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Elvis was in the building. And Bono was with him.
It was one of worst-kept secrets of last September's Toronto International Film Festival. While George Clooney and Oprah were downtown walking their red carpets, Elvis Costello was uptown, quietly shooting the second-season opener of his hit interview/jam series, Spectacle.
Maybe not so quietly. After all, U2 was in the house – the Masonic Temple, former home of the late, unlamented Mike Bullard Show – a vastly more intimate concert venue than the Rogers Centre gig the band had played just hours earlier.
The first new Spectacle airs Friday night on CTV at 10, with the rest of the seven-episode second season following early in the new year. The Season One DVD set, with additional performance footage, hit video shelves last month.
Costello says his on-camera skills have improved since then.
"As time went on, I felt more at ease and I didn't have so much need of the supports of the cards and the teleprompter," he allowed in a recent phone conversation. "I found that I could retain all the things. I didn't want to go blank and forget that we had a clip lined up there that would illustrate something well."
It helps that Spectacle is unique among talk shows, in keeping with its uniquely collaborative host.
"They are pleased to be talking longer," he says of his famous guests. "They realize that they can really talk forever, by comparison to most television shows, and then you can see they are quite relieved to get to sing.
"You know, even after this first episode of Season Two, I reflected that perhaps I had waited too long to ask Bono and Edge to do a number. Because we talked for quite some time before they played, and although when we edited it together, they said some great things, simply because you could sense that they didn't know when it was going to end.
"Once they had sung a song, then the funny stories came out. So in the end, by accident, we got a great show because the serious, more revealing things were said in that first period when they were going, `When the hell is he going to ask us to sing?'"
Another highlight of the upcoming season, he promises, is his sit-down/session with rock god Bruce Springsteen. "Springsteen did 3 3/4 hours. You sometimes end up with more stuff than you imagined you would."
Not just anyone can qualify as a Spectacle guest – though that, too, he admits, was something of a learning curve.
"We realized that there's probably no real reason for some people to do this show, because they speak more eloquently in their own arena or in another arena.
"You can theorize all you like. I remember going back to the original list that we drew up around a lunch table one day when the show was first being discussed, and saying we're going to have a show about Detroit. `We'll have, like, E-Pop and Madonna and Eminem and Diana Ross, and we'll have them mud-wrestle ...'
"I don't know what we were thinking. One, it would never happen, and two, it would be a catastrophe if it did."
There are, on the other hand, several "gets" on Costello's wish list who have thus far, for various reasons, eluded him.
"There is of course always a standing invitation to Bob Dylan," he says. "I wouldn't care if he came just to talk about painting. But, you know, he has a radio show, and maybe that is the medium for him to talk about music. ...
"There are other people that I know well – well enough to know it wouldn't be their most pleasurable experience, even if they're on there with me – some friends of mine that you would think in theory would be great guests, but I know they wouldn't have a degree of comfort with the show. I wouldn't ask it of them.
"And then there are people who, I think ... their name jumped a little bit from the wish list to the guest list, you know? Paul McCartney's name appeared in print in a couple of places. Never confirmed. ...
"Some people have a level of comfort with doing something like this, and other people are more trepidatious about whether or not they feel that their story is complete.
"I remember going to see Leonard Cohen (in concert) and thinking, `He'll never be on Spectacle because he doesn't need to do it.'
"He need never do another interview for anybody, because the show is perfect, the most perfect show I think I've ever seen. Everything is explained to the degree that I think is appropriate, anything else I feel would be an intrusion into his life that I wouldn't want to make."
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