The Tonight Show That Died

The word “failure” was never associated with the brief, Conan O’Brien version of the Tonight Show. Pundits and fans were, instead, chirping about whether Jay Leno somehow forced O’Brien off the show and himself back on it. It became a debate about personalities, not ratings or content.

No, if you want to apply “failure” to any Tonight Show, it unquestionably describes a version that you likely never saw—the seven-month-long fiasco that was Tonight!—America After Dark.

Our story begins in 1956. Steve Allen had been not only hosting Tonight, but was warring (on and off camera) with Ed Sullivan on a Sunday night show for NBC. He was spelled off by Ernie Kovacs on Monday and Tuesday nights as of October 1st. But the following month, the trades announced Allen was leaving and Kovacs would be dropped if a new format met with sponsor approval. (Something was found for Ernie. In a truly misguided attempt all around, NBC slated Jerry Lewis for a 90-minute show the following January. Lewis refused to work more than an hour so Kovacs was shoved in to fill the remaining 30 minutes. Someone decided there would be no dialogue for the entire Kovacs show. It wasn’t well received).

The new format wasn’t really new at all. It was what NBC programming chief Pat Weaver had envisioned for the Today Show when it began in 1952—cut-ins in from anywhere and everywhere, about anything and everything, anchored by a “communicator.” That’s what the network decided to try in late night. And as the host, the job was handed to Jack Lescoulie who, no doubt, was anxious to get out of the shadow of Today “communicator” Dave Garroway and be the number-one guy.

The format was aptly described in this TV column from The Knickerbocker News of January 26, 1957.

Gala Sendoff Planned For the New ‘Tonight’
National Broadcasting Company's answer to the popularity of top feature films on Late Theaters in key markets all over the nation will be unfolded Monday when Tonight takes on its new "America After Dark" look. Jack Lescoulie and a battery of leading newspaper columnists will take over from Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs as Tonight reshuffles its format completely in an effort to regain its once lofty ratings.
A three-city party — in New York, Chicago and Hollywood — will be held in honor of the new Monday-through-Friday show and televised as a portion of the premiere program.
Actress Jayne Mansfield will join in the celebration from Hollywood where Paul Coates, columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror-News and Vernon Scott of the United Press will play hosts to many film stars at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
Singer Roberta Sherwood will participate from Chicago where Irv Kupicnet, Chicago Sun-Times columnist, will host activities at the famous Pump Room, Comedian George Gobel will be seen from New York's Harwyn Club where celebrities will be greeted by columnist Hy Gardner of the N. Y. Herald Tribune and Earl Wilson of the New York Post, in addition, Bob Considine, sixth man of the team of columnists will report from Topeka, where Kansas’ 96th anniversary celebration will be in progress. Former Presidential Candidate Alfred M. Landon will be Considine’s guest.

Tonight cameras also will invade the Mount Sinai Hospital maternity ward in New York City on the opening snow, as well as dropping in at the Argonne National Atomic Laboratories in Chicago and the poker houses on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Norman Frank, one of the original producers of Wide Wide World, will use many of the techniques of NBC's alternate Sunday show in his new assignment. Frank said the “main concentration” will be to capture the tempo and pacing of nightlife throughout the country.
“The format will remain flexible enough to allow our cameras to go anywhere for live coverage of newsworthy events and specialties dealing with ‘Nighttime USA’,” Frank said.
"We will make backstage visits to theaters and nightclubs to talk with top personalities. We'll showcase new talent, attend parties and venture into any phase of nighttime activity that is technically feasible”.
Lescoulie will go from one extreme to another as host of the new program. For the past five years, Lescoulie has been leaving his bed at 3:43 a. m, to be in time for his duties as Dave Garroway's right-hand man on the Today show. In his new schedule, Lescoulie will not get up until 11 a. m.



Thus the new Tonight Show premiered on January 28, 1957. Critics hated it. Perhaps the best part of the show was something that would never, ever happen in the all-too-thoroughly screened late night talk shows of today—the unexpected, courtesy of Dean Martin. This column from the Philadelphia Inquirer was published January 30, 1957.

New 'Tonight!' No Fun After Dark
By HARRY HARRIS
ON MONDAY at 11:15 P.M., NBC's "Tonight" acquired an exclamation point. It also acquired some new features that rated a /*%/ to go with the !
To replace the civilized fun of Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs, the network shoveled together a bewildering assortment of stuff culled from “Today,” “Wide Wide World” and “Stork Club.”
Most of these items were repeated, a couple of minutes at a gulp, three or four times during the 105-minute duration of the East Coast telecast. This mineing of material was obviously intended to impress anybody who tuned in, however briefly, with the fact that the show's six newspaper columnist cohosts were widely scattered.
The only trouble is that zero divided by three or four is still zero, and that constant repetition of "Let's go to Hollywood" and "Let's go to Chicago" quickly suggested a better idea: "Let's go to sleep." Despite this inclination, we stayed with it to the last dismaying moment.
WITH Jack Lescoulie watching the store while his newsmen colleagues were digging up stories and Constance Moore along for no perceptible reason except to keep Lescoulie company, the program kept bouncing in and out of New York like a rubber ball attached to a paddle board.
At dull-looking parties in New York, Chicago, Beverly Hills and Topeka, enough names were dropped to stock a suburban telephone book.
Even for television, the small talk was almost unbelievably small. Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joan Crawford, Roberta Sherwood, Marion Marlowe, Alf Landon and a trio of mayors were among the burblers.
Dean Martin's talk was small, too, but in a different way. Asked to discuss a magazine article by his ex-partner, Jerry Lewis. Martin lashed out with snarling comments like these:
“Everything was full of lies but one thing. He wrote it . . . I could do a write-up on Jerry, but not even ‘Confidential’ would print it . . . Get back together with him? Ha! Not even in the same country! They'll put him away for a while, but he'll get out.”
It was a shocking exhibition of no fun after dark, but it served one devastating purpose. It had the harsh sound of truth, and exposed most of the program’s conversation for the contrived oohing and ahing it was.
THERE were some interesting sequences—robot-manipulators of radioactive materials in action; a California “poker club,” where in effect the gamblers rent the premises; Dr. Karl Meninger opining, in a discussion of don't-give-a-damn pills, “I'm not so sure tranquillity is the aim of life; maybe we need some do-give-a-damn pills.” But these were given relatively short shrift and added up to mighty few nuggets amid all that garbage.
Of the six newspapermen involved, only two—Paul Coates, in Los Angeles, and Irv Kupcinet, in Chicago—displayed any authority before the camera. Hy Gardner, an old hand at local telecasting, looked up from his notes long enough to take exception to Edward G. Robinson's comment, “You're not going Mike Wallace on me.” “I gave Mike Wallace lessons in this,” Gardner said sharply.
The other newsmen participating were Vernon Scott, Earl Wilson and Bob Considine.
"Entertainment" during the 105 minutes consisted of a few pallid gags by George Gobel, a "reading" by Robinson, a song by Miss Sherwood.
Of course, it was a premiere, and so ambitious a project deserves time to iron out the bugs. But “Tonight!”—complete with exclamation point—is as buggy as they come.

At the risk of being repetitious, let’s pass on the opinion of Herald-Tribune syndicate columnist John Crosby, published February 2nd.

Top Columnists Present Pretty Terrible TV Show
From Beverly Hills by long distance telephone came the menacing voice of an actor I know. “We're all waiting, Crosby,” he snarled, “to see whether you're going to be as rough on these newspapermen as you'd be on us actors if we had stunk up the air the way they did.” There was no point in asking him which program he meant. There could only be one—the new “Tonight” or, as it's subtitled, “America After Dark.”
There are a whole mess of newspaper columnists involved in this terrible enterprise—Earl Wilson and Hy Gardner of New York; Irv Kupcinet of Chicago; Paul Coates and Vernon Scott of Hollywood, and Bob Considine who I guess, represents America at large—and the kindest thing I can say about them is that they would be among the first to denounce the program if they weren't on it.
Rather Horrifying
I've seen two “Tonights” and I can best describe them by picking out a few highlights. On the first one, Dean Martin was persuaded to talk about an article written about his former partner Jerry Lewis: “That article is full of lies. Only one thing true about it and that is that he wrote it.” There was lots more, all rather horrifying. In Kansas, Alf M. Landon told Bob Considine of the Democrats who finally elected a governor in Kansas: “Well, they're eating pretty high off the hog now but by 1958 they'll be up salt creek.”
In Hollywood, Jayne Mansfield, in a sepulchral whisper that may have been her dying breath or may on the other hand have been the way she thinks busty blondes have to talk, confided to Scott that she was going to build a heart-shaped house and a heart-shaped pool and a heart-shaped bathtub for two. Kupcinet broke in from Chicago to ask about her weight-lifting and what it did for her. “It's brought out quite a few of my finer points,” murmured Miss Jayne. “It straightens things and puts things in the right places.”
In New York, a baby was born within camera range of Hy Gardner. The baby sensibly clammed up but Gardner didn't. “You've certainly proved one thing, that certain people do get born in New York,” cried Gardner. “And now back to Jack Lescoulie.”
All They Did Was Drink

The “And now we take you to” bit was heard again and again and again. They took us to Chicago and to Kansas City and Hollywood to the Harwyn, the Beverly Hilton, to Radio City, to a maternity ward while Lescoulie burbled “Exciting things are happening” and “It's all live and it's all happening on Tonight!” The trouble is that nothing special was happening, at least not on the show. There were parties in three cities but apart from making singularly ill-advised remarks, the people did nothing but drink. And while I'm well aware that vicarious pleasures are among television's chief attractions, I don't think vicarious drinking is going to catch on. You got to do your own.
The second night of “excitement and gayety and glamour” (Mr. Lescoulie's words, not mine) was not quite so dull and tasteless and pointless as the first night, largely because it just wasn't possible. Lescoulie interviewed Eli Wallach about movie acting and this was interesting and could have gone on longer. Later, Wallach did a reading about the joys and torments of acting and this was offbeat and absorbing, Kupcinet landed on the Merchandise Mart in Chicago in a helicopter and we learned a little about Chicago's growing helicopter taxi service.
‘Those Bloody Parties’
But then we got back into one of those bloody parties from Hollywood. Among the glamorous, gay, exciting people there were Jolie Gabor, Linda Darnell and Ann Miller, and mostly they all talked at once. This was a lucky thing because the few coherent lines that emerged from the babble will not be quoted in all the anthologies. This bit closed with a lecture on what every young mother should know from Mama Gabor which was totally unintelligible and may conceivably have been delivered in Hungarian.
The best part of the two nights was a visit with Paul Coates to a legal gambling joint in California where bored housewives play poker. I didn't know such joints existed and Coates, an old pro at this sort of thing, brought out the salient features of the place and the people who run it and inhabit it. But then just as my spirits started to lift, we were wafted back to New York and George Gobel asking Joan Crawford if she slept in pajamas. And the next night, Earl Wilson got his hair dyed red in a beauty parlor, setting back journalism 200 years.

NBC knew it had a disaster. Executive Producer Dick Linkroum told Variety in a story dated February 4th that format changes were coming and that it would take about two months to iron out the show. The first thing he did was dump producer Norman Frank (the press was told he’d be gone on another assignment for six weeks; he never returned) and took the job himself. Whatever changes he made didn’t work. The network’s brass met in mid-May and decided to keep Tonight but with some undisclosed format changes. Within days, Earl Wilson resigned and it was announced Lescoulie would be returning to the second banana’s job on the Today Show. On June 5, 1957 Variety announced the new format—a variety show starring Jack Paar with “a 12-piece orchestra, three guest stars nightly, an additional recording star and a comedy panel.” Gardner, Scott, Coates and Kupcinet were fired. (NBC had planned to use the 11:15 to 11:30 p.m. slot as a news commentary lead-in, but affiliates rejected the idea and it never happened).

Paar hadn’t done an awful lot since Jack Benny plucked him from nowhere and decreed Paar to be his summer replacement on radio in 1947. His radio variety show fizzled, there was a stint as a game show host, a failed morning show on CBS, a failed daytime show on CBS, and a fill-in job for Ed Sullivan which resulted in the lowest ratings of the season. In fact, Paar was announced in June 1956 as Allen’s permanent Monday-Tuesday replacement on Tonight but, for some reason, Linkroum decided instead to go with rotating hosts, including Paar, until Kovacs was hired. By June 1957, Paar was languishing in what was left of network radio, over at ABC doing a late morning show.

The seemingly out-of-nowhere Tonight job was an incredible break for Paar, and turned out to be a brilliant decision by NBC, even though some affiliates initially dropped his show in favour of movies. He debuted July 29th. The Station Relations department somehow convinced stations in Nashville, Boston and St. Louis to carry Paar. More affiliates followed. So did advertisers. By the end of October, the Paar show brought in close to one million dollars in new business for the network. On November 8th, Tonight piled up $4,200,000 in gross new business, a single-day record for NBC. Paar was a hero. Paar saved the day. And Tonight.

Television Needs Fixing

Quiz shows were the reality shows of the 1950s. They featured real people, using real brains to win really big money.

They (well, some of them) turned out be as real as today’s reality shows. They were fixed to build phoney tension to make sure the audience came back week after week so the sponsor could push his wares.

Today, would anyone care if a show is faked? If they’re entertained enough, probably not. After all, it’s just a TV show. How much less cynical we were in the 1950s.

The quiz show scandals caused all kinds of moral outrage—especially among U.S. Congressmen who (oh, here’s that cynicism again) saw a chance to score points with voters by staging an “investigation” to get to the bottom of it all.

Herald Tribune syndicate columnist John Crosby weighed in. Crosby had spent 13 years at this point ridiculing the banality on television. The quiz show scandal gave him a chance to rip virtually the entire industry, including the F.C.C. His comments resonanted. Portions of the column were widely quoted. Let’s bring you the whole column. It was apparently first published on October 16, 1959.

Did Quizlings Outdo Chicago's Black Sox?
By JOHN CROSBY
Charles Van Doren may go down as the Shoeless Joe Jackson of his age. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” is the plea on the lips of a million true believers—and the answer is silence.
But the trouble is I can’t quite cast these quizlings in the role of the Black Sox players of 1919. Shoeless Joe Jackson was an authentic genius. There was an air of papier mache about all the quiz heroes—that shoemaker with the appealing face, the taxi driver who used to answer the questions before they were asked.
I AM SHOCKED not so much by the fact that these have proved to be false gods as by the fact that they got to be gods in the first place. There is not the slightest question but they were gods all right. Why? Because they were intellectuals and knew the gestation period of elephants (one of the questions asked potential candidates?) I doubt it.
I think mostly because they were little people being propelled to fame and fortune overnight. They were each a little Cinderella story and it’s hard to say which was the greater lure, the fame or the fortune. The money was good but I think maybe the fame was even more enticing in our fame-hungry world.
BUT THEREIN LIES the fraud on the populace. If they didn’t truly possess this outlandish information, the public would never have made these shows so wildly popular and, if they weren’t so wildly popular, they never would have been worth millions to the Lou Cowans who owned “$64,000 Question” and “$64,000 Challenge,” and Barry and Enright who owned “21” which they sold for millions of dollars. As usual, it is not the guy in the ring who makes the killing. It is the fixer outside.
The moral squalor of the quiz mess reaches clear through the whole industry and I do not see why Congress shouldn’t pursue its investigation a little further. If it did, Congressmen would discover that nothing is what it seems in television. Well, nothing apart from its news and public events shows.
No scandal has ever touched the honest and hard-working news men who are competent and incorruptible. Why are they so exceptional? Well, largely because each news operation is network-owned and operated and the ad agencies kept strictly out of the office. This has given them an esprit de corps denied all the others. (The situation isn’t perfect. The news guys would like far more voice than they have, more time, more money, more everything but they’re proud of what they get on the air).
BUT IN EVERYTHING ELSE the heavy hand of the advertiser suffocates truth, corrupts men and women. Rod Serling, one of TV’s noted dramatists and author of “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” tells of doing a TV play based on the Till case, the Mississippi lynching. Somehow the victim became a foreigner from an undesignated country; the scene shifted to New England, last place in the world it could happen, and the diatribe was directed at some vague, formless injustice that didn’t merit the shouting. The script, in short, became a lie. Rigged TV drama, rigged quiz shows.
People in the business say: “Yeah, but that’s the way things are. Why fight City Hall?” The feeling of high purpose, of manifest destiny that lit the industry when it was young, when the Ed Murrows and Fred Coes and Pat Weavers ran the place, when talent was all over the place, is long gone. The money changers are in the temple and the place has reeked of corruption for a long time.
THERE IS A FEELING that corruption reaches into the highest echelons, into the trafficking for frequencies itself, and this has helped weaken the moral fibres in the lower echelons. Why fight City Hall? The Federal Communications Commission has been touched with scandal in the granting of a license in Miami and certainly it cannot be accused of being either energetic or notoriously interested in the honesty of quiz shows or anything else. The whole industry—who’s in, who’« out, who’s rich, who’s poor—rests insecurely on a rating system that is trusted by no one and is misused by every one.
The worst crumbs in the business are now in the saddle and the best and most idealistic and creative men in the business either can’t get work or they quit in disgust and go on to better things in the movies or the theater. Perhaps the quiz mess is the Black Sox scandal of television and maybe it could be used to clean up the rest of the mess.

Here we are more than 65 years later. Did television change for the better?

How To Be An Announcer

There is, out in the wide world today, a sub-set of the population known as Grumpy Former Radio People. Their main place of gathering is broadcasting message boards where they endlessly complain about the state of the radio industry today and how the airwaves are filled with low-salaried, semi-literate kids, unlike decades ago when sounds from their larynxes were flowing through microphones. Of course, they don’t seem to realise that their predecessors groaned the exact same thing about them.

Submitted as proof is this column from May 24, 1949 by esteemed radio observer John Crosby. Announcing had indeed changed from the early 1930s, where over-enunication and über-pear-shaped tones were the norm to allow people to be heard over the static and poor signals emitted by radios back then. That style quickly became obsolete as the technical side of broadcasting improved and would have sounded downright silly in 1949. But that didn’t stop nostalgic oldsters from waxing on about the “good old days.”

The Personality Kids
By JOHN CROSBY
PAT KELLY, N.B.C.’s chief announcer, celebrates his 20th anniversary with the network next month. He's somewhat the worse for wear and not altogether happy with the current crop of announcers.
Young announcers, he says sadly, can’t appear to get the hang of spoken English, a failure he blames on schools and colleges.
“We can’t undo the damage that’s done in schools. They’re not teaching English any more. Ninety per cent of the people in this country can never be taught correct English speech. They’ve heard it spoken incorrectly too long.”
MOST OF THE FAMOUS announcers of 15 years back have died or passed into obscurity, he reports. One famed announcer is now selling records to undertakers who hide record-players behind the ferns.
Alois Havilla, one of the best known of early announcers now practices his art on WNJR in Newark. Another once-famed NBC announcer works for a small Philadelphia station. Tastes have changed and few announcers were able to alter their voices with the fashion.
The old-style announcers, according to Kelly, used a beautiful precise diction. Or they bellowed.
Today sponsors prefer the chatty, chummy type of announcer like Harlow Wilcox or Harry von Zell. An announcer has to be a personality kid. Command of the language isn’t necessary.
ONE OF THE FEW old-time announcers to survive the revolution is Ford Bond, who once bellowed at the top of his lungs and is now as chummy as a loveseat.
Some announcers became so associated with a product that no other sponsor would take them. Ed Thorgersen, now the high priest of the newsreels, became so identified with Lucky Strikes that no one else would touch him when the Lucky Strike show dropped him.
Most good announcers have been either actors or singers. Graham McNamee, Milton Cross and Jimmy Wallington were all singers before they became announcers. Don Wilson and John B. Daniels were actors, Kelly himself was both a singer and an actor. Ben Grauer was a child movie star.
KELLY HAS HAD some grim evenings with announcers who had a drop too much to drink. One of the 19 announcers used on the Dr. I. Q. show—announcers are scattered all around the balcony on that program—went off on a toot.
When Dr. I.Q. said: “And now we will hear from Frobisher in the second balcony,” the only response was a dead silence. The announcer didn’t show up for five days. When he did, Kelly asked him what had happened to the 48 silver dollars with which he’s been equipped to pay off winning contestants.
“Oh,” said Frobisher blankly, “is that where I got all that money?”
The same man once walked out on the stage of the Philip Morris show, beating a Chinese gong which wasn’t part of the script. He threw the gong on the floor and jumped on it before several people fell on him and dragged him away.
THE LONGEST ad lib job in Kelly’s memory was that of Charley O’Connor.
O’Connor was sent out in an airplane to describe the arrival in his country of the Mollison plane. But the Mollisons didn't show up. For 45 minutes O'Connor circled around Long Island Sound in the dark, chattering about not very much.
An NBC announcer is a highly paid and fairly secure individual. The networks pays him at least $350 a month, generally more, and he may earn two or three times that in addition on commercial shows.
It's not an easy job to get, though. Vacancies occur only about once every two years and there is a long list of applicants. The ones who get in have to have five years’ experiences somewhere else.
IF YOU WANT to be to announcer, Kelly recommends a college liberal arts course with an English major, a course in speech, and as much acting as you can work in.
Kelly says if an announcer is good, it should be very hard to tell what part of the country he’s from. He should have no regional mannerisms. President Roosevelt, Kelly thinks, didn’t have a Harvard accent or any kind of accent.
“He just spoke good English,” declares Kelly.

In a few years, the Announcing Crop of 1949 would be complaining about the “death” of radio and lambasting the screeches of Boss Rock Jocks who, in turn... Well, radio, like life, appears to be an endless cycle.

Without Their Advance Knowledge

An intellectual from a respected family couldn’t be a cheater, right?

That attitude was the whole lynch-pin surrounding TVs quiz show scandal. The realisation that an intellectual could be a cheater—and was a cheater—and the fact the intellectual seemed like a nice young man is why viewers were so outraged they had been had. Television still had some self-respect in the ‘50s. Amidst the quiz shows, laugh-track laden sitcoms and strident commercials were documentaries, live drama and Edward R. Murrow. Today, no one cares that reality shows aren’t real. The audience doesn’t expect anything lofty out of television, just entertainment.

Among the millions of Americans fooled by the performance of Charles Van Doren (photo to right) on “Twenty One” was noted critic John Crosby. Crosby was not one to admire quiz shows—he was scathing against “Stop the Music” and even “To Tell The Truth”—but “Twenty One” was, well, intellectual, so it had to be good. One can’t blame Crosby, though. An intellectual from a respected family couldn’t be a cheater, right?

John Crosby’s Television & Radio
If you have to watch giveaways—and these days you have to turn the set off—I can only recommend “Twenty-One”, the only wheel in town that reminds me of the big table at Cannes. That is, the contestants stand to lose big dough as well as win it. Of course, they’re losing house money—but still it’s money that would otherwise be in the bank—and they’re matched evenly against another contestant rather than playing against the house which adds a certain morbid, and altogether fascinating allure to the proceedings.
The current winner is Charles Van Doren, the son of Mark Van Doren, the author, who has run up his score to $99,000. Young Van Doren, an English instructor at Columbia University, may reopen the whole argument about progressive schools which I thought we had safely behind us. He is a product of progressive schools, having attended City and Country School and St. John’s College before taking his Ph.D at Columbia. However, the very breadth and variety of his interests, which have been fair awe-inspiring, are the result, teammates say, not so much of formal schooling as the fact that he is Mark Van Doren’s son and was reared in a family of lively intellectual curiosity whose members were incessantly running to the encyclopedia to make sure they had it exactly right.
“Twenty-One” demands wide general knowledge, not specialized information, as do most of the others. The emcee, Jack Barry, simply throws a category at the contestants without their advance knowledge or consent and consequently Mr. Van Doren has had to be very nimble-witted about the United States government past and present, Shakespeare, kings and queens, the Air Force, the theater, opera and heaven knows what else.
On “Twenty-One”, two contestants are acoustically sealed off from one another in isolation booths, the manufacture of which must be one of the growing industries of our hemisphere, and are asked to pick a number from one to eleven, the size of the number determining the difficulty of the question. Frequently they pick either ten or eleven and consequently the two contestants get the same questions on, say Lincoln. There are two sets of questions and you can, if you’re bright enough, win twenty-one points which are paid off per point at a rate which jumps $50 every time a contestant surmounts each set. Everyone straight on that?
Well, whether you are or not, Van Doren last session was playing for $2,000 a point against a rival, Miss Ruth Miller, who had already got her twenty-one points. Consequently, Van Doren stood to lose $40,000 of the $46,000 he had built up over the weeks and the tension as he hesitated over Lincoln’s two Secretarys of War and two Vice Presidents was something terrible. Still, he got it right and went on to demolish Miss Miller on a question pertaining two World War II and run his winnings up to $99,000.
Miss Miller had to walk off with a mere $2,500 and she looked as if a two-mile race, not only beaten but exhausted. I learned at my grandpa’s knee that in gambling there had to be a loser as well as a winner — but this is the only TV giveaway that plays quite like that. Of course, I suppose the sponsor would be horrified to hear it called gambling but that’s what it is — except that the house gives you the chips to play with originally. After you’ve played a week or so, though, it’s your money and I suppose losing it is as painful as any other kind of losing.
NBC seems confident enough of its entry to throw it up against the perennial champion “I Love Lucy” (9 p.m. EST Monday’s) and it may put a dent in the ratings.

Crosby’s column is from January 11, 1957. The scandal claimed “Twenty One” on October 17, 1958. Crosby was livid when he realised he had been duped. He put his anger in print. “The moral squalor of the quiz mess reaches through the whole industry,” he wrote in November 1959. He opened that column with “Charles Van Doren may go down as the Shoeless Joe Jackson of his age. ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ is the plea on the lips of a million true believers—and the answer is silence.”

Van Doren wasn’t silent more than 50 years later. You can read his story to The New Yorker here.

It Pays To Be Ignorant

In 1959, as network radio sputtered toward its death, CBS melded some familiar elements into a show called “Funny Side Up.” It featured Kenny Delmar and Parker Fennelly basically reviving their “Allen’s Alley” characters under new names (with Delmar substituting Texan jokes for Southern jokes). They were two-thirds of a panel engaged in scripted banter on material sent in by the audience, pretty much like the premise of the parody quiz show “It Pays To Be Ignorant.” “Funny Side Up” wasn’t funny. It was flat.

Astute critic John Crosby hit on the thing that made “Ignorant” such a fun show to listen to. It was tightly-scripted but seemed out of control. The show’s tempo was manic. Wheezy old or obvious jokes didn’t get a chance to lie there—unlike the sedate, suburban proceedings of “Funny Side Up.” They were like a Tex Avery cartoon: set-up, ridiculous punchline, on to the next set-up before anyone has a chance to realise it’s an old groaner.

Here’s Crosby’s review from the start of the 1946-47 radio season.

YES, IT’S CORN, BUT GOOD!
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Sept. 6.—In a book on fashions, I once recall reading that a particular fashion in, let us say, women’s clothes was ridiculous 15 years after it was introduced, quaint and amusing 50 years later, and a classic 100 years later.
It doesn't take that long for a joke to become a classic. The jokes in "It Pays to Be Ignorant” already have all the attributes of the classic, although I don't suppose these jokes are more than 20 years old. But, like Greek statuary, they follow a rigid pattern laid down by the early masters, and through the years have acquired the yellowed and nostalgic patina of old marble.
This satire on quiz programs is still as corny as Iowa in August and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s a lot of fun, too, if you like that sort of thing. Perhaps I’d better give you a sample of the goings-on in “It Pays To Be Ignorant” and let you judge the program for itself.
GRAND GAGSTERS
Tom Howard is quiz master and he is flanked by a battery of experts, consisting of George Shelton, Harry McNaughton and Lulu McConnell. All four are veteran vaudevillians steeped in the wisdom of Joe Miller. If they know anything else, they keep it a deep secret.
Mr. Howard plucks an amateur from the audience and asks him a skull-cracking question such as “How many stories has a three-story house?” Before the poor man has a chance to open his mouth, the experts start throwing gags around like Indian clubs.
“Is the house for rent?”
“If you don’t know where the house is, why don’t you tell that to the people? I’m going to report you to the APU.”
“I once built a house in the country.”
“Well, you built it all wrong. It’s upside-down.”
“No wonder I keep falling off the porch.”
“Let’s get back to question,” yells Howard. “How many stories has a three-story house?”
“My sister in Kansas City has a four-story house.”
“Well, that’s another story.”
FAST-FIRED CORN
So far as I know, no one ever answers any of these questions. Suddenly, Mr. Howard remembers the amateur, or non-expert, who, I guess, simply shifts from one foot to another while this bedlam goes on. The amateur is given a prize of $25.15 and 204 cigarets for no apparent reason, but that shouldn't astonish any one who has ever heard a quiz program.
“It Pays To Be Ignorant” would be unbearable if it didn’t move so rapidly. Before you have a chance to detect the ripeness of these antique gags, three more come shooting through your loud-speaker.
“I was a comedian in a hospital—I kept the patient in stitches.”
“I've been married for fourteen years and I’m still in love. If my wife ever finds out, she’ll kill me.”
“I have a nice girl now—her name is Bottle.”
“I bet she’s a corker.”
“What do you expect for Father’s Day?”
“The bills for Mother’s Day.”
“What lives in a henhouse?”
“Is it for rent?"
These gags are delivered in a rich medley of accents. Howard has a voice like a hoarse bullfrog. Miss McConnell’s voice will remind you of a gravel chute in full operation. As for the amateurs, they simply sound bewildered.

For CBS, it didn’t pay to be ignorant. The network had been airing the show on Friday nights at 9 but looked at the ratings and suddenly replaced it on February 1, 1946 with a sitcom written by Abe Burrows called “Holiday and Company.” The numbers were even worse. “It Pays To Be Ignorant” returned May 2nd. The show began in 1942 as a sustainer on WOR/Mutual, bounced to CBS and then over to NBC, where it finished out its run on radio in 1951. The show premiered for a short run on television on WCBS on June 6, 1949 (opposite a movie on NBC and “Doorway to Fame” on DuMont) and there were TV revivals in each of the next three decades (the 1951 effort on NBC featured the original cast). By the way, to the right you can see the ignorance of one of the radio fan magazines. The misidentified cast depicted is from another show, “Can You Top This?”.

You can listen to an Armed Forces Radio edited version of some ignorance from 1943 below.

Doorbell. Insult. Repeat.

More than a hall closet, was NBC’s “Fibber McGee and Molly.”

By the time the end of World War Two rolled around, the show had pretty much settled into the same routine every week. Fibber and Molly set up the story line at the start and it meandered along until its conclusion, interrupted by secondary characters who, sometimes, got into a routine that had absolutely nothing to do with the week’s plot.

Audiences didn’t mind. Don Quinn, Phil Leslie and the other writers came up with great repartee. And the characters were likeable. For a while at least. New characters came and old ones went to keep the show fresh. But by the end of the ‘40s and into the ‘50s, the new characters were more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny—Ole the Svedish janitor, the golly-gosh teenager played by Gil Stratton Jr., even Foggy the Weatherman wasn’t as strong as Gale Gordon’s earlier Mayor La Trivia. The show sputtered along during radio’s death watch, losing announcer Harlow Wilcox, Billy Mills’ Orchestra (except as recorded stock music bridges) and the studio audience.

The show was a number of hardy annuals that John Crosby reviewed for the Herald-Tribune syndicate. This was published on December 1, 1948. Crosby doesn’t do much more than describe the usual format, so those of you who haven’t heard the show will get an idea of how it went.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY

The activities of Fibber and Molly McGee are reported for no special reason every year in this space. Periodic checkup. Heart, lungs, teeth, Hooperating. They’re not getting any younger and it’s wise to keep a stethescope [sic] on ‘em. This year. there’s a slight swelling of the metaphors (normal at this age but better be watched), blood pressure 150 (excellent), Hooperating 21.8 (And at their age!)
They’re an extremely rugged couple, Fibber and Molly, and, if they're a little set in their ways, it’s to be expected. Fibber is arguing with Molly boastfully but with superb figures of speech when the doorbell rings. Ding Dong! Doc Gamble, who is quite a lot like Fibber, walks in. They insult each other.
“I'm just cruising around talking to a few friends.”
“You’re getting fewer of ‘em every minute.”
Then, with Molly as mediator, they begin to boat and make cracks at each other about their finishing ability, their hunting ability, or anything else that happens to be under discussion. “I’ll be picking bass out of that lake like fleas off a hound dog, like a ward-heeler picking votes out of a saloon.
“Hah! When you get through beating the lake with that fly rod, you’ll whip up enough froth to shave the shoreline.”
“The fish you’ve caught in your life wouldn’t make enough chowder to wet a spoon.”
It’s a tribute to their incomparable art that Jim Jordan, who plays Fibber, Marian Jordan, who is Molly and Arthur Q. Bryan, who is Doc Gamble, can handle such without sounding like a tongue-tied sophomore in the Mount Vernon High School production of “Hamlet,” if you’ll forgive the metaphor. The language is as complicated as Winston Churchill’s, though of course it lacks the quality.
“You’re as welcome as four choruses of ‘A Tree in the Meadow’ to a cocker spaniel.”
“You dunk your crumpets with such vigor the waitresses have to wear ponchos.”
“He couldn’t hit a hamstrung heifer with a hatful of hay.”
“Them springs are tighter than a size forty girdle after a spaghetti dinner.”
“A flophouse bed gets made up oftener and better than McGee’s mind.”
“Good old Doc! I don’t know what the medical profession would do without him, but I bet they’d welcome tome suggestions.”
These outrageous metaphors are punctuated by that doorbell. After Doc Gamble gets out of sight, the Oldtimer walks in. He talks a brand of pure nonsense that can’t be reduced to print, nohow. There’s an interval of troubled domesticity between Fibber and Molly and then Billy Mills orchestra gives respite to the English language. The doorbell again. Sis, a little girl (played by Marian Jordan) of literate mind manages to get all the adults confused. You haven’t learned history until you hear Sis’s version of the pheasants storming the Bastille.
After Sis gets out of sight, the doorbell rings again and there's Mayor La Trivia. He and Fibber trade metaphors, though in general La Trivia’s figures of speech haven’t the emotional stability of Gamble’s or Fibber’s. The Mayor leaves. The King’s Men, a singing group and a good one, give the language another interval. Then Wimple, a New England type with a tyrant of a wife, strolls in. “How’s your wife.”
“Never seen her in better shape. She’s been in bed for a month.”
The Jordans have been going on in this manner since 1931 [sic] and their Hooper has never been much better.

Fibber and Molly survived, transcribed, with assistance by Arthur Q. Bryan and Bill Thompson (who would get out of show biz in 1957, only to return to voice some cartoons for Hanna-Barbera a few years later). When NBC finally gutted its radio programming schedule and created “Monitor” in 1955, Fibber and Molly found a new home. The show carried on until 1959, very much a shadow of its former self. But then, so was radio.

Radio's Smart Dummy

There was a time when the most popular show on network radio starred someone who wasn’t real.

Charlie McCarthy was an invention of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, who took advantage of the fact that radio was a sound medium. On radio, you couldn’t see that Charlie was a ventriloquist’s dummy. But you could hear the sarcasm and insults McCarthy directed at every man in his path (with movie starlets, his behaviour was predictably different), so he sounded like any real, flesh-and-blood person who came through the radio speaker. People say that ventriloquism shouldn’t have worked on radio. It’s very simple. No one listening thought of Bergen and McCarthy as a ventriloquist act or, at least, filed it in the back of their minds. They thought of Charlie as someone who was larger than life.

Bergen was blessed with Zeno Klinker, Keith Fowler (a drinking buddy of Charlie’s on-air nemesis, W.C. Fields) and other fine writers who managed to avoid making McCarthy’s invectives sound forced, as well as his own quick-wittedness to add his own when the occasion suddenly presented itself.

Someone noted for barbs was Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby. He continually aimed at overused and obvious premises, trite plots and inane dialogue which filled Old Time Radio. The 1946-47 season arrived. On a Monday, Crosby gave a qualified passing grade to the low-key Ethel and Albert. The next day, he decried Judy Canova as non-inspirational. The following day, he turned to his old friends Bergen and McCarthy. Crosby had his perennial favourites—Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Henry Morgan (who he reviewed that week) to name some—and Charlie McCarthy was on the list. But Crosby had no reservations about telling the big stars they stunk. He did that in the following column:

MCCARTHY is IN SEASON AGAIN
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Sept. 11.—The flame trees are turning scarlet on Fire Island, the Atlantic feels like shaved ice, and the smell of wood smoke is in the air again. On a recent Sunday night, like the smell of burning leaves, came another small but unmistakable sign that Autumn is almost here.
“Why are you late?” inquired Edgar Bergen of that small razor-tongued hedonist whose voice is familiar to about 70,000,000 Americans.
“Because I didn’t get here on time,” said Charlie, who hasn’t changed a bit.
“Why didn’t you get here on time?”
“Because I was late. You want to go around again?”
Lordy, lordy, I said to myself, I’ve been treading water all summer long and at last land is in sight. The McCarthy show was the first smart comedy program I’ve heard in what seems like forever. If I get a little hysterical, ignore it; I’m over-wrought. In fact, I’m fed up with Summer, let’s face it. I’m tired of wet bathing suits and sand in my hair and Flynn’s bar and grill. I’d like a martini, very dry, at the St. Regis and I want to wear shoes again, the leather kind, and I wish Fred Allen were back.
SHARP AS EVER
Charlie was in rare form. He’d intended, he said, to spend the Summer improving his mind but spent most of it improving his technique. And his technique, one of the most subtle and sure-footed in radio, is as sharp as ever.
After considerable meditation, Charlie tells Bergen he plans quit radio. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” says Bergen. “Oh, yes, I do. I read your lips.”
Bergen points out that quitting radio is a serious step but Charlie is adamant. “I decided I’m getting no place and you’re helping me.”
“But, Charlie . . .”
“No no no no no no. I say no and that’s final. I’m using my veto power. I’m walking.”
“But you mean so much to everyone.”
WHAT’S SATAN'S PAYROLL?
“Especially you. You get your pound of flesh for 75 cents.”
“But if you left radio, what would you do? Remember, Charlie, Satan has work for idle hands.”
“Yeah? What does he pay?”
I’ve heard better dialogue but one thing every McCarthy show has is a distinctive McCarthy flavor. Charlie is a rounded, fully developed character with more flesh and blood than a dozen Abbott and Costellos. Over the years, Bergen has endowed this small self-possessed cynic with a heart and a soul as well as a highly articulate set of vocal chords. Charlie is America’s Pinocchio.
I’ve never been a Mortimer Snerd man. Snerd, it seems to me, is one joke, endlessly repeated. But, in my new benign end-of-summer moody my feeling changed toward this slack-jawed imbecile who is only barely conscious he is alive. Mortimer, in case you hadn’t heard, spent the Summer in school. It came as a great shock to him to discover that school has been out all Summer, though, he said, he’d become a little suspicious when he won all the games at recess.
Guest star on the McCarthy program on that Sunday was Jimmy Stewart who proved again that movie stars, particularly one who has been in the Army for five years, shouldn’t get mixed up with the experts in front of a microphone. Mr. Stewart, bless his shy, wide-eyed American soul, was just plain awful and, if he didn’t have such a fine war record, I’d tell him so.

While a star that was a wooden dummy proved not to be a problem on radio, television was a bit of a different matter. Radio listeners already envisioned Charlie McCarthy as a living, breathing, talking, walking character, not something sitting on a guy’s knee. That made it a little difficult to build a televised comedy/variety show around him. Still, Bergen and McCarthy found a place on the TV game show “Who Do You Trust” (sitting at a desk was the only thing necessary). The pair retired in the mid-60s, only to return to the stage five years later (sitting on a stool was the only thing necessary). He announced his impending farewell to an audience in Las Vegas in 1978. It really was “farewell.” Bergen died two weeks later on September 30th at the age of 75. Charlie moved to the Smithsonian, showing his lasting impact he had on American culture.

Note: Crosby’s next column dealt with a special show on Mutual with a unique framing device: the “Unknown Soldier” of World War Two rose from the grave and discovered how little the world had progressed in the year since peace was signed with Japan, thanks to greed, hypocrisy, racism and and the prospect of atomic war.

That Ol’ Man Benny

You may have heard a tale that top syndicated radio columnist John Crosby once asked for a copy of an extremely funny Jack Benny script and was aghast to find it contained nothing funny, just “Hmmmm,” and “Well!”

That isn’t quite the way it went and, as proof, I give to you the Crosby column in question that appeared in newspapers in early 1947. He was reviewing the broadcast of December 29, 1946. It’s yet another show where, in the second half, Jack gets jealous and petulant at someone else’s fame. The first half features a running gag about Rochester mixing up an alcoholic eggnog brew with a reputation for potency. Benny’s writers set up the gag in their usual great fashion. Nobody wants to touch the stuff, finding comic reasons not to do so. Finally we come to Phil Harris who, after a brief pause, enthusiastically demands to be led to the stuff (the gag is topped by Harris complaining about the egg mixed in with the bourbon).

Crosby doesn’t include the whole gag in his column. He seems to be in a bit of a conundrum. He isn’t all that crazy about the script, but loves the Benny show so much he can’t be moved to stamp it with the dismissive criticism he pasted on other radio shows.

RADIO IN REVIEW
The Jack Benny Mystery
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Jan. 6.—One of the most mysterious things in the world, at least to, me, is the strange quality of genius that separates a good comedy script from a bad one. A couple of Sundays ago, Jack Benny offered his fans a program which to my mind was as hilarious as radio can ever get. Out of curiosity I sent to the West Coast for the script to determine, if I could, just what curious essence Mr. Benny had blown into this script to make it that funny. After reading the Benny script, I’m as much at sea as ever. Even allowing for Benny’s great gift for pacing, inflection and timing, I still don’t see why the darn thing should have made me laugh like that.
In order that you may, if you like, share my bewilderment I append below an abbreviated version of the Benny script. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the broadcast version was very, very comic.
● ● ●
Rochester: Dat ol’ man River,
Dat ol’ man River,
He must know sumpin’, but don’t say nuthin’,
He Just keeps rollin’, he keeps on rollin’ Along.
Ol’ man Benny, dat ol’ man Benny,
He won’t waste nuthin’, and don’t spend nuthin’,
He just keeps rollin’, he keeps on rollin’ along.
You should see him sweat and strain,
When he spends a nickel, he’s wracked with pain,
Benny: (Off) Rochester!
Rochester: Tote dat barge, lift dat bale.
Benny: Rochester!
Rochester: Git a little drunk an’ you lan’ in jail.
Benny: Rochester, I’ve been calling you.
Rochester: Sorry, boss, I was carried away with my own voice.
Benny: Oh, fine.
Rochester: Well, I’m becoming quite a popular singer. You know they call Bing Crosby, the Groaner?
Benny: Uh huh.
Rochester: And they call Andy Russell the Swooner?
Benny: I know. And what do they call you?
Rochester: The Razor’s Edge.
Benny: You sound more like the Yearling. Now, Rochester, my cast should be here soon for rehearsal. This is the holiday season and I’d like to serve them the eggnog I told you to make this morning. You did make it, didn’t you?
Rochester: Yes, sir.
Benny: Is it good?
Rochester: Wanna smell my breath?
Benny: No, thanks, I’m on the wagon. But you know, Rochester, that’s a strange drink. I wonder why anyone would ever think of mixing eggs and bourbon.
Rochester: It’s psychological, boss.
Benny: Psychological?
Rochester: Yeah. The eggs make you think you’re getting something very healthful.
Benny: Uh huh.
Rochester: And the bourbon makes that fact unimportant.
Benny: Well, that’s logical. By the way, Rochester, how much eggnog did you make?
Rochester: About 250 gallons.
Benny: 250 gallons! For goodness sake, Rochester, I want to drink it not bathe in it.
Rochester: Well, to each his own.
Benny: All right. All right. Make some sandwiches, too.
(Door Opens)
Livingston: Hello, Jack.
Benny: Hello, Mary. Come in. You’re the first one here.
Livingston: Jack, how come you called rehearsal so early?
Benny: Well, Mary, to tell you the truth, I have a date tonight.
Livingston: With whom?
Benny: Gladys Zybisco.
Livingston: Gladys Zybisco? Oh, Jack, surely you can do better than that.
Benny: Look, Mary, Gladys is very nice. She may not be the most beautiful girl in the world but she has a nice figure.
Livingston: I know, but does she have to walk that way?
Benny: Mary, that’s not her fault. She’s near-sighted and she anticipates the curb in the middle of the block. By the way, Mary, would you like a glass of eggnog?
Livingston: Sure, Jack, I’d love it. Wait a minute! Who made the eggnog?
Benny: Rochester.
Livingston: Uh, uh.
Benny: Why, what’s the matter?
Livingston: Well, last Christmas I tasted some of Rochester’s egg nog and the next thing I knew I was at the Rose Bowl game.
Benny: Oh, you saw the game?
Livingston: Saw it nothing. I was playing left tackle for Alabama.
● ● ●
That is just a sample of the Benny dialogue. How he manages to wrest so many laughs out of such harmless stuff is his own deep secret.

If you listen to the version of the show that’s circulating on-line, it doesn’t follow the script above. In 1946, two versions of the programme were still being made, one broadcast for the east coast then a second live show for the west.

The “secret” Crosby talks about wasn’t much of a secret. Benny always said not all his shows were great but he hoped people would tune in to hear what the characters were up to. The show had been on the air long enough that even casual listeners recognised individual character traits. They were ready to laugh as soon as those foibles came through the speaker. Combine that with expert delivery. It’s something a script will never show you.

It's True! It's On The Radio!

People believe what they hear on the radio, even if it’s obviously false. Jack Benny went out of his way to tip people to prove to them he wasn’t a tightwad like he was on his show. But there was a little blurring of lines when it came to Benny because on the radio he played Jack Benny, Radio Comedian.

There was no blurring of lines when it came to soap operas. The characters were made up. Their settings were made up. Yet for some, the acting was so convincing, they believed the ridiculous idea that someone had microphones planted all around them and their friends, and that real lives were being broadcast live, accompanied by organ music, an announcer and convenient commercial breaks.

Radio soap actress Mary Jane Higby devoted a chapter in her autobiography to misguided listeners who simply and steadfastly refused to believe it was only a show. Higby was one of a number of stars who had first-hand experience with delusional fans. And it is one of Higby’s shows that columnist John Crosby referred to in his thoughts on soap addicts in one of his columns published in late 1946.

RADIO IN REVIEW
Soap Opera Addicts
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Dec 30.—The dim twilight of soap opera la not everyone’s world. It is a special world, it would appear, built purposely for those persons whose credulity has no apparent limits. To the sceptical listener with a ready fund of humor the agonies of soap opera offers neither escape nor amusement. For that sort of listener, of whom there are a great many, a far more rewarding study than soap opera is that of, the people who listen to the darn things, or, as someone, put it so well, the proper study of man is man.
Soap opera is not so much a taste as an addiction. Even broadcasters will admit that the soap opera fan listens not to just one but to several, sometimes five or six a day, deriving from the later ones even more comfort than from the early ones when they sink further and further into the nebulous world of fancy and farther and farther from the prosaic world of the dishes. Just how virulent this soap opera drug can become was well illustrated by a recent occurrence in New Jersey.
A Mrs. Davis of Hillsborough township, near Somerville, New Jersey, recently received a note on which was scrawled: “Steve killed Betty MacDonald. Irma has him on her farm. I hope you will come out of this with flying colors.” Mrs. Davis turned the letter over to police who traced it without difficulty to a woman in Brooklyn, from whom they wrung this remarkable confession.
The writer told police that she listened every day to a soap opera called “When a Girl Marries.” On this program recently a Betty MacDonald was killed and Harry Davis of “Somerville” was arrested. The Brooklyn letter writer went on to explain that Harry Davis was really innocent. The real murderer, she told the startled cops, was a man named Steve, Betty’s lover, who was now hiding out on Irma's farm. (Irma loved him, too.) She had written the letter to Mrs. Davis to reassure her that everything would come out all right and to assure her that her faith in Mrs. Davis and Harry remained unshaken.
That’s all there is to the story. The police presumably told the Brooklyn lady not to write any more letters and may even have advised her against taking soap opera so seriously. The reaction of the Brooklyn addict to a visitation from the cops remains unknown. Does she still listen to “When a Girl Marries"? What went through her mind when she discovered that Harry and Irma and Steve were people of fancy, not fact? Was she outraged at this betrayal of her implicit trust and, if so, has she found anything to take its place? Or, to put it more plainly, are there any other anodynes so satisfying and undemanding as soap opera for credulous ladies from Brooklyn?
The spy psychiatrists will have to take it up from there. This column is out of its depth.

TV Firsts

Ah, TV trivia! Where would we be without it?

Perhaps the first concerted effort to keep track of TV trivia in the modern age (1948 and later) was on page 39 of Weekly Variety of July 26, 1950. The cockeyed information caught the eye of syndicated columnist John Crosby, who took it easy in his August 1st newspaper piece and simply summarised what he read in Variety. That may have been a first, too.

One of the things mentioned in the Variety column that the writer felt would make a nice surprise in a refrigerator commercial would be “Ed Sullivan frozen in a block of ice.” I couldn’t help but think of the 1961 Paramount cartoon “Cool Cat Blues,” featuring an ersatz Sullivan frozen in a block of ice. Did the great Irv Spector, who wrote the cartoon, see the Variety piece and file it in the back of his head for future use?

Alas, the frozen Sullivan (how would anyone know he wasn’t?) suggestion didn’t make the cut in Crosby’s column. Neither did something Variety recorded that was on television at the time—the TV camera that drank a glass of Schaefer beer between innings of the Brooklyn Dodger games. I’d like to have seen that commercial.

Radio In Review
BY JOHN CROSBY
Variety Salutes Television
VARIETY'S current issue contains its annual salute to television, roughly 14 pages of complaints, criticisms, predictions and assorted laments about TV contributed by the deep thinkers of the R.C.A. building and Hollywood. I hurriedly skip over the large-scale observations, which are too sweeping for my small-scale intellect, and pass along to some of the more minute perceptions.
H. Allen Smith, for example, reports that he has watched 3,212 icebox doors open, only 3,210 of which were subsequently closed. Two were left standing open. Mr. Smith suggests that they get a little suspense into it. When a door swings, there should be some sort of surprise—a copperhead poised for the kill or Groucho Marx leering from behind a beer bottle.
THIS IS such a fine suggestion I'm afraid it will be adopted. Not the copperhead, though. There will be four bottles of beer there, singing that old folk song, "Piel's Light Beer of Broadway Fame" at you. Then a can of Hunt's Tomato Sauce, doing a soft-shoe dance in the deep-freeze unit, will tell you what it does to a flounder. The possibilities are endless.
Some one score years ago, George Bernard Shaw used to complain that about two-thirds of the average movie consisted of opening and bedroom doors. But the movies matured. The actors graduated from the boudoir and began opening and closing taxi doors, shouting "Follow that cab!" Now, we are in the icebox door age, but already there are rumblings of change. The automobile door is getting the play. ("Notice the easy finger-tip action, the vibromatic swing of this fine, all-steel hydro-active door, exclusive with the Blodgett.")
For my money, the best door-opener in the business is Miss Betty Furness, the Westinghouse Girl. When she opens a frigerator, she gets her whole body into it, not just her wrist. She's also the most polished oven-door opener now operating. Another year and she'll be ready for a Cadillac door.
ANOTHER Variety essayist, Hal Kanter, of Hollywood, scripted a little ode to television's unsung pioneers. Milton Berle, Mr. Kanter points out, is the first man—Hey Nonny, Nonny—to kiss his own hand in front of a television camera. Mr. Berle is also credited by Mr. Kanter with launching the "Check your brains and we'll start even" joke on TV, a notable first.

Ed Sullivan, says Mr. Kanter, blazed another trail when he showed the industry "you can entertain an audience at home by photographing audiences in a theatre. Mr. Kanter, a diligent historian, also salutes the first technician to walk in of a camera at the most dramatic moment of the play; the dress designer who designed the TV neckline, thus adding a new dimension to the industry; and the first English film, "Tiffin on the Thames," to be seen on TV. This picture, he pointed out, may be seen tonight on Channel 2, the following night on Channel 6 and twice on Sunday on Channel 11.
Another noted Hollywood scholar, Manny Mannheim, contributed easily the most exhaustive paper yet written on the subject of scratching and shaking on TV; (Mr. Mannheim first won renown with his searching study of cigarette choreography on TV.) Ken Murray, Mr. Manheim points out, is a top-of-the-head scratcher, an action that comes just before the straight line and just after Mr. Murray has flicked his cigar.
WHENEVER Ed Sullivan is momentarily at a loss, (Mr. Mannheim continues) he scratches his right eyebrow. Mr. Sullivan, he notes, is a switch scratcher. Equally adept with either right or left hand. Milton Berle is another eyebrow scratcher, but a delicate one, just a flick of the finger. Mr. Berle is also a back-of-the-neck man. Bob Hope,a television novice, seems to be troubled in the same areas as Mr. Berle--back of the neck and eyebrow, whereas Ed Wynn, the itchiest man on TV, is an all-over man. Close behind Mr. Wynn comes Abe Burrows, who scratches his forehead, top-of-the-head and back-of-the-neck.
As for handshakers, Berle, Mr. Mannheim notes, is the warmest host. He shakes hands both before and after the girl sings a song. Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Murray shake hands only afterward. They're all put in the shade, says Mr. M., by a Chicago m.c. who shakes hands before and after, pummels the guest in the intervals and occasionally kisses them.

TV Cliches

There’s a reason TV sitcoms of the ‘60s featured a wife who was a witch, a Martian crash-landing in suburbia, an astronaut with a genie and a car that had been someone’s mother. Everyone was tired of what had come before on TV and radio, over and over and over again.

I’m afraid I’m not a fan of most situation comedies from radio’s Golden Age. Plots are contrived. Characters don’t react the way anyone really would. There were exceptions, of course. The best shows manage to avoid or overcome those faults, generally through great acting and dialogue.

Critic John Crosby was no fan of radio’s (and, later, television’s) triteness and he apparently found a kindred soul in one of the industry’s writing fraternity. He summarised some all-too-familiar basic sitcom plots in his column of July 3, 1955.

Comedy Writers Deserve Spanking
By John Crosby
NEW YORK—I read in “Variety” that Lou Derman, a comedy writer, has told off his fellow comedy writers, and high time, “The lush days of comedy writing that began with radio and carried over into television are approaching their zenith—and why?” asks Derman plaintively.
And then goes on to answer his own question. “We deserve a spanking, the whole pack of us. We've allowed our shows to become unbearably dull, repetitious, predictable, wild and sloppy. We've ignored the public mood. A public that's tired of watching story in and story out about—
“Bringing the boss home to dinner and forgetting about the wife's birthday and getting into this disguise so husband won't recognize me and is my wife killing me for her insurance policy? And did he forget my anniversary? And the old boy friend and the girl friend and let's make him think he's going crazy and bringing the boss home to dinner.”
Well, of course, that's by no means all the situations. There's the other one—and how could Derman have forgotten it—about bringing the boss and the boss's biggest enemy home to dinner the same night and having to serve them in separate rooms, husband and wife dashing back and forth, eating like crazy.
Or how about the guy who takes a potential customer to lunch, the potential customer being a very pretty girl, and pretty soon the news is all over Oakdale that Jim Hughes was seen with . . . Could we conceivably do without the matchmakers—the husband and wife who are trying to pair off old Uncle Jim and the widow next door who makes such good humpelfingers?
Or how about the wife who cracks up the car and is trying desperate stratagems to keep her husband from finding out. Or the husband who wants to go on a fishing trip with the boys and the wife decides she's going to go along this year. Or the guy next door who has bought his wife a mink coat and good old Jim hides it in his closet and then Jim's wife finds it and thinks Jim bought it for her and . . . . Or the wife who wants to learn how to play poker and wins all the money.
Or the father playing baseball with his son and he breaks the neighbor's window and runs like a thief. Or the teenage girl who wears mother's diamond clip to the school prom and loses it and . . . . Or 13 year old Johnny whose superior intelligence bails his father out of that mess at the country club. Or the idiotic secretary who by sheer imbecility traps the most dangerous bank robber in the whole world.
Or ... well, that's enough. Anyway they are going to be tough to get away from those old situations. The decline in comedy writing or, at least, its sameness, has driven NBC to attempt a nationwide search for new comedy writers. More than 1,000 aspiring young comedy writers leaped to the call and submitted comedy material. At least 30 writers were considered to be promising enough to have been asked for additional material.
If they unearth one Robert Benchley, NBC will have done very well. Maybe even that is asking too much. If they could unearth just one situation comedy format in which the husband and wife don't even know the people next door and have no intention of meeting them, it will have been worth while.

By the ‘60s, producers got the idea that if you start with an outrageously ridiculous premise, like seven castaways with endless amounts of clothes on a desert island, the audience will accept any kind of plot and characterisation, if the writing is clever. That attitude brought some of the best-loved TV of a couple of generations ago.

A Portrait of Fred Allen

When Fred Allen died on March 17, 1956, there was a great outpouring of respect for his work—and a few attempts to tell the story of the “real” Fred Allen.

Allen didn’t have the reputation as a warm man. He wasn’t someone audiences could really identify with like Jack Benny, or, rather, the character on radio Benny played. People tuned in to Allen to hear him turn a phrase or stick it to deserving targets, like politicians and radio management.

Radio columnist John Crosby was a great admirer of Allen’s, perhaps they both hated the triteness, phoniness and incompetence of the radio industry, both on and off the air. Both were based in New York. Crosby interviewed Allen a number of times and got to know him pretty well. Here’s his tribute to Fred Allen, the person, in his column of March 21, 1956.

Tribute Paid To Kindness of Fred Allen
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, March 21-- Under a dour exterior, Fred Allen was the kindliest man imaginable. Swarms of out-of-work actors descended on him regularly for handouts which were never refused. There was one actor who put the bite on him every Sunday after church. One Sunday the guy didn't show up and Fred got so worried he went looking for him.
The radio feud between Jack Benny and Fred Allen was legendary, but actually the two men were close friends and their admiration for each other was boundless. But this didn't prevent them from heckling each other unmercifully on stage. Once Benny was appearing on the Paramount stage and Allen sat in the front row and hurled one witty insult after Another at his old friend. After one quip, Benny, non-plussed, waved a $20 bill at the audience and offered it to anyone who could top Allen's last gag. Instantly Allen was on his feet, topped his own gag with a better one, and walked up and claimed the $20.
Fred was a wit's wit. There is not a humorist alive who did not admire him extravagantly, but none imitated him because they couldn't. His was a wonderfully original and well-stocked mind and he had the gift of bringing two frightfully irrelevant things into the same sentence. It was the humor of the ludicrous and a very penetrating wit it was but it does not reproduce well.
His humor was very much of the moment. I remember having lunch with Fred once just after the first atom bomb had gone off at Bikini and had proved to be a bit of a dud. I asked him if he'd heard the broadcast and he said, "Yes, nothing disappeared but the OPA." Well, the OPA had gone out of existence that weekend and it was a very funny remark then, but it doesn't make much sense today. I bring it up only as an example of the way Fred could take two totally unrelated subjects and combine them into one fast quip.
Even his prose style defied imitation. He had a horror of cliche and every sentence that came from his lips hid a newly minted freshness that was unique, even among very literate men. To him, even "hello" or any other ordinary salutation was a cliche and he avoided any form of routine greeting. He'd greet you, on say, a hot day with: "It's so hot out I could take my skin off and sit around in my bones."
In his early days he billed himself as the world's worst juggler and he just about was. He'd keep dropping the Indian clubs and to cover his confusion he'd make wisecracks that would convulse the audience. Actually, Fred was the last of three great American humorists who started the same way. The other two were W. C. Fields, who was a little better juggler than Fred but still no world beater, and Will Rogers, whose rope act was pretty fair, but not much better than that. All used wisecracks to cover their inadequacies with the props and grew into national institutions.
Fred's death came as a particularly terrible shock to me because he took such very good care of his health. He didn't drink or smoke and his diet was of such austerity that rabbit would find it dull. In fact I always thought he'd live to be 103. He had high blood pressure and he had consulted so many doctors and read so many books on the subject he knew more about it than they did.
Any sort of new medical fad would receive his most earnest attention. Once in Florida he stumbled on a cult that believed in fasting as a cure-all for everything. People subsisted on nothing but distilled water for weeks. Fred was fascinated by the project and its effect on the patients.
He was a very simple liver. For decades, although he was a millionaire, he lived in a little apartment on West 38th St. He used to eat lunch every day at the corner drugstore. He never owned a car and never learned to drive. It wasn't parsimony; it simply that luxury didn't mean anything to him. He never got away from the common people and he had a wide acquaintanceship in his little neighborhood with delicatessen store proprietors and local cops.
His kindliness was fabulous. Once a delicatessen store proprietor, a friend of his, lost his liquor license because gamblers had been hanging out there. Fred bought the place, got a liquor license in his own name and turned it over to his friend to run. At the time of his death he was working on his autobiography and he kept looking up old friends of his vaudeville days for material. Every time he found one of these old chums, most of them down on their luck, it cost him the price of a new suit. He loathed sham of any sort and he considered the broadcasting industry, which made him famous, full of it. He always regarded network executives as overgrown office-boys and he was incessantly battling them.
"If the United States can get along with one vice-president, I don't know why NBC needs 26," he once said. Among his other pet dislikes were Hollywood and Southern California. "It's a nice climate," he remarked of California, "if you're on orange."
He also took a dim view of agents and he once remarked of his agent: "he gets 10 per cent of everything I get except my blinding headaches." Years ago Fred was a pretty good drinker, averaging a bottle a day. The day prohibition was repealed he stopped drinking entirely, claiming that he'd drunk so much poison that the good stuff would probably kill him.
The end was sudden. As John Huston remarked after the death of his death: "He was too good a man to be sick. When the time came, he just died."

NBC took a bit of time for their own tribute to Allen. It came on the hour-long sustaining programme “Biography in Sound.” It was first broadcast on May 29th then rebroadcast on December 18th. You can hear the later broadcast by clicking on the arrow. It was written by Earl Hamner, who later created “The Waltons.” I believe the staff announcer giving the ID at the end is Mel Brandt.

Gagging on Gags

Imagine one week you’re starring on your own show, and the next week you’re a supporting player on a show that’s taken your time-slot and sponsor. That’s what Louise Erickson had to endure.

It was no surprise, though. Billboard announced in its August 21, 1948 issue that Tums had purchased Alan Young to replace Erickson’s “A Date With Judy.” Judy’s contract ran until January 4, 1949. On January 11th, the Young show made its debut on NBC, costing $8,500 to produce, compared to $4,700 for “Judy.”

In a way, it wasn’t a debut. It was another in a series of shows featuring Young as a clutzy, eager young man with a girl-friend hinting at romance one minute and exasperated at his antics the next. Erickson joined Doris Singleton and Jean Gillespie on the list of actresses playing his suitors. It was a concept that was neither new to Young, nor to radio. Young was already busy. He was co-hosting a variety show with Jimmy Durante, having walked from “The Texaco Star Theatre” in March for not giving him enough air time. And he found time to get married to singer Virginia McCurdy in Tijuana during the run of the show.

How long Erickson stayed on the show is buried in newspapers or radio columns I haven’t uncovered. Broadcasting of March 22nd reported she had rejoined the cast of “Meet Corliss Archer.” The New York Times radio listings for April 26th list Shirley Mitchell in Young’s cast instead of Erickson. “A Date With Judy” returned to the air in the fall on another network (initially without a sponsor). George O’Hanlon took over July 12th as Young’s summer replacement. But Young never returned. The Times’ TV listings grew slowly over the course of 1948 and 1949, with new stations and longer programming days, as well as expanded networks. That’s where the stars were going and that’s where Young went.

Newspaperdom’s best-known radio critic may have been John Crosby, and he got to the bottom of what was wrong with Young’s radio show, which was written by Dave Schwartz, Artie Stander and Joe Young (Bob Fisher joined the staff in March). The column appeared in papers beginning April 18th. You’ll note the sly reference to Don Wilson’s best-known sponsor of the day. Young’s competition, by the way, was “Mr. and Mrs. North” (CBS), “America’s Town Meeting” (ABC, simulcast on TV) and “Share the Wealth” (Mutual). He was the lead-in for Bob Hope.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK—The Alan Young show (NBC, 8:30 p.m. EST Tuesdays) is described in NBC press releases as situation and gag comedy, which is exactly what it is.
The situations aren't bad. The gags are awful. That doesn't mean necessarily that Young is batting .500. Some of his shows are almost all gags and his average sinks to .019. Others are almost all situation comedy in which case his batting average is more respectable.
Young plays the part of harassed, earnest, dewy-eyed young man, a sort of contemporary Harold Lloyd, who wants to be an actor and hasn't got anywhere. He has an agent named Ed Brady who steals his clothes and gambles all his money away on the horses. (The starting gate usually comes in ahead of Brady's horses.) He has a girl, Betty, who adores him but whose parents don't. She has a small, cynical brother who views his sister with the detachment of small, cynical brothers. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't, it? Well, it is.

The one original note in the Young show is struck by Jim Backus, who plays the part of Hubert Updike, the biggest snob in radio. Updike, a wealthy young man whose accent is a parody of Harvard's, gives away all his folding money because the creases spoil the pictures, and likes to stroll in his garden to give his flowers a chance to smell him. He has blue jaundice. (You can't get it in this country. He had to send abroad for it).
Over the years Updike has developed a number of other eccentricities. He had to sell his new Cadillac because the tune played by the horn fell to No. 3 on the Hit Parade. And once he knocked a pedestrian 250 feet and had him arrested for leaving the scene of an accident.
Backus, who plays this highly flavored young man, is easily one of the best stooges in the business. I just hope they don't make a featured comic of him. You have to take Updike in small doses.
I'm also rather fond of the young brother, a perceptive little brat. Once when Young was scheduled to leave town and wailed that this would remove him from the sight of his girl friend's beautiful face, this youngster informed him that her eye lashes came off, her red cheeks came off, her lips came off. "I can put it in a box and ship it to you," he said.
There are a couple of other stooges—Nicodemus [Stewart], a colored man who sounds like his name, and Mr. Beagle, a nasal New England type who sounds like all the other nasal New England types! Young, in fact, is in danger of being overwhelmed by his own stooges. He's a personable and likable young man, but in this show he has surrounded himself with so many spicy characters he is easily the dimmest member of the cast. As to those terrible gags, if you want don’t want to take my word for it, here are some samples:
“Gamble all my money in a plumber’s shop? Oh, I couldn’t. I’m no plunger.”
“What do you want to be an actor for? One day you’re making love to Betty Grable, the next day you’re a has-been.”
“Yeah, but look where you has been.”
That’s enough for everyone?
One last word. Tums, which used to have the world’s worst commercials, no longer has the world’s worst commercials. Tums has Don Wilson in there pitching now and Wilson’s mellow voice—so round, so firm, so fully packed—is probably the only one in existence which can take the curse off all that chatter about acid indigestion.

Both Updike and Young went onto better things. Young won two Emmys for his early TV show, but later gained fame co-starring for six seasons with Mr. Ed and had a fine cartoon voice acting career. Updike was given a new name by a chap named Sherwood Schwartz and placed on an island with six other stranded castaways. And there he remains in endless reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” to this day.

Kinescopes Aren't Wynn-derful

Technology has supposed to have come far even within the last few years but, in some ways, it hasn’t. Just go to any video sharing site on the internet and you’ll find someone who taken their cell phone, pointed it at their TV monitor and recorded something. They used to do that in the 1940s, too. Except they used something called a kinescope.

Without getting into an involved history, Eastman Kodak came up with an invention in September 1947 to record images from a TV screen. There was no coast-to-coast circuit then and no videotape. Until both were developed in the ‘50s, any TV show that had been performed live and was re-broadcast was recorded on a kinescope. Network TV began in New York, meaning many shows were kinescoped there and shipped to stations in Los Angeles and elsewhere. For the record, the first show kinescoped in Los Angeles and shipped to New York was Ed Wynn’s CBS variety show. It was aired on kinescope on 14 stations in the east two weeks after the live broadcast on KTTV (still a CBS station at the time).

Wynn had seemingly been around forever when he landed on television; his first monster hit in vaudeville was “The Ziegfeld Follies of 1914.” He was hugely successful on radio in the early ‘30s and was so widely listened to, he begat legions of Ed Wynn imitators (Howie Morris was doing a Wynn-type voice in commercials as Mayor McCheese four decades later). The early TV industry liked Wynn; he won an Emmy in 1949. But his show wasn’t a hit. It changed sponsors from Speidel to Camels before the year was up and moved to a new time slot. The quality of the kinescope was blamed for the failure; Billboard reported viewers in the Midwest complained about the lousy picture. Wynn moved to NBC the following season.

Everyone’s favourite acidic radio critic, John Crosby of the New York Herald-Tribune, took a look at Wynn’s show soon after it signed on. He was kind to Wynn, whose routines must have been corny even when this review first appeared on October 25, 1949. Crosby was not so kind to Eastman Kodak’s recording device.

Radio In Review
By JOHN CROSBY
Perfect Foot, Imperfect Kinescope
Kinescope, or television recording, the process of filming a television show off the receiving tube, is almost never put on the air in New York where there are more live shows than sometimes seems necessary. Therefore, the arrival of the Ed Wynn show, the first kinescope entrant from the West Coast, was awaited with bated breath. Well, we all can unbate our breath now. Kinescope, to put it mildly, needs work.
On your home television screen, kinescope resembles a particularly decrepit Western or one of the old, old silents. But it’s not silent. The Wynn show, at least, is all-singing, all-talking, all-dancing, as they used to say of pictures back in 1928 when sound was new. There are only two shades on the Wynn show—black and white. There’s nothing in between. Also the film jerks unexpectedly in spots. Or else Ed Wynn has arthritis.
AT STAKE here is something much larger than the Wynn show itself which we'll get to in a minute. A lot of people, who are fastened by golden strands to Hollywood and pictures, would like to get into television via kinescope. Kinescope, if it ever gets any better than this, will mean that any city with a television station can enjoy first-rate shows, coaxial cable or no coaxial cable. It’ll mean that Hollywood with its hordes of entertainers and magnificent technical equipment can become capital of the television world as it is capital of films and radio. On the basis of the Wynn show, that day is pretty far away.
APART FROM its technical limitations, the show is as pleasant a half hour as you’ll find in television. It's nice to have Mr. Wynn’s extraordinarily disheveled profile, manic eyes, quavering voice and boneless, expressive hands in full view again. So many people have been helping themselves to Wynn’s material in recent years that he appears at times to be imitating himself. However, I'm happy to report that Wynn seems more at home with his own material than any of the other comedians.
His show is a remarkably unpretentions affair, consisting largely of Mr. Wynn. He tells those foolish stories, crackling with puns; he ogles the pretty girls; he drifts around aimlessly in his clownish hat.
While it doesn’t produce the boffolas of the Berle show, you’ll find it a good deal more restful and, in the long run, it may wear better.

LIKE THE WYNN shows of old this one abounds in sight gags. A man asks for a long-playing record and Wynn rolls out something the size of a wagon wheel.
“It ought to play about a month,” he explains.
Wynn gets tangled up in a phone booth, a comic bit too intricate to reduce to English. He confides to the audience that he is appearing this evening through the carelessness of his sponsor and that television, like crime, does not pay.
A lone guest star lurks about the premises every week. One of them was Carmen Miranda, whose exuberant countenance I find hardly credible even under the rest of circumstances. On kinescope, Miss Miranda looked as if she had just been disinterred.
ANOTHER GUEST was Mel Torme, the velvet fog, who came off somewhat better. Torme’s personality, incidentally, appears to have been completely redecorated in Hollywood.
When he left New York, he was a gangling youth, resembling an adolescent bullfrog. On television he was a poised, attractive kid and, most surprisingly, his face seems to have been redesigned from chin to hairline. Perhaps he just grew into it.
The Wynn show as a whole probably will please the old Wynn addicts, but I doubt it’ll create any new ones. Mr. Wynn is stacking the cards against him by appearing on kinescope.
I can’t quite understand why, either. Of all the entertainers in Hollywood, he is probably the most footloose and he easily could have come to New York and done the show live.

Television changed during the ‘50s. Variety was out. Wynn made the switch, too, faltering after 16 episodes of “The Ed Wynn Show” where he played a wily widower raising two granddaughters in a show that was part drama, part light comedy. But anyone who thought Wynn was just a giggling baggy-pants comic was truly mistaken. Wynn may even have shocked himself with his fine dramatic performance in “Requiem For a Heavyweight” on “Playhouse 90,” which led to his Oscar-nominated role in “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1958).

Wynn died of cancer in 1966. The kinescope died before that. Wynn’s death was mourned. The kinescope’s may not have been but perhaps it should be. The kinescope captured and preserved many television broadcasts we, today, would never have had the chance of viewing. Including Ed Wynn’s.