Entertainment / Entertainment

No Budget TV lives up to its name

By Stephanie De Pasquale | Thursday, September 04, 2008 | () comments

Andrew Link/Quad-City Times In the TV screen: Joe Lee, co-creator of No Budget TV, does a newscast for episode three. Buy this Photo

VIDEO: No Budget TV
A Quad-City based web-program spoofs high-budget TV.…
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Half of the two-car garage is filled with yard-care equipment, garbage cans, tools and lawn chairs. The floor on the other half is snaked with extension cords and power strips leading to stage lights that are suspended by zip ties on a jury-rigged contraption made of two mike stands connected by a curved metal bar and held together with gaffer’s tape.

William Martin is struggling with a complicated black box that has lots of buttons, trying to get the lights to dim. Eventually, he determines that the high-voltage lights are blown, so C.J. “the DJ” Crawford replaces them with standard bulbs that happen to be lying on a shelf in his garage.

While Martin works to position the lights, Crawford starts to line up a camera shot of Joe Lee, who is seated in a lawn chair at a plastic table in front of an old light blue-and-green patterned bed sheet to provide a backdrop.

This is No Budget TV, Crawford and Lee’s creation, what Crawford describes as a “goofy hobby.”

Despite its name, it is not a television program in the usual sense. It appears on a Web site (nobudgettv.com, of course) with monthly episodes that consist of a wacky news segment, various skits, performances by area bands and band-on-band interviews in which Crawford moderates discussions between the members.

The skits range from spoofs of “American Idol” and prescription drug commercials to politically incorrect re-creations of local news events. In episode four, for instance, they plan to shoot a scene in which a crowd is protesting against aliens — the kind from outer space, not people from other countries.

Crawford and Lee hope to gain local recognition with No Budget TV and help give Quad-City bands more exposure through the project.

“Just because you’re on a major label doesn’t mean that you’ve written the best songs,” Crawford said. “I think that there’s a lot of bands around here that have a lot of talent and they’re really underexposed.”

Filming the ‘news’

On this particular Sunday afternoon, they are filming the news segment portion of their show. The “news” is a collection of odd stories with no time element that they find on the Web site fark.com, which collects offbeat news.

But the $50-a-month Internet connection isn’t working, so they decide to hold off on the news portion and film the transitions between segments instead. That’s not before Crawford jokes about how the Internet always works when they’re filming out of Lee’s garage and logging on through his neighbor’s wireless network.

Crawford normally reads the news, but the premise for episode three calls for Lee to fill in because Crawford has been kidnapped and brainwashed by “Saula Pands,” one of several recurring parody characters who, the duo insists, are not meant to be malicious representations in any way.

Lee isn’t used to introducing what’s coming up next like Crawford, who has hosted a radio show on Quad-City radio station KBOB-FM (Rock 104.9) for 2 1/2 years. So it doesn’t require too much acting for Lee to appear awkward when he has to play the role of temporary host.

They film several mostly unscripted takes of the scenes so they have more to work with when editing.

“No matter what we write, no matter what we script out, that stuff is never funny. Well, in comparison to the stuff that happens by accident,” Crawford said. “This is just a goofy hobby that we’re starting to get halfway good at.”

Bouncing back from a band breakup

The hobby began in the spring when Crawford needed a creative outlet other than continually updating his MySpace.com page in the wake of his band breaking up a year before. With a background in radio, he decided to try something in TV or the next best thing to TV.

“I didn’t want to worry about censoring myself, and also I don’t think anybody would necessarily hire me for a TV station. I was born with a face made for radio,” he said. “We may end up having something come out of it, or it may just end up being a fun project. But I just wanted to do it for something to do.”

Episode three debuted Wednesday, and the duo plans to keep putting out episodes once a month as well as unrelated clips each week. In addition to Martin, who will begin producing some animation for the show in addition to lighting scenes, Crawford and Lee are helped by friends Sean Lewis and Paul Banks, who play various characters, and Al Dimeo, who sets up sound for the band performances.

Crawford and Lee say they always are looking for more people, especially women, to help produce No Budget TV.

“We’ve got a lot of pretty girls in the Quad-Cities and we’re a bunch of ugly dudes,” Crawford said. “So the more pretty girls, the more (Web page) views we’re going to get.”

Stephanie De Pasquale can be contacted at (563) 333-2639 or sdepasquale@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.

If you go

What: No Budget TV

When: Sunday, Sept. 14

Where: To be announced

How much: Free

Information: To be an extra in a No Budget TV episode, contact C.J. the DJ at nobudgetinbox@hotmail.com for the time and location of the video shoot.

On the Web: nobudgettv.com, myspace.com/nobudgettv or youtube.com/nobudgettelevision