@Applewood @EasyAce
I want to thank you both for your comments about Godfrey,his show,and his history. You guys make me feel like a teenybopper compared to you. About all I remember about Arthur Godfrey is he played a ukulele (I THINK),and didn't even seem to do that very well.
@sneakypete Godfrey did indeed "play" the ukulele. Compared to him, Tiny Tim was the Wes Montgomery of uke players.
I have no reason to doubt either of your memories of tv back then,but it seems impossible to me that anybody was a threat,or even a competitor to Ed Sullivan back then. My memory is no doubt MUCH worse than yours for that period of time,but the way *I* remember it,"The Ed Sullivan Show" OWNED Sunday night teebee. I am sure he had competitors for his time slot,but I honestly have no idea who they were,and I truly feel sorry for them.
Sullivan took some time to become the Sunday night powerhouse he was. When his show debuted as
Toast of the Town in 1948, he was so stiff on camera that wags nicknamed the show
Toast of the Tomb.
Godfrey was hugely popular on radio in the 1940s and early 1950s and likewise on television when he made the transition himself in the late 1940s. He wasn't a Sunday entry, though:
Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts aired on Monday nights;
Arthur Godfrey and His Friends was his weekday morning radio show which went to television on Fridays, if I'm not mistaken. He was no threat to Ed Sullivan no matter how popular he was.
What makes this so strange looking back is that Sullivan seems to have zero talent of his own. Maybe because of this he had the good sense to just walk out on stage,welcome the audience,and introduce the acts before getting the hell out of the way.
What Sullivan had that set him apart was two things: 1) What you just said; and, 2) the man was an incomparable judge of entertainment. Not to mention that he had a knack for aligning the acts who came on his show in unusual ways, if you remember that a performance of classical music was liable to be followed almost immediately by an animal act, that sort of thing.
He also had a sense of humour about himself and let it onto his show---he was so well aware of what an awkward putz he looked on the air that he thought nothing of booking comedians who impersonated him on his own stage!
He sure as hell didn't have any charisma,either. I have no idea how he came to own maybe the biggest live entertainment show on television back then.
Sullivan was a longtime entertainment newspaper columnist and radio presence before CBS had the bright idea to bring him to television. Maybe the best single line summary of Sullivan's staying power came from the comedian Alan King:
Ed Sullivan will last as long as someone else has talent.Actually, Sullivan lasted until his
rilly big shoes became too expensive to produce anymore, in 1974.
One of the bigger things about Sullivan---he let his performers do their thing live on the stage, rather than making them lip-synch to recordings. Practically every music star who either became stars with a gig on the Sullivan show or saw their stardom skyrocket with an appearance played it live, from the jazz and classical people to the rockers such as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Sam Cooke, the Beatles (the no-questions asked most successful of the numerous acts Sullivan brought aboard from abroad), the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five (Sullivan was especially attuned to the British Invasion after having bumped into the Beatles' popularity in England while going through an airport and promptly booking them for their world-changing February 1964 appearances), Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and more.
One thing about the Sullivan show that stands out in my mind is that he seems to have been the only major player on television back then that didn't hesitate to have black entertainers on his show. You HAVE to applaud both him,CBS,and his sponsors for having that kind of courage and sticking to it. I remember Louis Armstrong especially as being a regular guest star.
Sullivan was unapologetic about bringing black and other ethnic talent aboard his show. Armstrong was a frequent guest star; Sullivan also booked such black entertainers as the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll, the Supremes, the Temptations, James Brown, and Sarah Vaughan. He did so despite protests from the deeper South that included newspaper editorials urging people to boycott the Sullivan show. Sullivan's popularity was big enough to allow him, essentially, to tell them go screw---even when they included his one-time sponsor Ford after the automaker threatened to block his show from being aired in the South.
Oh,and we HAVE to give shout-outs to The Red Skelton Show as well as Groucho Marx and "You bet your life". I doubt either would have any trouble being hit shows even today. Red Skelton would "dance close to the edge of 50's moral acceptability,but Groucho must have made the set censors suicidal.
Red Skelton was an odd duck. A no-questions-asked gifted clown but often caught behaving off the air like a spoiled child who couldn't bring himself to credit anyone else for his success---especially the writers who either helped create some of his famous characters or created them outright for him.
He, too, came to television from radio, and therein lies a tale: For a long time in the 1940s, tickets for Skelton's radio shows were coveted not for the show itself . . . but for Skelton's after-show performances. The man got himself
so wired up performing live on the air that he kept it up after the show ended each week just to cool himself down little by little, and went into such an almost anarchic few more rounds before finally cooling that the Skelton after-show was considered one of the hottest tickets in town. If you copped tickets for a Skelton show you were considered as lucky as if you'd scored tickets for the radio shows of Jack Benny, Fred Allen,
Fibber McGee & Molly, and CBS's longtime Monday night powerhouse
Lux Radio Theater.
(The same phenomenon attached to
The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show in reverse: fans hoped to score tickets to be able to hear Phil Harris's monologues
before the show went on the air every Sunday night from 1946---when they became the breakout stars of the formerly variety show
The Fitch Bandwagon---until the show ended in 1954.)
Make the censors suicidal? Groucho would probably have made them want to kill each other as acts of mercy! Now, here's something I bet you didn't know survived---the lone surviving complete episode of a radio comedy Groucho and Chico Marx did in the early 1930s,
Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, Attorneys at Law, an episode called "
The Ocean Cruise." (If you have to ask why Harpo wasn't there . . . )
The show itself didn't survive for us beyond that episode and a couple of extracts from earlier episodes, but the scripts did: they were published as
Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel: The Marx Brothers' Lost Radio Show, edited by Michael Barson, in 1988. This was the original cover:
You guessed it: I'm an old-time radio nut. I have as large a collection of old-time radio shows (you'd be amazed how many survived from how many series!) as I have a music library---I have over 16,000 old-time radio shows on an external hard drive tied to my computer, not to mention a small truckload of books about the era. Including the aforesaid
Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel plus, among others . . .
Goodman Ace,
Ladies and Gentlemen---Easy Aces.
Fred Allen,
Treadmill to Oblivion (about his radio years) and his memoir
Much Ado About Me. (The memoir was published 7/8ths finished---Allen died of a heart attack in 1956, before he could finish the book.)
R. LeRoy Bannerman,
On a Note of Triumph. (A biography of old-time radio's arguably greatest dramatist, the writer/director Norman Corwin; the title comes from the radio special Corwin wrote and delivered after V-E Day in 1945.)
Abe Burrows,
Honest Abe. (Burrows co-created
Duffy's Tavern and was involved in several other radio shows including his own, briefly, before he became a fabled playwright, humourist, and maybe Broadway's number-one script doctor.)
Mickey Cohen,
How Fibber McGee & Molly Won World War II (A delightful review of the show's particular wartime-theme episodes.)
Jim Cox,
Frank and Anne Hummert's Radio Factory. (The story of the couple who dominated radio soap opera making.)
John Crosby,
Out of the Blue. (An anthology of Crosby's radio and television criticism for
The New York Times.)
John Dunning,
On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. (Just what it says, with as full entries as possible for a few hundred shows.)
Elizabeth McLeod,
The Original Amos 'n' Andy. (She debunks completely the accusations of racism attached to the show and argues that, in fact, the show and its two performers were as popular among black listeners as white listeners---because they presented blacks not as caricatures but as living, breathing men struggling to make a business work and to make life work like anyone else.)
Henry Morgan,
Here's Morgan. (The memoir of the man who was probably the edgiest radio comedian of his time.
His radio show is still a blast to listen to, incidentally. His signature sign-on: "Good evening, anybody, here's Morgan." His signature sign-off: "Morgan'll be back on the same corner in front of the cigar store next week.")
Gerald Nachman,
Raised on Radio. (An excellent history of network radio.)
Jim Ramsburg,
Network Radio Ratings 1932-1953. (Covers the spread from when radio ratings began being taken until the last year radio ratings were taken in hand with the growing television world, complete with brief sketches of particular shows trending, rising, falling, or doing unusual or controversial things.)
James Thurber,
The Beast in Me. (I include this because this anthology includes his remarkable four-part
New Yorker series on the radio soaps, including copuous space given to one of the Hummerts' most prolific soap writers, Charles Robert Hardy Andrews.)
Jordan R. Young,
The Laugh Crafters. (Interviews with some of old-time radio comedy's best writers, including several who worked for people like Jack Benny,
Duffy's Tavern, Fred Allen, and Red Skelton.)
