Day 11 - Thursday 12th October 2006

Sorry for the delay in updating the blog, but when you only have 4 days in NY, it wasn't my highest priority.
We didn't surface until about 10am, this seemed to be a common practise in NY, not sure if it was because we were tired or how high up we were, but I know I would start waking up about 7am and would almost instantly be back asleep again. Even at 10 I could have rolled over and pumped out the ZZZZZZ's for another couple of hours.
We got ourselves a map and decided we should walk down to Time Square. This was probably no more then a couple of miles in total and took us about 3 hours with having to go into what felt like every store on the way. By the time we reached Time Square we already had 2 backpacks full of mostly trashy sourveins to take home with us. Time Square was great. The whole thing extends for about 6 blocks and it doesn't matter what time of day or night you are there, the place is always packed. The size and complexity of some of the ads there is amazing. For instance, one of the Ads features a brand new fully working 4WD attached to the side of a building.
We had a look through some of the stores here, espeically Toys-R-Us. The Time Square Toys-R-Us store is the largest toy store in the world, it even has a 5 storey high ferris wheel in the middle of it. Just for a change Toni went Ga-ga over all of the stuffed animals. I kid you not, we currently have a suitcase which is mostly filled with the ones she has picked up while we have been over here. Thankfully a lot of them are for other people, but more then enough will be taking residency in our place.
We picked up a couple of xmas presents for people from Toys-R-Us and then it was time to head to a Television studio as we had reservations to see a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (which is really big over here, it is basically a news saitre and my second favourite tv show behind Top Gear). The way the trip worked out, everyone got to do one thing that no one else was that keen to do. Mums was the day in LA, Toni's was San Diego Seaworld and mine was the Daily Show taping. It was about a 20 min walk from Time Square to where we needed to be. Even though we had reservations for the tickets, we were informed that they give out more reservations then the amount of people they can get in the studio, to ensure that they are always full. We had to be there by 4:30 but were advised to get there earlier. We got there just after 3:30 and there were already about 160 people in the line!!! So we waited, and waited and waited.... and then we did some waiting. At about 4:45 the came out and you got a ticket with the number you are in line (thus how i know there were 160 people in front of me) and the studio only holds about 220 so there were some very disapointed people turned away who had been waiting a fair amount of time.
Our confirmation letter indicated that things would start happening around 5 and that the taping would finish around 7:15-7:30. Well it was 5:45 before we were let in (so a total of 2hrs 15 standing in line outside). We did luck into 1st row seats which was nice and A warm up guy came out and did about 15mins and he was pretty good. Then Jon came out for a 5-10 min Question and Answer session and then the taping began.
I've been to a few tapings in my time, most notibly for the old ABC comedy Good News Week (Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins) and they would film about 2 hours worth of stuff to make a 22 min TV show and most of the best stuff was what never made it to television, usually either because the subject had drifted so far away from where it started or because it was dripping in profanity.
This wasn't the case here. They filmed it like it was live, including just having loud music play in the studio for the several minutes where the ads would be. There was only a tiny part that had to be re-shot and about 6:50 we were up and out of the studio.
It was a funny show and everyone got a good laugh but the 2.5 hours of waiting certainly wasn't worth it, especially as we saw pretty much only exactly what went to air (We did watch the show that night at 11pm). He also only had some obscure political author as the guest for the night. The night before The Colbert Report (which is its sister show) had George Lucus on. He was very funny and even made fun of Episode 1 and Jar Jar. I would have happily waited in line for that!!!
We kicked around Mid Town Manhatten for a bit then we got some dinner and took some beers back to the apartment and called it a night