More questions about television lighting

[Rinehart]

Oh yes, the heat was something else. There is the story of Hugh Downs' first appearance on television, in 1945. He was supposed to do a 10-minute news broadcast, and when he got to the studio, he found that it wasn't so much air conditioned as refrigerated--he could see his own breath misting in the air, and all the crew were wearing jackets and gloves. They gave him the script, and almost as an afterthought, the production assistant said, "You know, if you want to take your suit jacket off and just do the thing in shirt sleeves and tie, we don't mind."
He opted not to, but almost immediately realized that he had made a mistake; just before they went to air, all the crew took off their jackets, gloves, etc, and the young woman who was the production assistant was wearing shorts and a halter top. The lights came on and the temperature soared, and in the last couple of minutes of the broadcast he had difficulty reading the script. Sweat was pouring off him like a monsoon, and was getting in his eyes faster than he could wipe it away. When it was finally over, his suit was completely soaked through, which was a good thing, he said, because it probably saved him from bursting into flame.
There's one little codicil to this story. After he was done, it occurred to him that he had never watched a television show before, which made him one of the few people to have done a show before having seen one.