Thumb Award EVER AVANT-GARDE: CHANNEL 13 HOPS ON DISCO BANDWAGON

Thumbs down to Channel 13 for its Saturday night television travesty “Dancing Disco.” For an organization that constantly has its hand out to the community for more programming dollars, KERA certainly seems innovative in finding ways to waste money. The justification for buying the syndicated show, according to the KERA programming director, was that it was “cheap” (it only cost $2000 for eight shows) and “fun.” Maybe so, but the cost per show for the eight-week series averages out to more than twice the unit cost of “Sesame Street,” the public television giant that KERA runs seven days a week. (The annual cost of “Sesame Street” is $26,000.) If KERA really wanted to serve the public, it could have not bought “Dancing Disco,” signed off 30 minutes earlier on Saturday nights, and used the money it saved to spare us one pledge break.