NPR's 'Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me' Turns its Satirical Eye on Daytime

Daytime continues to show it still has the stuff of the zeitgeist, finding itself featured this week as a topic on NPR's hit comedy gameshow Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me.

The celeb-studded Wait, Wait... (which bills itself as "the oddly informative news quiz") turns a satirical and side-splitting eye on current events each week. The show has a regular segment called "Bluff the Listener" where a listener-contestant is given details of three potential news stories based on a similar theme and asked to determine which is real.

This week's theme was "Daytime TV to the Rescue" and featured three "potentially" true news accounts of "do-gooders on the daytime dial," including:

• DAYS OF OUR LIVES choosing to throw an environmentally friendly wedding for characters "Sami Brady" and "Lucas Roberts," played by actors Alison Sweeney and Bryan Dattilo, complete with biodegradable party favors, as a way of raising viewers' environmental consciousness.
• Talk show hostess Kelly Ripa (ex-Hayley Vaughn Santos, ALL MY CHILDREN) claiming "cuteness" gets no respect to a weekly magazine, dissing Charlie Gibson, and proposing an "attractivness onslaught," led by Anderson Cooper, Reese Witherspoon, and the cast of NBC's HEROES--all capable of proving just how intelligent "cute" can be.
• GENERAL HOSPITAL, home of Luke and Laura (who panelist Charlie Pierce describes as "the hairstyles that did so much for daytime in the 70s") seeking to raise public awareness of holistic medicine by adding a character, "Dr. Sanjay Prada," who is specialist in Eastern Medicine--and facing protests from the evangelical right in the process.

Readers of Soappipe, of course, know that the correct answer is DAYS's upcoming "green wedding," and that the others came from the show's very creative imagination. Sadly, the listener-contestant did not, incorrectly identifying the made-up GH alternative medicine story as the correct one.

(More on Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me here.)