`Nighttalk With Jane Whitney' Has Scenario Of Daytime Talkies

Television talk shows are a growth industry, and Jane Whitney is the latest, slightly harried contributor to the GNP of gab.

"Hello?" she says on a crackly telephone connection recently from Boston, taking a breather from preparing for the premiere of "NightTalk with Jane Whitney."

"This sounds like I'm back in El Salvador. Oh, my nerves."

Long-distance carriers are cursed. Numbers are re-dialed. This time the fiber-optics do their trick.

"You study 12 hours for each show when they're taping two a day and you'd be harried, too," Whitney says, blowing off some steam with a good-natured kvetch. "I'm juggling AIDS as a pop-culture disease, male cops better than female cops and male plastic surgery."

Topics like that won't be enough to separate her show from those of Oprah and Sally and Geraldo and Phil and all the rest. Whitney is another barker in a crowded carnival midway, and she knows it.

Her hours, though, do distinguish her. "NightTalk," true to its name, was designed to air around the time p.m. turns to a.m., when the prime competitors are Johnny and Arsenio and Dave and Dennis.

"NightTalk" premiered this week in 14 markets around the country. Locally, KOMO (Channel 4) airs the hour-long show weeknights at 12:30 a.m.

Other late-night talk shows are in the pipeline - most notably, one hosted by arch-conservative radio bullhorn Rush Limbaugh. But Whitney's is patterned more closely after the daytime models - guests on a stage, audience on tiered seats, host flitting around with a microphone.

"The whole point is, daytime is so glutted," says Whitney. "They saw an opportunity in late night for some counterprogramming. I'm not young, I'm not male, I'm not hip, I'm not a comic - I'll be different immediately."

A preview tape where the topic of the day was tawdry tactics of tabloids showed Whitney behaving in the manner we expect from our moderators.

On stage sat a man who had infiltrated one of the supermarket scuzz sheets. He wore a black hood, to conceal his identity, and told of editors dreaming up new, ever more outrageous stories.

"You're telling us," Whitney prodded for the benefit of any viewer just returning from the kitchen, "that they sit around making up a wish list of stories that have absolutely no foundation in truth?" Yup.

Whitney, 42, talks about her professional life as a quest, with a national talk show the grail. She hosted a local talk show in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, before the species began to recede toward extinction. Two years interviewing celebrities for "Entertainment Tonight" came next, then a stint hosting what Whitney calls "a `Nightline' clone and a `Donahue' clone" for a Pennsylvania PBS station.

Then Whitney moved to El Salvador with her new husband, a New York Times reporter posted to cover Central America. They spent their first wedding anniversary in Panama City, where post-election tumult provided the fireworks. She called the NBC bureau and asked if they needed a hand.

"They said, `You're on,' " she recalls. As a stringer for the network, Whitney covered the Nicaraguan elections and the guerrilla offensive in El Salvador.

"I think I acquitted myself. But a talk show is really the only thing I've ever wanted to do. I knew I couldn't do `Good Morning, El Salvador,' since my Spanish was so remedial."

Back in the States, a 10-year-old audition tape of Whitney caught the attention of a production-company president who invited her to audition for "NightTalk."

"After 14 years of trying to make it happen it fell into my lap," Whitney said.

Where it falls next is anyone's guess - including Whitney's.

"I do have standards about what I will and won't do," she says, asked about some of her peers' notorious excesses - Geraldo's on-camera plastic surgery, Donahue in a dress, assorted kink du jour. "I think you can use this medium to spread some light on an issue. It may not fly. It may be too serious."

Hello? Is our connection fading again, or did she say she's helping create a TV talk show that may be too serious? Yup.

"I'm not that good an actress," Whitney adds. "I won't do just anything to be on television."