John Barbour Courtesy of Barbour Family John Barbour, who created, produced and co-hosted the 1979-85 NBC reality series Real People, died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Las Vegas, a family spokesperson announced. He was 93.
The Toronto native began his career as a stand-up comic, which led to appearances on shows hosted by Steve Allen, Joey Bishop and Dean Martin and gigs serving as the opening act for Robert Goulet and Bobby Darin in Las Vegas.
He also released two comedy albums, 1965’s It’s Tough to Be White (which dealt with civil rights and race relations and included liner notes written by Dick Gregory) and 1978’s I Met a Man I Didn’t Like (with liner notes from Neil Simon).
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Barbour was the pilot host for The Gong Show in 1976 before Chuck Barris took over, a writer and performer on the rebooted Laugh-In in 1977-78 and an actor on such TV series as Get Smart, Ironside, The Odd Couple, Sanford and Son, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Breaking Bad.
Real People, filmed before a studio audience, featured profiles of non-celebrities who had interesting occupations or hobbies and was a big ratings hit at the start. Other hosts on the show included Sarah Purcell, Byron Allen, Skip Stephenson, Mark Russell, Peter Billingsley and Fred Willard.
Jonathan Barbour was born in Toronto on April 24, 1933. After his father abandoned him, he dropped out of high school and ran away from home at age 15, then immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s.
Barbour wrote episodes of My Mother the Car and Gomer Pyle: USMC in the mid-1960s and in 1970 became the inaugural host of KABC-TV’s AM Los Angeles, where he won the first of his five Emmy Awards and generated controversy for interviewing such anti-Vietnam War activists as Muhammad Ali and Jane Fonda.
In 1971, he hosted a daytime talk show on KCBS-TV in Los Angeles and later won his other Emmys as a “critic-at-large” on KNBC-TV.
Barbour wrote, produced and narrated the 1982 documentary film Ernie Kovacs: Television’s Original Genius and in 1992 won the prize for best documentary at the San Sebastian Film Festival for The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes, which profiled the New Orleans district attorney and his murder investigation. Oliver Stone called his film “the perfect companion piece to my movie JFK.”
He then wrote and directed a sequel, 2017’s The American Media and the Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy, and two years later published his autobiography, Your Mother’s Not a Virgin: The Bumpy Life and Times of the Canadian Dropout Who Changed the Face of American TV!
Survivors include his wife, Sarita, and their son, Christopher.
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