By Neal Romanek, August 10, 2007
About a week and a half ago I drove out to a recycling pier in San Francisco to meet Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, the best science show on television. It's a great concept—Mike, your charismatic host, travels around the country taking on the grossest, slimiest, dustiest, generally most awful jobs human beings do. But along the way he explains their significance—the show is, at heart, almost always about recycling, about moving more efficiently the vast waste-stream generated by human beings.
But longtime readers of this here blog may recall that we, too, are engaged in making what we hope will someday soon—like maybe October 3—be the best science show on television
. So I sat down with Rowe to get a sense of how Dirty Jobs gets made and how he thinks about his role as a Dickies-clad, often-sewage-strewn communicator of science. And to attempt to secretly drain his brain of the secrets of televisual awesomeness.
We spoke amid haybale-sized cubes of compressed aluminum cans and cardboard—a typical setting for the show. But the trucks full of crew and gear, and the carnival like set-up, were unusual. They were shooting their 150th episode, designed to be a Very Special Episode of Dirty Jobs, with guests from previous shows, games, dinner, etc. It's due to air at the end of September.
Click here to read the entire interview by Adam Rogers at Wired Science.
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