Les Nessman

Les Nessman is a character on the television situation comedy WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-82). He was played by Richard Sanders.

Les is the news director for the radio station WKRP. A small, balding, bespectacled man who always wears a bow tie, Les is, as station owner Mama Carlson says, "incompetent, unprofessional, and very weird." Though he is the worst news director in Cincinnati and possibly the world, Les keeps his job, in part because Mama Carlson wants the station to keep losing money (WKRP was set up as a tax write-off) and in part because Les's co-workers at the station are too fond of him to let him go.

The character is best known for his imaginary "walls." Les works in the WKRP bullpen, a big room with desks for several of the employees. Les believes that as the news director, he should have his own private office, and so he puts masking tape around his desk indicating where walls would be if he had hiw own office. He insists that anyone who approaches his desk must knock at an imaginary door and wait for permission to come in. He mimes opening and closing a door whenever he sits down at or leaves his desk; once he even took out a set of keys to lock the nonexistent door. All Les's colleagues respect his insistence on maintaining his own private space, and play along with his "walls" charade. In one episode, Les dates a pushy news "groupie," Darlene, who moves into his apartment and takes over his life. He only gets the nerve to break up with her when she dares to call his walls "silly" and remove the masking tape from the floor -- Les can put up with a lot of abuse, but he will not stand for someone disrespecting his walls.

Les was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. His father was a man named Harvey Moorhouse; Les's mother and father divorced when Harvey was investigated by the FBI for Communist connections. Les's mother married another man, Mr. Nessman, who raised young Les as his own; Les never knew about his real father until his stepfather was dead and buried.

When Les moved to Cincinnati, he took a job in the news department at WKRP, eventually rising to the rank of news director. Though he has been at the station for over twenty years, he still insists that WKRP is "just a stepping-stone" in his career. His ambition is to go to New York and become a news anchor for CBS. In one of the last episodes of WKRP, Les actually decides to make an audition tape and go to New York to try and get a job with CBS; he decides against it when he realizes, and accepts, the fact that he just isn't talented enough to make it in the big time.

As WKRP news director, Les's specialty is doing farm reports, with a particular emphasis on hogs. He leads every news report with the hog futures, "because that's what people are interested in"; he makes exceptions only for really big news stories, like the resignation of President Nixon. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown, Les missed the story completely and led off with a story about a hog who could do addition and subtraction. His devotion to pigs has won him five Buckey Newshawk Awards (presented for the best farm reporting in Ohio and parts of Northern West Virginia) and the coveted Silver Sow Award for hog reporting.

Les is also noted for his paranoia about Communism. Because of her bad experience with being married to a Communist, Les's mother raised him to hate and distrust Communists, with the result that Les is always doing on-air editorials warning his listeners about the dangers of the Soviet Union. "America," he once told his listeners, "Who was that lady I saw you with last night? Could it have been the sweet seductress known as the Communist conspiracy? Was it she who stood under the streetlights, luring the farm boys with her broad shoulders? Beware!" He has never bothered to create an emergency warning for natural disasters, but he does have an elaborate warning for what to do in case of invasion by the Russians or Chinese. During a tornado, he read out his emergency warning by changing "Russian" to "Tornado," telling his listeners: "The city of Cincinnati has just been attacked by the godless... tornadoes! Citizens are advised to arm themselves immediately!"

Another trademark of Les's work as a news announcer is his tendency to mispronounce words, especially foreign words. He calls golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez "Chy Chy Rod-ri-gweez," and pronounces chihuahua as "chee-hooah-hooah." The news copy he writes tends to be full of strange turns of phrase; in a report on a swim meet, he mistakenly called the breast stroke "breast stroking" and reported that the swimmers "swam in water." He has no traffic helicopter, a source of great humiliation to him and a bone of contention in his relationship with program director Andy Travis. In the absence of a helicopter, Les has tried various techniques for doing traffic reports: thumping on his chest to fake the sound of a helicopter propeller, reporting on traffic from a motor scooter, and even using an old World War I biplane in the episode "The Airplane Show."

Les's best friend at the station is sales manager Herb Tarlek, though they have a somewhat passive-aggressive relationship. Herb has tried to cheat Les on various occasions, such as selling him an elaborate accident insurance policy (which backfired when Les had an accident), and often insults Les to his face. For his part, Les has been known to try and strangle or even stab Herb when Herb insults him. "I hate him, but he's my best friend," is how Les sums up their relationship.

Episodes focusing on Les, in addition to those already mentioned, include "Les on a Ledge," where a ballplayer accuses him of being gay; "Secrets of Dayton Heights," where Les finds out who his real father was; and "I'll Take Romance," where Les unwittingly dates a prostitute.