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Dick Clark set for New Year's homecoming

Posted on: Friday, 30 December 2005, 18:20 CST

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A year after he was sidelined by a stroke, veteran TV host Dick Clark returns on Saturday night to the annual New Year's eve broadcast he launched in 1972, but it remains unclear whether his Times Square homecoming will end up being a swan song.

Clark, 76, has remained out of the public eye since falling ill in December 2004 though a recently published photo showed the once seemingly ageless host of "American Bandstand" looking haggard and frail.

Questions about the level of his participation in Saturday's 34th edition of a "New Year's Rockin' Eve" were heightened with the disclosure that a publicity photo for the show was a composite, blending a two-year-old image of Clark into a current shot of co-hosts Ryan Seacrest and Hilary Duff.

Seacrest, 31, host of Fox television's hit talent show "American Idol," recently signed a multi-year deal to co-host the New Year's show on ABC with Clark this year and eventually take over the annual telecast. Duff will anchor segments of the show from Hollywood.

A spokesman said Clark will be in the studio for the entire live 90-minute show, which runs from 11:35 p.m. to 1:05 a.m. EST, including the countdown to midnight and the descent of a giant illuminated ball over Times Square. And he plans to share roughly equal screen time with Seacrest.

"They'll do roughly the same amount of stuff during that hour and a half," Clark's publicist Paul Shefrin told Reuters on Friday in a phone interview from New York.

Shefrin acknowledged the stroke had left Clark's speech somewhat impaired, but said he was fully able to carry his weight in the broadcast.

"The man can talk," Shefrin said. "It's not 100 percent perfect. He's still working on it becoming more perfect, but he's certainly capable of doing the show. Otherwise he wouldn't be here. There's no facial contortion. There never was any facial contortion."

Asked about the possibility that Saturday's broadcast might turn out to be Clark's last TV appearance, Shefrin said "It could be, but that is not something that he has uttered."

As for the composite publicity photo, in which a healthy, smiling Clark appears to be standing beside Duff and Seacrest, Shefrin said it was "photo-shopped, like 90 percent of the photos distributed by the industry everywhere."

"It's a composite photo because Dick opted not to do a photo session he's done before," Shefrin said. "It's only because of the health situation that this has become a cause celebre."

ABC spokeswoman Pat Preblick defended the use of the altered photo, saying, "This is a common practice across the industry." Several news organizations voiced concern the photo was released without a disclaimer that it was a composite.

Clark, who presided over more than three decades of pop music and dance trends as host of "American Bandstand," has reigned supreme on ABC at the end of every year since eclipsing Guy Lombardo's long-running New Year's countdown on CBS in the 1970s.

Seeing a chance to make ratings inroads this year against ABC, Fox recruited as its New Year's host the man who filled in last year for Clark -- Regis Philbin, 74, of the syndicated morning show "Live with Regis and Kelly."

Former MTV personality Carson Daly, 32, will host a New Year's special on NBC.

Source: REUTERS

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