Arch Campbell moved to Washington, DC, in 1974 for a job at WRC-TV. He was just in time for a revolution in TV news. “We were taking the place of the first batch of newspeople, who generally chased around town in crew car, taking pictures of fires and wrecks,” Campbell says. “Those guys were thrill-seekers.”
But news was changing, becoming more personality-driven. “We had to become content producers,” Campbell says. “We put personality and reporting into our stories.” As he writes in his new autobiography, The Accidental Critic, he was brought in as the “resident zany,” charged with doing offbeat human interest stories. He adopted a pet pig, which he named Spot and entered into a singing dog contest. He did weekend weather, once blowing a raspberry to the entire month of February. He profiled then-out-there subjects like a tattoo parlor and bars with huge beer lists.
Finally, at the dawn of the ’80s, Campbell got tapped to join a revamped news team that included Jim Vance, George Michael, and Bob Ryan. He talked management into allowing him to review movies, which he’d done in Dallas (the lifelong movie buff got that gig when the Texas station’s GM burst into the newsroom shouting he needed a movie reviewer pronto and “I raised my hand,” Campbell says). The new role still allowed him to dig into the weird and wonderful around town: He championed student filmmakers the Langley Punks, got John Waters’s muse Divine onto the 6 o’clock news, and won an award for economics reporting after he enlisted a monkey to pick stocks—and the monkey’s picks outperformed those made by professionals.
WRC was perennially an also-ran in local TV ratings before new leadership commissioned a series of TV ads that branded its news crew as “The Team” helped win them a place in Washingtonian living rooms for decades. Doreen Gentzler “made everything come together” when she joined, and Campbell says the group really became a team, working and playing together for years. Campbell was such a prominent figure around town that the comedian Patton Oswalt, who grew up in Sterling, Virginia, lit into him in a 2007 routine, blaming Campbell for the fact that he didn’t know anything about DC’s punk scene. (The two are now pals.) Then, as Campbell says, “the world changed.” WRC’s corporate ownership demanded cost cuts, and the band broke up. Campbell left Channel 4 in 2006 after 32 years on air and moved to WJLA, where he stayed for eight years before retiring for good.
Campbell recently returned to WRC, which is now branded as NBC4 Washington. “I love going back,” he says. But the newsroom is so different from his time. “It’s so quiet, you honestly could hear a pin drop. In our days, it was loud and boisterous. It was a different time, not necessarily better.” Campbell’s book talks about the various personalities at the station, the high jinks of news reporting at a time when local TV was flush with money, and his relationships with management over the years. It’s a wonderful window into local media history.
But Arch, we’ve got to know: What happened to Spot the Pig? Campbell’s chuckles fall away. “He was a great pet,” he says, ruefully. When his porcine pal got too big for their house, Campbell boarded him in Columbia, Maryland, where tragedy befell Spot: He got out and made a fateful decision to cross Route 29. “I think it was a Hormel ham truck that ran over him,” Campbell says.
Arch Campbell will speak about The Accidental Critic in conversation with Doreen Gentzler on Sunday, February 2, at 5 PM at Politics and Prose. The event is free.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
