'Poorman' has a wealth of ideas
But the popular deejay and television host has a knack for rubbing management the wrong way. Now he's suing KDOC for canceling his show.
Having met Jim "Poorman" Trenton -- the man, the myth, the legend -- for the first time Wednesday morning at his seaside digs, I must admit to some disappointment.
Not a bikini in sight.
Yep, he says, he's heard that lament before. As the brains behind "Poorman's Bikini Beach" TV show, people have come to expect that Trenton and women in swimwear are never separated.
"This time of year, they're all in hibernation," he says. "When the weather gets cold, the girls go away. The season for taping is from March through the end of October."
So we are left with Trenton, who doesn't mind calling himself eccentric and "very bizarre in the way that I am," but bridles when I tell him that a former business associate has just referred to him as a "nut case."
I won't weigh in on that. I'm here only to tell you that Trenton, a former KROQ deejay who gained fame in the early 1980s by creating the wildly popular call-in radio show "Loveline," is still around. The brain is still percolating, the confidence is still there, and he still has the knack of irritating authority figures.
The latest installment is a complaint he filed against KDOC, the Orange County TV station that last fall began airing his half-hour bikini beach show six nights a week at 11:30 p.m.
In a dispute over what Trenton says was an ad featuring a male porn star, the show ended after 5 1/2 weeks. The porn pitchman, fully clothed and seated on a sofa between two fully clothed women, was hawking two adult videos for $1 but didn't mention salacious titles or display the DVD covers.
Trenton says management had approved the ad and aired it throughout his five-plus weeks on the air. Other advertisers pressured the station to quit running it, he said he was told.
Station owner Bert Ellis, who hasn't seen the suit, says the ad was just part of a larger ongoing problem with Trenton, who wouldn't conform to the station's goals for the show and "started sinking back into the dreck he does on a normal basis."
Ultimately, Ellis says, Trenton asked to be let out of his contract.
Trenton scoffs at Ellis' interpretation and is suing to be paid for lost ad revenue. That comes into play because Trenton is one of those rare birds in TV who buy a time slot from a station, then sell their own ads. He does that so he can have control of the program, subject to FCC and station policies.
