The Word – Series 3, Episode 9, 08/01/93

The Word – Series 3, Episode 9 (8 Jan 1993)

Happy 1993: The Word celebrates by promising rap with Ice Cube, pig racing, and a guest who’s been married “eight… no, nine… anyway, lots.” We begin respectably with Sister Sledge belting “We Are Family”, which is ideal given the show immediately introduces more in-laws than a Christmas row.

Enter Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hollywood’s Hungarian hurricane, who cheerfully recounts eight marriages, a three-day stint in jail (two hookers next door; she took notes), and her continuing education in romance (“I know nothing about sex—I was always married”). She refuses to mount a studio horse (“I fell off one playing polo, darling”), but happily accepts a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig as a consolation gift, cradling it like a designer handbag with hooves. Between quips she reminisces about being courted by Elvis (“gorgeous, but no time to shag in Vegas”), then corrects the host’s English and her own math in the same breath.

The producers double down on Graceland by rolling a mini-doc about the Elvis-is-alive industrial complex, climaxing with Elizabeth, a barmaid who swears she lived with a bearded Nashville musician named Tony who later confessed he was Elvis Presley. Polygraphs were passed, lips were siliconed, Kentucky mountains provided reprogramming, and the King’s secret ambition was… to be a policeman. Her solution to the haters: “dig up the grave.” Happy birthday, Elvis—wherever you are.

Elsewhere, there’s “tough talk” with Aussie hardman Russell Crowe (glowering apprenticeship: complete), and a promise to “wrap” with Ice Cube (either rap or gifting paper—this show makes both plausible). In between, the studio tries to race pigs, a sentence that sums up the editorial ethos.

Live music keeps the lights on:

Sister Sledge (still immaculate).

Sunscreen supply the early-90s shimmer for anyone not currently bottle-feeding a pig.

Final score: one diva, one swine, one spectral King, a future Gladiator, and a newsroom’s worth of tabloid confetti. Tasteless, shameless, and gloriously 1993—The Word remains the only show that can segue from “We Are Family” to “dig up the grave” without changing key.