Television viewers in Bismarck, North Dakota, were treated to some real class this weekend when none other than the great Ron Burgundy read them the news.
Actor and comedian Will Ferrell reprised his Anchorman role for KXMB’s Saturday night news broadcast. The former Saturday Night Live star is promoting Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, a sequel to the 2004 film about a fictional news team’s sexist reaction to the arrival of an ambitious female reporter.
Dressed in his signature rust-coloured three-piece suit and a striped tie, Ferrell read stories off the teleprompter, punctuated them with exaggerated eye blinks and engaged in witty banter with weekend anchor Amber Schatz and the rest of the Bismarck news team.
Schatz said she has watched the original Anchorman about 30 times, and the hardest part of co-anchoring the newscast with Ferrell was holding back laughter every time he spoke in character.
“The second he said, ‘Good evening, I’m Ron Burgundy,’ I lost it,” Schatz said Sunday. “It was really hard not to laugh.”
Ferrell also clowned around, popping into Schatz’s screen while she read a story and telling her after a commercial break, “Amber, you look lovely tonight” before asking her if she was married.
When Schatz told him she wasn’t married, Ferrell replied, “Well I am, so don’t get any ideas.”
The online video of the 30-minute newscast, which is making the rounds on social media, is part of a widespread marketing campaign for the movie sequel that has included Dodge Durango commercials, a new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavour named Scotchy Scotch Scotch, and Burgundy’s own exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
On Sunday, Ferrell headed to Winnipeg, where he was slated to help cover Canada’s Olympic curling trials for broadcaster TSN.
KXMB is one of two CBS-affiliated television stations serving central and western North Dakota. The Bismarck station shares programming with Minot’s KXMC, but the two stations produce separate newscasts.
Schatz, 31, said station managers and salespeople had been planning the appearance for months, but she didn’t know anything about it until Wednesday. It was a complete surprise to viewers.
During Saturday evening’s newscast, Ferrell occasionally strayed from the script.
While extolling the tale of firefighters extinguishing a trash fire in a Sam’s Club parking lot, Ferrell seemed impressed that crews used 500 gallons of water and foam to put out the blaze: “I repeat, 500 gallons.”
He also drew laughs from Schatz when he mispronounced s’mores as “sah-mores,” over-dramatised his tease of the Dakota Storm Center, and noted after the sports segment, “I’ve never seen fighting in a hockey match before. That was fascinating.”
Schatz, who has worked in small markets in the Dakotas for eight years, said the whole experience was surreal. If she could choose how to spend her 15 minutes of fame, “I would choose this exact thing.”
The news team expected Ferrell to end with his “Stay classy” catchphrase, but he missed the cue, saying: “What Am I supposed to read that”
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The crew got to hear him say “Stay classy, Bismarck,” during the credits, but his microphone had already been cut off.
“He did say it, it just didn’t air,” Schatz said.
– AP
