Each episode began and ended in trouble, wrote Erik Barnouw. Sunny stretches were in the middle. A Friday ending was expected to be especially gripping, to hold interest over the weekend. A serial was...
Dr. Kildare was about battles with silly hospital administrators, conflicts with ignorant patients, medical dilemmas building to personal crises. Sometimes it seemed that Blair was peopled with eccent...
DR. KILDARE, medical drama, also known as The Story of Dr. Kildare, based on the Metro Goldwyn Mayer films.
Contestants were selected from the studio audience. By answering an initial question, a contestant won three darts, which he threw at the Dr. Pepper dartboard. The board was ten feet high and containe...
Chandu the Magician was among the first and last shows of its kind, in two distinct runs separated by 12 years of silence. Partners Raymond R. Morgan and Harry A. Earnshaw were brainstorming in 1931,...
Cavalcade was a show with a dual purpose. On the surface its job was to sell America by dramatizing the positive aspects of the nation’s history. But its real purpose was to stem the tide of criticism...
Cantor’s 60-minute C&S shows were largely carried by himself, Wallington, and violinist Dave Rubinoff, with occasional guests. Rubinoff supposedly led the orchestra. It was typical early ’30s variety:...
CAST: Gertrude Berg as Bessie Glass, operator of a hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Joseph Greenwald (1935) as Barney Glass, her husband. Josef Buloff as Barney, 1953–54. WRITER: Gertrude Berg. House...
By 1932 he was a vaudeville headliner. He was on Broadway as part of Earl Carroll’s Vanities when newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan invited him to appear on a radio interview and gossip show. At the tim...
But the original concept died with the demise of those quarterhour vignettes in 1945. Seldom thereafter would Berg venture into the ghetto. It’s hard, darling, she told a Newsweek reporter with the ad...
But Grigsby had encountered stiff competition from RCA, which claimed to hold patents on radio tubes essential to the manufacture of modern radio equipment. Grigsby thus had to pay royalties to its st...
But Dragnet evolved slowly. Webb pondered the idea he had received from Marty Wynn and developed it for more than a year. Realism should be the show’s hallmark: the stories should be authentic to the...
Burns continued to work, doing a routine with Carol Channing that was short-lived. For a time it seemed that the old sentiment was to be proved true: that Burns without Gracie was a stale act indeed....
Burns and Allen household names—Gracie’s search for her lost brother. Whose idea was it? In The Big Broadcast, Frank Buxton and Bill Owen credit Bob Taplinger, head of publicity at CBS. Carroll though...
Blanc went on to speaking parts, playing a wide variety of sardonic and hysterical characters. He played caustic delivery men and punchdrunk fight trainers. As Benny’s beleaguered French violin teache...
Best known as Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz (and as the wife of Ziegfeld), Billie Burke had a rosy, upbeat series promoting herself as that bright morning star. She portrayed a woman of u...
Benny died at 80 on Dec. 26, 1974. He was followed in death by the others: Eddie Rochester Anderson, Feb. 28, 1977; Don Wilson, April 25, 1982; Mary Livingstone, June 30, 1983; Dennis Day, June 28, 19...
Benny asked his wife to play the part, and Sadye Marks became Mary Livingstone. She discovered mike fright, a malady that never really left her. She had never been unusually nervous in vaudeville, but...
An article the following week charged that one amateur had been cruelly set up for national ridicule. Barely had his song begun when Bowes gave him the gong. The audience roared with laughter: the maj...
An advocacy group, the Cinnamon Bear Brigade, operates in Portland, Ore., and claims 400 members nationwide. The outstanding cast was identified by Frank Nelson, with additional names supplied by SPER...