MY STORY

If you are not a viewer of ""The Mike Douglas Show,"" the Philadelphia-based syndicated talk-variety program, you would have little reason to pick up this book; if you ARE a viewer, you have even less reason. For here the message is the medium. The book is a Mike Douglas Show in print. Here are the famous co-hosts, dancing bears, elephants, and repartee that may have sounded witty on the air but lies soggy and flat on these pages. Here too is the saga of star-struck Michael Delaney Dowd, Jr., (a.k.a. Mike Douglas) as he makes his way to Philadelphia via Hollywood, Oklahoma City, Chicago, and Cleveland--lifting his Irish tenor with dance bands and in dreary clubs, telling small jokes and dreaming always of hosting his own TV show. This happy hegira is told in prose wretched enough to be a talk show script. ""Take it from Mrs. Dowd's little boy Mickey,"" gives you the flavor; but our favorite sentence is, ""Both of those two guys got to be millionaires."" Like the show and the star, the book is cute. That's condemnation enough.