Entertainment

Starr Report

“Cake Boss” star Buddy Valastro and his mother, Mary Valastro, are speaking for the first time about Mary’s battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), an incurable degenerative motor neuron disease.

Buddy and Mary, speaking to People magazine for its Aug. 13 issue, both say they were devastated by the news, given to Mary when she visited the Mayo Clinic last summer with Buddy.

“She didn’t deserve this,” Buddy, 35, tells People. “As the doctors told us there was nothing they could do except make her comfortable, it was like a truck hit us.”

“I was always so active. Now I can’t even walk across the street because I could collapse,” says Mary, 64, who originally thought she had carpal tunnel syndrome after experiencing weakness in her fingers. “I had surgery and everything,” she says. “It just never got better.”

And, although Mary has a slower-progressing form of ALS, she says, bluntly, “It still sucks.”

“My main concern now is to keep her fighting and moving and keep her spirits up,” says Buddy. “You have to have the will to fight.”

The issue is out on newsstands today in New York (because we rock).

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CBS Sports Radio has found its main man in Doug Gottlieb.

Gottlieb, late of ESPN, will host an afternoon show (3-6 p.m.) and will be the network’s main college basketball analyst when CBS Sports Radio launches next Jan. 2. He’ll also be an “exclusive contributor” — whatever that means — to cbssports.com.

Elsewhere on the radio scene, Z100’s Elvis Duran has inked a new, “long-term” deal with parent company Clear Channel to remain on Z100, continue with his nationally syndicated show and work with Clear Channel on “a variety of future endeavors” including “talent and programming development.” Duran will also serve as the company’s spokesman.

He’s hosted his “Elvis Duran and the Morning Show” on Z100 since 1996 — no mean feat — and it’s been syndicated since 2009.

Speaking of radio veterans, I recently interviewed Q104’s Ken Dashow for a story which ran last Saturday in The Post’s TV section.

Dashow is celebrating 30 years on the New York airwaves, and I asked him how the business has changed since he started on WNEW FM back in 1982.

“It’s an honest answer — and I’m not being evasive — but we used to guess what people wanted to hear, and in this digital world it’s now a lot easier to understand what listeners want to hear,” he said. “When people ask, ‘Who programs your radio station?’ the true answer is, ‘You do.’ The audience really does pick the music.”

As far as technological changes, Dashow said it’s “night and day” from the way it was when manned his first airshift.

“You used to slip-cue the records and you had to do it right — if you were seguing into ‘Baba O’Riley’ you held the record still while the turntable played and then let go [of the record]. There was a lot of mechanical moving — putting carts into the deck and making sure they were cued. There were lots of gears and buttons.

“Now it’s all digital,” he said. “So that’s all gone, which had a good and bad effect. Now we have to work more fluidly with the computer. Recently, Little Steven [Van Zandt] called in to my ‘Breakfast with the Beatles’ Sunday show to talk about Paul McCartney and Bruce [Springsteen] being shut down [during their duet at the Hard Rock Calling Festival in London]. I had to upload that to my blog and make a podcast and also put it on the Q104 Web site and tweet about it.

“I have to be my own IT guy.”

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AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” which kicked off its fifth season with record ratings, has since come back down to earth.

Since premiering to a series record 2.9 million viewers on July 15, “BB” has fallen with each successive episode, dropping to 2.3 million viewers (July 22) and then to 2.2 million viewers for this past Sunday’s episode, “Hazard Pay.”

Still, the show’s 2.4 million average, over these three episodes, easily eclipses last season, when “BB” topped the 2 million viewer mark only once, with its Season 4 opener (2.6 million on July 11, 2011).

Elsewhere in cable, ABC Family’s Baby Daddy” — starring Jean-Luc Bilodeau, Tahj Mowry, Melissa Peterman and Chelsea Kane — had a terrific month. The Wednesday night comedy (8:30-9 p.m.) finished as cable’s top-rated comedy in women 18-34 and females 12-34. Network stablemates “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” “Bunheads,” “Jane By Design” and “Melissa & Joey” also finished first, for the month, in their respective target demos.

More cable: “Joy Behar: Say Anything!” premieres Tuesday, Sept. 4 at 6 p.m. on Current TV. It will air Monday through Thursday, with later-evening repeats. Behar will continue co-hosting ABC’s “The View.”