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By Root 1348 0

I think was happening that week, which was the other story: Tim Robbins, whose film Bob Roberts we first ran as a short, like a three-minute film, in the ’85 season, was the host and had written a piece about GE dumping PCB’s into a river, which we had all heard at read-through. The sentiments behind it were heartfelt, but it didn’t work as comedy. It didn’t get picked because it didn’t play. And I think Tim was fearful that I might be under some sort of GE thing that I was not going to allow that to happen. So after one of the musical intros, he wanted to wear a T-shirt that had a GE logo with a bar across it, and I said, “Be my guest,” you know. “I don’t think that General Electric” — which by then owned NBC, of course — “will suddenly grind to a halt because of this. Saturday Night Live is its own thing. It has its own sort of beliefs and standards” — or whatever.

What everybody forgets is that music wasn’t the closing thing, there’s an act after it. So now after Sinead tears up the picture, we have to go do a comedy act. Well, there’s complete silence in the studio when it happens. The switchboard’s lighting up, but we’re not anywhere near the switchboard; we’re just getting ready for the next sketch, which we know is not going to play. I was stunned, but not as much as the guy from the audience who was trying to charge her and destroy the show while she was singing. He had to be taken away by security.

Now there’s silence and we’ve got to do a sketch. The sketch unravels. But now Tim Robbins has got to come out and stand beside her for good-nights. It wasn’t like somebody holding up her LP — of course, saying “LP” dates me now. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t promotional. I think Tim Robbins was wearing the anti-GE T-shirt. For him that would have been an enormously big statement, to be defying a corporation while you’re on it. And that was sort of the revolution that was going on that week. That was what people were focused on. People at the network were very focused on what Tim Robbins was going to do about GE, and I was less so because I have more confidence in GE. But there’s a lot of people whose job it is to anticipate trouble, and they were all on the Tim Robbins issue. And suddenly this girl tears up a picture of the Pope. When she did the Dylan concert the next week at the Garden, they booed her. I don’t think she understood the scale of what she was doing. It was martyrdom. We didn’t quite get what it was.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive:

All in all, even when it was, “Oh my God, Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope,” as I said to Lorne, “Lorne, when we go too long without controversy, something’s wrong. This show is supposed to rock, it’s supposed to be the adolescent that’s not obedient to authority. And if we lose that, then we don’t have that show.”

LORNE MICHAELS:

I think it was the bravest possible thing she could do. She’d been a nun. To her the church symbolized everything that was bad about growing up in Ireland the way she grew up in Ireland, and so she was making a strong political statement.

RICK LUDWIN, NBC Vice President for Late Night:

That was truly a Danny Thomas spit-take moment on my part. I jumped out of my chair. I was in Burbank watching the live feed in my office. When I’m not in New York, they send the dress rehearsal to me on a teleconference line, and then of course later I can punch up the East Coast in my office and watch the live show at 8:30 California time. So I was sitting in my office in Burbank and literally jumped out of my chair when she tore up that picture. I just knew we were in trouble.

DAVE WILSON, Director:

It was a little unnerving. I was more upset that she had hidden it from us than I was by the act itself. In rehearsal, her manager had asked if we could use only one camera because of the type of song it was; they would like it not interrupted with intercutting. And then he asked if she could hold up a picture of starving children, and that’s what she did at rehearsal. It was a very tender moment, actually. And then to change it all into this