B.A., 1993
Program Host, QVC
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“The one thing my family reminds me about the most was when I had this stretchy bracelet on the air—it was chunky and huge and full of beads, and I had to put it on to show everyone what it looked like. And I said, ‘Look, it stretches and gives,’ and I guess I stretched it out too far, and it was like a fireworks display of beads just shooting out all over the studio. It was crazy. And that was my only sample, but it’s live television, and I had three or four more minutes to fill. So I was just standing up there going, ‘Hey, let me keep telling you about this bracelet I just had a second ago, but you can’t see it ’cause I broke it.’”
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Many college students are confronted with the choice of whether to go into a mainstream field such as sales or take a flier on a career in showbusiness. Dave James, who double-majored in theatre and history at UAB, is doing both: He’s an on-air personality presenting products on QVC, one of the world’s largest multimedia retailers. The path from UAB to QVC, however, was hardly a straight line.
On choosing theatre at UAB and venturing out into the “real world”
“I was born in Birmingham but grew up in Huntsville—I got into theatre during my senior year of high school and went to some of the local high-school competitions. I caught the eye of a UAB professor, Rick Plummer, who asked me to audition, and I ended up getting a scholarship to UAB.
“My parents were absolutely worried to death about me majoring in theatre—they were concerned about making money, paying the bills, making a career out of it, how hard all that would be. It was, and is, a very hard career for a lot of people. When I left UAB, I realized how much I liked to eat regularly, so I got into theatre administration—I was still a part of the theatre for a couple years, but I was doing it more from a producing point of view. I was the operations manager at the Cape Fear Regional Theatre in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a couple years, and I got to work with some of the best folks from Broadway and a lot of great local talent in that area.”
While in North Carolina, James started a part-time radio job that eventually became full-time, and his newfound career in radio took him to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and then Springfield, Massachusetts, where his morning show climbed to the top of the local ratings. It was in Springfield where James first heard about QVC’s nationwide search for a new on-air personality.
On the competition that won him a job at QVC:
“They were doing auditions all over America—it was almost like ‘American Idol’—and I went to the one in Rhode Island. I called in sick, skipped out on work, and stood in line with everyone else. Everyone had to ‘sell’ some kind of product for their audition, and I sold a stick, because I figured it was versatile enough that if I ran out of things to say, I could just say something like, ‘Well, dogs love this product!’—just let my imagination go.
“I got a callback and auditioned again at QVC, where they had whittled it down from thousands of people to just 25. From 25 they whittled it down again to five people, me and four women. They gave us a product that we had to sell live, on the air, in about four hours. I prepped as best I could . . . it was a lot of fun, and all the customers called in to vote for their favorite.
“This was on a Friday night, and I found out on Sunday that I had won: They brought all five of us out there, and my current boss, Jack Comstock, read the name of the winner. It was shocking, absolutely shocking, but very flattering, especially considering how talented the other four were. And here I was, just some schlub from the radio. I was so honored to be chosen.”
James’s typical on-air shifts are in the early morning, though he does get an occasional daytime shift. He says he gets up at 2 or 3 in the morning, gets to QVC Studio Park by 4 a.m. to go backstage and get acquainted with products and on-air guests, and starts broadcasting live at 6. Wondering who in the world would be shopping at that hour? James says you might be surprised.
On the pace of business:
“People are shopping all the time. In the five years I’ve been here, we’ve seen a huge increase in the overnight and early-morning hours. It’s important to remember that when it’s 3 in the morning on the East Coast, it’s midnight on the West Coast, so people out West are still calling in.”
Finding new things to say about an endless stream of products can be difficult, but James says that anybody who’s ever been a QVC host naturally has “the gift of gab.” He adds that QVC’s program hosts try to give “the most genuine presentation possible” as opposed to merely giving the hard sell—and that his acting training from UAB does come in handy sometimes.
On the theatrical aspects of being a QVC host:
“I think the first thing we try to keep in mind is that it’s not really a sales pitch. . . . If there’s a product that I can’t picture myself or someone else in my family using, I’ll immediately try to think of somebody I’ve spoken to on the phone recently. This all ties into theatre training—I think, ‘Who would use this product?’ I picture that person in my head, and that’s who I talk to. And if any of my old theatre professors are reading this, that’s probably Stanislavsky’s ‘third circle.’ That’s what we draw upon: If it’s not necessarily for me, who is it for, and how can I make this presentation for them?”
James has now been with QVC for five years; he lives near QVC headquarters with his wife, Tammy, and two children, nine-year-old Skyler and six-year-old Austin. He says there are a lot of similarities between that part of Pennsylvania and the South (“lots of friendly folks, and they’re passionate about their college football”) that made it easy to acclimate to the area. His family still lives in Birmingham, though, and when he makes his regular visits, UAB is frequently on his mind.
On his memories of college:
“UAB is still in my heart; I loved going to school and graduating from there. It was just awesome. I miss it, and I still look at the Web site from time to time and check in with some of the theatre and history professors who are there. And whenever I come to Birmingham, I drive through campus to see how it’s changed. I could not have asked for a better place to go to college than UAB.”