FRED ALLEN WON HIS $5,000 BET THAT "STOP THE MUSIC!" WOUDN'T CALL.
Did Stop The Music Stop Allen?
The 1948-49 Season
17th In A Series
What, We Worry? Network Radio opened the 1948-49 season flush with the sense of renewed popularity and its 14th consecutive year of record high earnings. The percentage of total stations affiliated with the networks had plunged from 97% to 68%. But the drop was easily attributed to the postwar surge of new AM stations the air - 559 in 1948 alone, bringing their total to 1,621. The networks, limited to just one affiliate per city, added 76 of the newcomers to their flocks that grew to 1,104.
Almost unnoticed was the growth of FM radio which had leaped 215% from 150 to 473. But the importance of FM was still a thing of the distant future. Of greater concern to radio’s immediate future was the rapid growth of television.
By December, 1948, another 33 television stations had begun operations with 50 more under construction. New television stations attracted new viewers and TV penetration grew faster than 10,000 new homes per month in 1948. Momentum for set ownership snowballed to avalanche proportions in early 1949 and a million households were soon in sight. It was still less than three percent of the radio homes, but television was the new nightly center of family gatherings and neighborhood parties. By coincidence - or perhaps not - the Top 50 Network Radio programs’ average audience dropped by over a million homes during the season.
Merlin Aylesworth, NBC’s founding president from 1926-1932, predicted in the spring that television would wipe out radio as America knew it within three years. He wasn’t far off the mark. (See Dr. DuMont’s Predictions.)
Paley's Piece of The Rock. In the four seasons since Bill Paley’s return from World War II with his vow to take CBS to the top of the ratings, the network had averaged a scant 18 shows in the annual Top 50. Paley had America’s most popular program in Lux Radio Theater and there were encouraging signs from the CBS stable of home grown shows - most notably Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, My Friend Irma and The Adventures of Sam Spade. (See CBS Packages Unwrapped.) But NBC’s comedy stars continued to dominate the Top Ten year after year.
Paley’s network lacked the power and prestige of radio’s biggest names. He determined to get them for CBS - and with an eye to the future, lock them up for CBS-TV which required huge amounts of capital to compete with NBC. To accomplish the job he bor-rowed $5.0 Million from Prudential Insurance.
His first target was the resurgent Amos & Andy - which had scrambled back into the annual Top Ten since its conversion to an NBC half hour sitcom in 1943. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll owned their program and its characters. Paley convinced them to sell their property to CBS for $2.0 Million in September. Their windfall from the sale was subject to a capital gains tax of 25% instead of an income tax that could soar close to 80%.
Then CBS captured the team’s NBC sponsor - Lever Brothers’ Rinso laundry soap - and paid Gosden and Correll an additional fee as “technical advisors” to their own program. It was a win-win situation for A&A and CBS. The only losers were NBC and the IRS.
When You Diss Upon A Star... With Amos & Andy back in his fold, Bill Paley landed an even bigger prize for CBS - his friend Jack Benny. Accountants and attorneys for network and the comedian floated another capital gains deal similar to the Amos & Andy coup, but the IRS refused the idea. It ruled that Amos & Andy were fictional characters and the program was indeed a property that could conceivably exist without Gosden and Correll. (1). Benny was different - he was an actual person and without him, his program was worthless.
Benny’s move to CBS appeared costly to the comedian. As 60% owner of his program’s production company, Benny’s personal tax liability after signing with Paley was just over $1.0 Million - more than three times the amount that a capital gains deal would have been. Although the sum was undoubtedly covered by CBS, Benny jumped networks for personal reasons.
Unlike CBS chief Paley who displayed true interest in Benny‘s welfare, NBC’s David Sarnoff refused to meet with his star of over a decade in an attempt to keep him in the fold. Instead, Sarnoff assigned an RCA staff lawyer to negotiate with Benny - a former federal prosecutor against whom Benny had a rare personal grudge stemming back to an overblown jewelry smuggling charge in the 1930's. Sarnoff’s thoughtless insults pushed Benny to CBS. (See Sunday At Seven.)
Jack Benny was highly respected in the entertainment community. With his endorsement, the personable Paley lured Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton and Burns & Allen from NBC plus Bing Crosby and Groucho Marx from ABC for his 1949-50 schedule. Paley’s loan from Prudential was paid off promptly while Sarnoff’s insensitive blunder with Benny eventually cost NBC millions of dollars in radio and television revenue.
A Revolutionary Battleground. Sarnoff and Paley took their battle into the phonograph and recording industries when Columbia Records introduced the 33 1/3 revolutions-per- minute, microgroove “Long Playing” disc on June 21, 1948. CBS had offered to share the technology with RCA, but Sarnoff rejected the idea. Instead, RCA came out with its own 45 r.p.m. system seven months later. The battle of systems went on for several years until the record buying public decided the issue, preferring the seven inch, 45's for singles and the twelve inch, 33 1/3 discs for albums That forced both companies to share their technologies. The bulky 78 r.p.m. records that had been popular for decades were on their way out and sales of phonographs employing the new slower playing records boomed.
The Federal Party Pooper. The FCC complained in August, 1948, that Network Radio schedules contained 40 quiz and giveaway programs that awarded over $160,000 in prizes, every month. Particular targets of the complaint were ABC’s Stop The Music! and Truth Or Consequences on NBC. It went conveniently unmentioned by the FCC that the Truth Or Consequences promotions also raised over $3.0 Million for charities.
The commission floated a broad reinterpretation of the 1934 anti-lottery statutes which it directed at giveaway and quiz shows. The bureaucrats proposed to outlaw any effort on the part of listeners as a requirement to win a radio contest. - writing a letter, answering the telephone or even listening to a specific program. Although there were wide loopholes in the edict, ABC, CBS and NBC prepared to file injunctions against it. The giveaways continued as the argument continued during a year of hearings.
Only Mutual complied immediately, piously observing that giveaway programs, “Were not healthy for radio.” That said, Mutual cancelled its only prime time giveaway show, Three For The Money, which had been unable to attract a sponsor for three months and was thus deemed, “Not healthy for radio”.
TV Freezes & Expands. Television’s growth was stalled in September when the FCC “froze” all pending television station applications while it considered ways to alter its 1945 rules regarding channel usage and TV signal separation distances between cities. The freeze, originally projected at 90 days, lasted for four years.
But the freeze didn’t effect television stations already established or under construction. By early 1949, new stations were coming on the air at the rate of one every week. Mean-while, AT&T officially opened coaxial cable networking from the east coast to the Midwest in January, 1949. The video chains were linked as far west as St. Louis and live network programming became available to most of the country’s largest markets.
Television Wrestles With Programming. ABC and CBS began regularly scheduled television programming in 1948, joining the year old NBC and DuMont networks. All four were wrestling with their program schedules - or boxing with them, depending on the night. NBC televised boxing on Monday and Friday nights, wrestling on Tuesday. Both CBS and DuMont scheduled boxing against ABC’s wrestling shows on Wednesday. Combined, the four networks logged eight boxing or wresting shows a week in the prime time 10 o’clock hour. It was this kind of programming that prompted Fred Allen to quip, “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”
Nevertheless, boxers and wrestlers provided the networks with cheaply produced “reality” programming while network and agency producers scrambled for ideas to create programs likely to attract audience interest and advertising investment.
Look, Don’t Listen. For a decade the networks had taken radio income in huge chunks to finance television’s technological development. Now they looked to radio to provide television with programming content beyond the “saloon” appeal of boxing, wrestling, baseball and Roller Derby. The networks’ cannibalization of radio programming to feed television began with just a few nibbles.
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts was the sudden new radio hit for CBS a year earlier, finishing in the season’s Top Ten. It was a simple studio show with a small audience that could easily be covered with just two or three cameras. CBS-TV began simulcasting Talent Scouts on December 6th - replacing Roller Derby. The radio version of Godfrey’s show lost almost ten percent of its previous season’s rating in the process, but the maneuver gave CBS and sponsor Lipton Tea a solid foothold in the new medium. (See Arthur Godfrey and Monday’s All Time Top Ten)
Then CBS simulcast We The People on Tuesday night and its radio ratings slid 12.5%. ABC simulcast Break The Bank on Friday nights, losing 20% of its radio audience. The network’s long running public affairs feature, America’s Town Meeting was simulcast on Tuesday and lost 17%.
The pioneering but short-lived Dumont Television Network, (1946-56), produced only one program on Sunday nights, a video version of The Original Amateur Hour hosted by Ted Mack. (2) Simultaneous video of ABC Radio’s Friday Night Boxing, aka The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, had first appeared on NBC-TV a year earlier. NBC’s television network borrowed just one more program from radio in 1948-49 - Mutual’s Meet The Press, with co-creators Martha Roundtree and Lawrence Spivak. The program was first seen in November on Sunday nights at 8:30. (3)
NBC was slow to translate its own radio favorites to television. That would all change in a big way the following season when advertising executive Pat Weaver was appointed President of NBC Television. Regardless of the danger to Network Radio’s ratings, the adaptation of radio favorites to television inspired imitation - and lots of it.
Paley’s Lucky Bet. Bill Paley’s acquisition of Jack Benny for CBS didn’t mean that sponsor Lucky Strike would automatically follow its star to his familiar Sunday time period on a different network. So Paley guaranteed American Tobacco that Benny’s program on CBS would either match or better his NBC ratings - or CBS would refund $1,000 for every rating point that the show lost. Paley didn’t refund a penny.
Benny’s audience moved with him. The comedian’s October through December NBC ratings averaged 22.7 - his January through June average on CBS was 22.9 His defection to CBS gave the network its first Sunday night leader since 1935 when Eddie Cantor became the first major star to jump from NBC to CBS. The Lucky Strike Program starring Jack Benny was a CBS fixture at 7:00 for the next seven seasons. (See Lucky Gets Benny on this site.)
Benny Breaks A&A’s Fall Fall. Jack Benny gave CBS additional value as a lead-in for its Sunday programming. Amos & Andy premiered on CBS at 7:30 on October 10th, three months before Benny arrived with his show at 7:00. For those three months Gosden and Correll were stuck with Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch as their lead-in - a program that appealed primarily to juvenile fans of the cowboy hero. The veteran comedy duo lost 25% of their audience from the same three months on NBC the previous season. Amos & Andy lost their time period, too, lagging behind Phil Harris & Alice Faye’s sitcom which still had Benny as its lead-in on NBC.
The situation was reversed in January when Benny joined CBS and became Amos & Andy’s lead-in. Harris & Faye lost a whopping 42% of their audience on the month he left while Amos & Andy recovered for a third consecutive Top Ten season. (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten and Sunday’s All Time Top Ten.)
Welcome To The Clubbing. Horace Heidt joined a sadder-but-wiser group that included Eddie Cantor, Kate Smith and Gene Autry, plus detectives The Thin Man and Sherlock Holmes. Over the years all had been programmed against Jack Benny on Sundays at 7:00 and none had succeeded.
Heidt’s Youth Opportunity Program was doing nicely on NBC’s Sunday schedule at 10:30. Then the network convinced Heidt and his sponsor Philip Morris to move the show back to 7:00, vacated when Benny jumped to CBS in January. The result was an immediate 40% loss of audience against Benny’s show on CBS and a drop into single digit ratings for the next four months. The sponsor and its star cut their losses and moved the show back to 10:30 in late April then rectified their mistake to an even greater degree the following season. They joined Benny and moved to CBS’s Sunday schedule where Horace Heidt’s Youth Opportunity Program enjoyed three consecutive Top 50 seasons.
Stop’s Summertime Stats. By the beginning of the 1948-49 season, ABC‘s Stop The Music! had been on the air for six months and had awarded three jackpot prizes averaging nearly $20,000 in retail value, ($202,000 in today‘s money) The show continued to make news with its pyramiding piles of prizes which spurred accusations that it “bought” its audience and further emboldening the FCC to redefine prohibited lotteries to new dimen-sions. Stop The Music! remained on the air through the summer of 1948 to build a following and attract major sponsors for each of its four quarter-hour segments. Lorillard’s Old Gold Cigarettes bought two of the segments while Smith Brothers Cough Drops and Spiedel Watch Bands each sponsored one .
Prospects were even rosier for Stop The Music! when Edgar Bergen went on vacation in June and left his 8:00 timeslot on NBC to his summer replacement, the bland Robert Shaw Chorale. Regardless, CBS won the summertime 8:00 half hour with The Adventures of Sam Spade starring Howard Duff as producer William Spier’s wise-cracking version of Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective. Spade consistently won its time period in July, August and September with 7.5, 9.4 and 9.7 ratings against Stop The Music’s 5.9, 6.3 and 8.3. (See Stop The Music! and The Curse of Dashiell Hammett.)
Cowan Vs. Cowan. Ford and NBC brought in a summer replacement for the sophisticated humor of Fred Allen at 8:30 against Stop The Music! that can only be termed puzzling. RFD America was a simplistic quiz show that featured farmers as contestants. More puzzling was the fact that RFD America was created by Stop The Music’s producer, Louis Cowan. As a result, Cowan’s two shows were programmed opposite each other on competing networks. Against NBC’s rural quiz and actor Herbert Marshall’s espionage drama, The Man Called X on CBS, Stop The Music! easily won the 8:30 time period.
Bergen Beats The Band. The real Sunday night battle resumed in October when Edgar Bergen and Fred Allen returned after summer hiatus. Well publicized momentum appeared to be on Stop The Music’s side. But the half hour charts for the last quarter of 1948 tell a different story:
October November December
8:00 8:00 8:00
NBC Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 18.9 9.8 21.7
CBS Adventures of Sam Spade 15.6 15.8 18.4
ABC Stop The Music 11.6 12.2 13.0
8:30 8:30 8:30
NBC Fred Allen 17.5 18.6 20.0
ABC Stop The Music 15.2 17.2 17.1
CBS Cabin B-13 (Sustaining & Not Rated) NA NA NA
Despite Stop The Music’s also-ran ratings, ABC had every right to be delighted with its hour-long giveaway show that attracted headlines, listeners and advertising revenue. Then in late 1948, CBS Chairman Paley did a huge favor for Stop The Music! He hired Edgar Bergen away from NBC and broke up the Bergen-Allen ratings tandem in January, 1949. The ventriloquist left the air for the rest of the season before joining the CBS Sunday lineup at 8:00 ten months later.
Bergen’s long absence was the giveaway show‘s big break. Whether he was at NBC or CBS, the soft spoken Scandinavian and his popular alter egos consistently stopped. Stop The Music! in its tracks.
The Wit’s End. The same wasn’t true for Fred Allen in his fight against Stop The Music! NBC and Allen’s sponsor, Ford Motors, seemed to be at a loss when Bergen left in January. Instead of keeping Allen in his familiar timeslot of three and a half years and supporting him with a suitable lead-in that could attract respectable numbers, the network moved him into Bergen’s vacated half hour at 8:00 with disastrous consequences. Rating breakouts for the time period illustrate Allen’s decline:
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
ABC Stop The Music 16.3 16.8 17.6 14.6 9.8 8.8
CBS Adv of Sam Spade 10.7 12.5 11.3 9.5 10.1 8.3
NBC Fred Allen Show 11.7 11.3 9.4 8.9 9.5 5.8
Some reports claim that Allen welcomed the fight. Indeed, he did offer a tongue-in-cheek reward of $5,000 to any listeners who could prove that they missed a shot at Stop The Music’s jackpot by listening to his show. But by June and five straight months of third place finishes, Allen was discouraged, bitter and once again in ill-health. The 55 year old comedian abandoned his weekly series on June 26th, closing out a 17 year career in Network Radio.
Stop The Music’s 1948-49 full-hour ratings record was truly remarkable. It reflects an unmatched popularity growth in which the show added at least one rating point each month - over 376,000 homes per point - for six consecutive months from September through March, rising from an 11.3 to a 20.4. It was all downhill from there, but it was a great ride while it lasted for the ABC giveaway show that stopped Fred Allen - with strong assists from both CBS and NBC. .
Winchell Gets A Grand Deal. After a successful 16 year association, Jergens Lotion and Walter Winchell parted company in December, ending the longest sponsor-program relationship in prime time radio. The columnist - reported to be another target of the CBS talent raid - became radio’s first “Thousand Dollar A Minute” star when he signed a widely publicized 90 week, $1.35 Million contract with ABC which had sold his broadcasts to Kaiser-Frazer automobiles in December.
Winchell repaid his new sponsor's faith by tying with Jack Benny for Network Radio's most popular program in January, then taking the Number One slot by himself in February, March and June, giving ABC the greatest number of monthly wins that the network ever experienced. Winchell’s ratings rose 25% over the season but the automaker saw no results from his endorsements and dropped his Sunday broadcasts after 26 weeks. ABC was left with the problem of finding a sponsor - any sponsor - who would pick up the high-priced tab for its expensive and increasingly controversial star’s program. (See Walter Winchell,)
Hollywood Highs. Although Jergens pulled out of the high-priced Winchell broadcasts, it kept its sponsorship of Louella Parsons following Winchell at 9:15 p.m. ET. For the first time since her Hollywood Hotel days a decade earlier, Parsons returned to the season’s Top 50 with her film colony news and movie star interviews. Meanwhile, Jimmie Fidler continued his two quarter hour Sunday shows on ABC and Mutual. Parsons and Fidler combined to produce a aggregate total of 23.8 rating points on Sunday, evidence that the public was still hungry for Hollywood news and gossip in the postwar years before television drove movie attendance down.
ABC’s Steel Plate of Prestige. ABC had a record high nine programs in the season’s Top 50 - four of them were broadcast on Sunday. The network’s fourth winner followed its successful 90 minute block of Stop The Music!, Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons. It was a complete change of pace - the prestigious Theater Guild On The Air, aka The U. S. Steel Hour.
Unlike its Hollywood counterpart Lux Radio Theater which adapted familiar film stories and depended heavily on the box office appeal of its stars, Theater Guild On The Air adapted what its producers considered to be the finest plays of Broadway’s “legitimate” stage, featuring highly skilled, if not immensely popular actors. The program was introduced to the ABC Sunday schedule at 10:00 p.m. ET in 1945 and started slowly with single digit ratings for two seasons against radio favorites Take It Or Leave It, We The People and The Bickersons.
It was moved back 30 minutes in September, 1947, to take advantage of Winchell and Parsons’ lead-in and nearly doubled its audience. By the 1948-49 season it was an established hit for ABC, topping all competition in its time period. Unfortunately for ABC, its successful Sunday lineup was fragile. Theater Guild sponsor United States Steel moved the program to NBC the following season.
Monday Awash With Hits. CBS’s domination of Monday seemed like it would never end - and it never did as long as the Golden Age lasted. The network’s peak was 1948-49 when it won every time period from 7:00 until 11:00. Lever Brothers and CBS repeated with Monday’s Top Three programs packaged from 8:30 to 10:30 - Lux Radio Theater, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and My Friend Irma. The three were again in the season’s Top Ten and Lever again had five of the season’s Top Ten most popular programs. (See Monday’s All Time Top Ten, Lux…Presents Hollywood! and Arthur Godfrey.)
Hawk Returns To The Nest. After one year on NBC’s Thursday schedule and a fall from the season’s Top 50, R .J. Reynolds Tobacco moved The Bob Hawk Show comedy quiz back to CBS where it had been a fixture for five years. The quipping quizmaster remained on CBS with Camel Cigarettes sponsorship for the next five seasons, all rated in Monday’s Top Ten and the annual Top 50.
Railroads Express Style. The National Association of Railroads introduced its stylish Monday night Railroad Hour on ABC in October. The program featured handsome baritone Gordon MacRae, 27, as host and singing lead in each week’s presentation of a Broadway operetta or a Hollywood musical with popular guest stars from the stage and screen. MacRae was a best selling artist for Capitol Records and just beginning a film career that peaked seven years later when he starred in the movie versions of Oklahoma and Carousel. Like its predecessors, The Telephone Hour and Carnation Contented Hour, The Railroad Hour was never an hour in length. It began as one of network radio’s few 45 minute programs. The “hour” was further reduced in April when it was shortened to 30 minutes. Unfortunately for ABC, the railroad association, like U.S. Steel, moved its prestigious theatrical presentation and its sponsorship money to NBC the next season.
NBC Laughs Off Tuesday. Three of Tuesday’s Top Ten shows - comedies headlining Amos & Andy, Red Skelton and Milton Berle - were gone from the NBC schedule. Amos & Andy jumped to CBS while Brown & Williamson Tobacco curiously swapped Tuesday’s Red Skelton Show with its Friday success, People Are Funny. The Art Linkletter stunt show picked up a fraction of a point and finished in the season’s Top Ten, but Skelton lost 30% of his audience on Friday and his season rating fell below 20.0 for the first time in seven years.
Meanwhile, Texaco installed Milton Berle as permanent host of NBC-TV’s Texaco Star Theater on September 21st - in the same 8:00 timeslot on Tuesday that he had occupied on NBC Radio the previous season. Berle’s television success was rapid and legendary - forever leaving the question of why NBC allowed Berle’s television comedy hit to be programmed against its own Tuesday comedy lineup on radio.
In yet another questionable maneuver, NBC reversed the decade-old scheduling order of its two reliable Tuesday hits, Fibber McGee & Molly and Bob Hope. Although FM&M held its own as Tuesday’s Number One program, Hope dropped from the season’s Top Five for the first time in nine years and his annual rating fell into the teens.
One maneuver that did pay off for NBC was Lever Brothers’ Lifeboy Soap takeover of Big Town - a ten year hit on CBS - and moving it to NBC. The newspaper drama lost 25% of its audience in the shift but remained in Tuesday’s Top Ten, winning its time period against a CBS entry in the big money quiz craze - Hit The Jackpot, hosted by a glib newcomer, 28 year old Bill Cullen. (See Big Big Town.)
The Surprise Hit. This Is Your Life grew out of a Truth or Consequences segment from 1946 when the U.S. Army asked Ralph Edwards to "do something" for a despondent paraplegic veteran. Edwards hit on the idea of profiling the young man’s life on the air - with surprise appearances and tributes from his family and friends. The idea was to bridge the soldier’s happier past with the promise of better things to come beginning with a parcel of gifts presented by Edwards. The segment drew immediate praise and inspired a new program based on the biographical concept. This Is Your Life, which usually surprised its unsuspecting guests of honor, had a two year radio run for Philip Morris cigarettes and became a nine year television hit for Edwards beginning in 1952 .
Listeners Turn Tums Down. Tums gave itself unnecessary ratings heartburn in January. The Lewis Howe antacid tablets cancelled A Date With Judy starring Louise Erickson at mid-season. The sitcom had passed perennial favorite Aldrich Family as radio’s most popular teen comedy the previous season with a Top 20 finish. It had another one in the works with 16.4 average rating when it was abruptly shut down in January. Tums replaced A Date With Judy with The Alan Young Show - a sitcom starring the 29 year old Canadian comedian. Curiously, it co-starred the displaced Erickson in the role of Young’s girlfriend. Listeners obviously missed her as Judy because The Alan Young Show limped in with a 9.6 average and was cancelled at the end of the season.
The Beached Blonde. When Amos & Andy moved their highly rated Lever Brothers show to the CBS Sunday schedule, the shift bumped another Lever Brothers hit, Blondie, out of its timeslot. The sitcom starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake had enjoyed nine seasons on CBS, eight of them in the annual Top 50. The 1947-48 season was its highest rated yet, finishing 24th in the annual Top 50. (See Bloonn…dee!)
Besides their radio success, Singleton and Lake had starred in two dozen of an eventual 28 Blondie movies for Columbia Pictures all based on the immensely popular Chic Young comic strip. But Lever uprooted Blondie from its network home and put it into NBC‘s Wednesday schedule where it floundered, losing 37% of its CBS audience. (4) Blondie’s short-lived run on NBC was cancelled at the end of the season and the sitcom left radio.
Soap Star In Disguise. Blondie lost her 8:00 time period ratings to another blonde, handsome Karl Swenson, star of Frank & Anne Hummert’s detective series, Mr. Chameleon, on CBS. (5) Swenson’s Chameleon sleuth was described as a “Master of disguises.” To match each disguise that he used to catch the killer du jour, Swenson would employ one of his many character voices and neatly wrap up each week’s potboiler in a predictable, formulaic fashion. The format was virtually identical to the Hummerts’ simplistic but successful Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. Not surprisingly, both programs were sponsored by products from Sterling Drug, the biggest booster of Frank Hummert’s philosophy to keep his programs simple and repetitive as not to challenge or confuse even the most backward or casual listeners.
Like Mr. Keen, Mr. Chameleon was a program that critics loved to hate. It was con-founding to them when the show became one of the season’s Top Ten programs two years later. (See Karl Swenson.)
Mr. Television Misses Radio. Despite his smash success on NBC-TV’s Texaco Star Theater, Milton Berle hadn’t given up on radio. Berle‘s television popularity was so great that Texaco gladly picked up the tab for a radio version of Texaco Star Theater which was placed with ABC on Wednesday at 9:00 opposite NBC’s Duffy’s Tavern and the classically themed Your Song & Mine starring concert baritone Thomas L. Thomas on CBS.
To insure his radio success, Berle retained much of his cast from the previous two seasons on NBC and beefed up his comedy writing crew with Nat Hiken and brothers Danny and Neil Simon. Berle expressed confidence that he was ready to conquer radio like he had television. But the show failed. Berle & Company could only generate a 9.6 rating, losing the time period to both Duffy’s comedy and the CBS recitals. “Mr. Television” left series radio for good - his own good - in June.
ABC ’s Wednesday Wins & Woes. Bing Crosby was in the last season of his three-year Philco Radio Time contract on ABC. After two seasons of mediocre ratings with few signs of improvement, it became common knowledge within the industry that Crosby wanted out, while both CBS and NBC wanted him back despite his demand to pre-record his programs.
NBC Vice President Sid Eiges, licking the wounds from his network’s loss of its top comedy stars to CBS, told the press, "NBC is negotiating with the greatest name in the entertainment world, an international figure.” It was no secret that he was referring to Crosby - who undoubtedly appreciated the accolades but nevertheless signed with CBS. Ironically, Crosby finished his last season on ABC back in the annual Top 50 as did his lead-in, Groucho Marx’s comedy quiz, You Bet Your Life. Then Marx followed Crosby’s lead and signed with CBS, too. (See The One, The Only…Groucho!)
A Dramatic Comeback. For the first time in 14 years CBS won Thursday and did it in dramatic style by winning every time period from 7:00 until 11:00 p.m. ET.
The returning Suspense topped Al Jolson’s Kraft Music Hall at 9:00. The mystery anthology scored its highest-ever rating and became one of the year’s Top 15 programs. Jolson lost a third of his previous season’s audience and left the show in May. The long-running Music Hall itself folded four months later. (See Sus…pense!) The FBI In Peace & War beat NBC’s Aldrich Family at 8:00. FBI established itself as a solid Top 25 hit while the family sitcom starring Ezra Stone lost a third of its ratings and barely remained in the season’s Top 50. (See FBI vs. FBI.)
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons outrated Burns & Allen at 8:30 and became one of the season’s Top 15 programs. It was George and Gracie’s last series for NBC before heading back to CBS for their final Network Radio season and subsequent hit series on CBS-TV. Casey, Crime Photographer destroyed Dorothy Lamour’s Sealtest Show at 9:30. Casey bounded into the season’s Top 20 while the beautiful movie star took the once strong Sealtest half hour into single digit ratings. Sealtest then joined co-owned Kraft Foods and left Network Radio at the end of the season. Newcomer Hallmark Playhouse edged NBC’s transplant from CBS, Screen Guild Players, at 10:00 and the long running anthology of light drama, First Nighter, beat Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians at 10:30.
The CBS publicity department crowed the Thursday triumph while those who scoffed at Bill Paley’s concept of 1946 that CBS could beat NBC’s hit variety shows with drama were forced to eat crow.
To Care Enough To Air The Very Best. Kansas City greeting card giant Hallmark entered Network Radio in 1946, taking on sponsorship of the CBS series Radio Readers Digest, based on material found in the popular monthly magazine. Digest was a respectable program but never reached a season’s Top 50 in its five year run Hallmark Greeting Cards founder Joyce Hall often said that good quality was good business, leading to his company’s slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best.”
He was determined to prove it in the programs that carried his company’s name too. .Digest was replaced on CBS in 1948 with The Hallmark Playhouse, weekly half hour radio adaptations of classic and popular novels. British author James Hilton was chosen to host and select the books used in the series. Hilton’s credits included the best selling Goodbye Mr. Chips, Random Harvest and Lost Horizon. Hilton also won a 1942 Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for MGM’s Mrs. Miniver.
Hallmark Playhouse was the surprise hit of the year. Opposite longtime listener favorite Screen Guild Players on NBC, Hallmark immediately established itself as one of the season’s Top 50 programs and remained on the list for the next five years. More importantly, Hallmark Playhouse set the pattern for broadcast quality that Hallmark Cards would follow in its many years television programming that succeeded its radio series. .
Friday’s Flips & Flops. Listening tastes were changing and Friday was in turnover. Six of the previous season’s most popular shows of the night were gone. Illness forced Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks off the air for a year. People Are Funny was moved to Tuesday and Waltz Time was cancelled after its best rating and ranking in 14 seasons. (See Baby Snooks, People Are Funny and Frank Munn's Golden Voice.)
The same fate was suffered by It Pays To Be Ignorant after five seasons. The Adventures of The Thin Man and Can You Top This? were both relegated to Mutual’s home for aging programs. (See It Pays To Be Ignorant, The Curse of Dashiell Hammett, and Can You Top This?)
Only ABC held steady with its four proven winners - three low cost dramas and a big money quiz - This Is Your FBI, The Fat Man, The Lone Ranger and Break The Bank. In response to the upstart ABC, NBC programmed what would have been an unbeatable comedy lineup just a few seasons earlier - Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton and Jimmy Durante plus William Bendix in The Life of Riley. But they simply weren’t the drawing cards they once were. Television, however, would be a different story for all four.
Easy Does It - Finally. One fascinating exception to Friday’s demise of veteran comics was Easy Aces - identified during its final season on the air as Mr. Ace & Jane. Goodman and Jane Ace had logged twelve multi-network seasons when CBS brought them back after a three year absence for an encore. Jane continued to earn her title, The Queen of Malapropisms, uttering such lines as, “We’re insufferable friends,” while Goodman portrayed her long suffering husband. Although he actually wrote her material, he muttered asides to the listener in response to her lines like, “Isn’t that awful?”
Easy Aces was the quiet little program from which the industry didn’t expect much. The Aces had the last laugh - finishing for the first time ever in a night’s Top Ten and the season’s Top 50. Nevertheless, General Foods cancelled Easy Aces at mid-season to make way for a new sitcom from which great things were expected - My Favorite Husband starring Lucille Ball. Lucy’s radio predecessor to her television classic could only score half of Easy Aces’ ratings. As Jane might have said of the network and sponsor that cancelled her show , “You certainly hit the nail on the thumb that time!” (See Easy Aces.)
Another Shot At Ford’s Theater. Ford Motors had decided in 1947 to pursue prestige with The Ford Theater, a late Sunday afternoon hour comparable to U.S. Steel’s successful Sunday night anthology, Theater Guild On The Air. NBC and the auto maker boasted that no expense would be spared to bring adaptations of the finest Broadway plays to listeners, interpreted through the talents of radio’s best actors. And Ford delivered. Critics agreed that the program was highly commendable.
Unfortunately, listeners preferred the cheap thrills offered by The Shadow on Mutual and ABC’s Counterspy. Ford Theater was destroyed in the ratings and the automaker went back to the drawing board. Following Lux Radio Theater’s successful lead of 1935, Ford abandoned New York for Hollywood, moved to CBS and opened the 1948-49 season with a carbon copy of radio’s most popular program: hour-long adaptations of popular films performed by Hollywood’s biggest stars.
The new Ford Theater opened with a flourish but finished third in its time period behind ABC’s Break The Bank and Eddie Cantor on NBC. It became painfully obvious that Americans didn’t listen to the movies on Friday night - they went to the movies on Friday night. The program was cancelled at the end of the season.
Saturday Night Becomes Day Time. A major change in its Saturday schedule didn’t dislodge NBC from the Top Five positions. Missing after eleven seasons and ten Top 50 finishes, Kay Kyser was gone from NBC and prime time radio with Colgate’s cancellation. Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge was picked up in November by Pillsbury for a seven month run on ABC’s weekday schedule where it finished a poor second to NBC’s long running soap operas, Backstage Wife and Stella Dallas.
To replace Kyser, Colgate moved A Day In The Life of Dennis Day from NBC’s Wednesday schedule to Saturday and paired the singer’s sitcom with its successful Judy Canova Show. As a result, Day and Canova rose to the top of Saturday’s ratings.
The big loser in Saturday’s situation was Truth Or Consequences. The FCC’s far-fetched lottery edict prohibiting giveaways spooked Ralph Edwards and sponsor Procter & Gamble into abandoning the secret identity contests that had scored big ratings and raised millions for charity. The stunt show lost nearly 40% of its audience, falling from sixth to 30th in the season’s rankings.
A Bang Up Saturday On CBS. CBS recovered from its 1947-48 Saturday shutout by placing four programs in Saturday’s Top Ten. Among them was the gunshot-filled Gangbusters, which the network lifted from ABC at mid-season for Procter & Gamble sponsorship. Another was the wildest music show ever broadcast, hosted by a dead-panned bandleader dressed in a clownish suit who addressed his audience as, “Music lovers.” .
By his late 20's Spike Jones was regarded as one of the best studio drummers in radio, performing anonymously, but profitably, in John Scott Trotter’s Kraft Music Hall orchestra and Billy Mills’ Fibber McGee & Molly band. He was also known among his peers as a comedian - just like his fellow bandsman, trombonist Jerry Colonna. (See “Professor” Jerry Colonna.)
Jones’ big break came in 1942 when he gathered a group of studio players and recorded Der Fuehrer’s Face for RCA’s Bluebird label. The anti-Nazi novelty became an instant hit and led to the formation of Spike Jones’ “City Slickers” - a group of highly skilled musicians who doubled on washboards, cowbells, auto horns, sirens, pistols filled with blanks and most anything else that could lead to musical mayhem.
Two years on the Bob Burns Show followed along with a string hit records - all parodies of familiar classical and popular songs - most notably The William Tell Overture, and Cocktails For Two - plus the holiday novelty All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth featuring the falsetto voice of trumpeter George Rock. Coca Cola and CBS gave Jones his own Friday timeslot in the 1947-48 season. The show was moved briefly to Sunday at 6:30 in January, 1949, and two months later to Saturday at 7:00 - opposite the NBC Symphony under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. Spike Jones won the time period.
Multiples Run Out of The Money. For the first time and only time, no Multiple Run program finished among the season’s Top 50. Nevertheless, CBS continued to place its entire 6:45 to 8:00 block in the Multiple Runs’ Top Ten. Serial sitcom Beulah became the first CBS program in six seasons to beat NBC’s Chesterfield Supper Club and win prime time’s keynote quarter hour at 7:00.
ABC set new marks for its early evening programming by placing both of its alternating half-hour adventure dramas in the Multiple Run Top Ten. The Lone Ranger was in the second of its three year run topping the list at 7:30 p.m. ET. (See The Lone Ranger.) Counterspy, a crime fighter from a different era, filled the 7:30 timeslot on Tuesday and Thursday.
From Super Spy To Soaper Star. Radio actor Don MacLaughlin was 35 when he was cast as David Harding, Counterspy, in 1942. It turned out to be one of the steadiest jobs in Network Radio - he held it for 15 years. Counterspy was producer Phillips H. Lord’s interpretation of the government agents fighting espionage genre - it predated both The FBI In Peace & War and This Is Your FBI by several years. (See FBI vs. FBI on this site.) The purely fictional Counterspy was supposed to be to G-Men what Lord’s Gangbusters was to local police. MacLaughlin had played various roles in Gangbusters melodramas since the show’s inception.
Counterspy bounced around the Blue/ABC prime time and Sunday afternoon schedules for seven seasons before achieving its highest ratings on the network in the two years when it alternated with The Lone Ranger at 7:30 under Pepsi Cola sponsorship. Pepsi took the show to NBC’s Thursday schedule in 1950 and Gulf Oil took over its sponsorship the following season.. But after two years of disappointing ratings Counterspy was relegated to NBC’s Sunday afternoon schedule and offered to participating sponsors. Counterspy’s final stop was Mutual in 1953 where it was programmed in various time periods under participating and co-op sponsorship for four and a half years.
MacLaughlin’s tour of duty with the fictional government crime fighting unit ended in 1957, but he was busier than ever. A year earlier he originated the role of lawyer Chris Hughes on CBS-TV’s As The World Turns - a part he played for 32 years until his death in 1986 at age 78. Don MacLaughlin knew how to keep a job.
Henry’s Leads Turn To Lead. Veteran West Coast newsman Bill Henry had reported the 8:55 p.m. ET Johns-Manville News strip on CBS since 1943 when Cecil Brown walked out in a dispute over the network’s editorial policy. Henry had averaged double digit ratings in the timeslot and constantly placed in the Multiple Runs’ Top Ten. But interest in news had waned since the end of World War II - evidenced by the absence of any newscasts in the season’s Top Five Multiple Run programs. It was the first time that had ever happened.
CBS anticipated the drop-off and discontinued Henry’s popular news strip on June 25, 1948. His Johns-Manville News immediately began a new five year run on Mutual, but not to the 11.7 rating he had enjoyed on CBS with lead-in’s provided by the likes of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Mr. Keen and Dr. Christian. His first season on Mutual averaged a 2.6 rating - down 80%.
(1) Television later proved the IRS point when black actors Alvin Childress played Amos and Spencer Williams was Andy.
(2) ABC Radio broadcast a separate production of The Original Amateur Hour on Wednesdays.
(3) Meet The Press remains on NBC-TV’s Sunday television schedule to this day - but nowhere near prime time.
(4) Penny Singleton left the Blondie radio series at mid-season and was replaced by movie star Ann Rutherford.
(5) Karl Swenson was one of weekday radio’s busiest actors - the male lead in Frank & Anne Hummerts’ afternoon soap operas Our Gal Sunday and Lorenzo Jones.
Top 50 Network Programs - 1948-49
A. C Nielsen Radio Index Serv, Sep 1948 - Dec 1948
& C.E. Hooper Semi-Monthly Reports, Jan 1949 - Jun 1949.
Total Programs Rated, 6-11 PM: 164 Programs Rated 13 Weeks & Ranked: 148 37,623,000 Radio Homes 94.2% Coverage of US One Rating Point = 376,230 Homes
1 1 Lux Radio Theater 25.5 Lever Bros/Lux Soap Mon 9:00 60 CBS
2 2 Fibber McGee & Molly 23.5 Johnson Wax Tue 9:30 30 NBC
3 10 Jack Benny Program 22.9 American Tobacco/Lucky Strike Sun 7:00 30 CBS (1)
4 30 Walter Winchell’s Journal 21.7 Kaiser-Frazer Autos Sun 9:00 15 ABC (2)
5t 10 Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts 20.1 Lever Bros/Lipton Tea Mon 8:30 30 CBS
5t 4 Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 20.1 Standard/Chase & Sanborn Sun 8:00 30 NBC
7 5 Bob Hope Show 19.8 Lever Bros/Swan Soap Tue 9:00 30 NBC
8 8 My Friend Irma 19.5 Lever Bros/Pepsodent Toothpaste Mon 10:00 30 CBS
9t 3 Amos & Andy 16.9 Lever Bros/Rinso Laundry Soap Sun 7:30 30 CBS
9t 33 People Are Funny 17.1 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Cigarettes Tue 10:30 30 NBC
11 15 Duffy’s Tavern 16 7 Bristol Myers/Vitalis & Trushay Wed 9:00 30 NBC
12 12 Mister District Attorney 16.6 Bristol Myers/Ipana & Sal Hapatica Wed 9:30 30 NBC
13t 19 A Date With Judy 16.4 Lewis & Howe/Tums Antacid Tue 8:30 30 NBC
13t 50 Suspense 16.4 Autolite Spark Plugs Thu 9:00 30 CBS
15 33 Mr Keen 16.0 American Home Products/Kolynos Toothpaste Thu 8:30 30 CBS
16 44 Casey Crime Photographer 15.7 Toni Home Permanents Thu 9:30 30 CBS
17 9 Phil Harris & Alice Faye 15.4 Rexall Drug Stores Sun 7:30 30 NBC
18t N Mystery Theater 15.2 American Home Products/Bayer Aspirin Tue 8:00 30 CBS
18t N Stop The Music 15.2 Participating Sponsors Sun 8:00 60 ABC
20 22 Inner Sanctum 15.0 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Mon 8:00 30 CBS
21 17 Big Town 14.8 Lever Bros/Lifeboy Soap Tue 10:00 30 NBC
22t 36 A Day In The Life of Dennis Day 14.6 Colgate/Palmolive Soap Sat 10:00 30 NBC
22t 42 The FBI In Peace & War 14.6 Procter & Gamble/Lava Hand Soap Thu 8:00 30 CBS
22t 25 This Is Your FBI 14.6 Equitable Life Insurance Fri 8:30 30 ABC
25 13 Red Skelton Show 14.4 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Cigarettes Fri 9:30 30 NBC
26 55 Bob Hawk Show 14.1 RJ Reynolds/Camel Cigarettes Mon 10:30 30 CBS
27t 28 Judy Canova Show 13.9 Colgate Palmolive Peet/Halo Shampoo Sat 9:30 30 NBC
27t 14 Life of Riley 13.9 Procter & Gamble/Prell Shampoo Fri 10:00 30 NBC
29 15 Your Hit Parade 13.8 American Tobacco/Lucky Strike Sat 9:00 30 NBC
30t 42 The Fat Man 13.7 Pepto Bismol Fri 8:00 30 ABC
30t 31 Mr & Mrs North 13.7 Colgate Palmolive Peet/Halo Shampoo Tue 8:30 30 CBS
30t 6 Truth Or Consequences 13.7 Procter & Gamble/Duz Laundry Soap Sat 8:30 30 NBC
33 18 Great Gildersleeve 13.4 Kraft Foods/Parkay Margarine Wed 8:30 30 NBC
34t 36 The Big Story 13.3 American Tobacco/Pall Mall Cigarettes Wed 10:00 30 NBC
34t 76 Louella Parsons Hollywood News 13.3 Jergens Lotion Sun 9:15 15 ABC
34t N Your Song & Mine 13.3 Borden Dairies Wed 9:00 30 CBS
37 25 Burns & Allen Show 13.0 General Foods/Maxwell House Thu 8:30 30 NBC
38t 20 Al Jolson's Kraft Music Hall 12.8 Kraft Cheese Thu 9:00 30 NBC
38t 36 Break The Bank 12.8 Bristol Myers/Sal Hapatica Fri 9:00 30 ABC
40t 27 Adventures of Sam Spade 12.6 Wildroot Cream Oil Sun 8:00 30 CBS
40t 62 Bing Crosby's Philco Radio Time 12.6 Philco Radios & Televisions Wed 10:00 30 ABC
42t 6 Fred Allen Show 12.5 Ford Motors Sun 8:00 30 NBC (3)
42t 31 Manhattan Merry Go Round 12.5 Sterling Drug/ Dr Lyons Tooth Powder Sun 9:00 30 NBC
44 N Mr Chameleon 12.3 American Home Products/Bayer Aspirin Wed 8:00 30 CBS
45 N Mr Ace & Jane (Easy Aces) 12.2 General Foods/Sanka Coffee Fri 8:30 30 CBS
46t 47 Theater Guild On The Air 12.1 US Steel Sun 9:30 60 ABC
46t 72 Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life 12.1 Elgin-American Costume Jwlry Wed 9:30 30 ABC
48 53 Hallmark Playhouse 12.0 Hallmark Cards Thu 10:00 30 CBS
49t 23 Aldrich Family 11.9 General Foods/Grapenuts & Jello Thu 8:00 30 NBC
49t 76 Curtain Time 11.9 Mars Candy Wed 10:30 30 NBC
(1) Jack Benny Program Oct - Dec American Tobacco/Lucky Strike Sun 7:00 30 NBC
(2) Walter Winchell Sep - Dec Jergens Lotion Sun 9:30 15 ABC
(3) Fred Allen Show Oct - Dec Ford Motors Sun 8:30 30 NBC
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
The 1948-49 Season
17th In A Series
What, We Worry? Network Radio opened the 1948-49 season flush with the sense of renewed popularity and its 14th consecutive year of record high earnings. The percentage of total stations affiliated with the networks had plunged from 97% to 68%. But the drop was easily attributed to the postwar surge of new AM stations the air - 559 in 1948 alone, bringing their total to 1,621. The networks, limited to just one affiliate per city, added 76 of the newcomers to their flocks that grew to 1,104.
Almost unnoticed was the growth of FM radio which had leaped 215% from 150 to 473. But the importance of FM was still a thing of the distant future. Of greater concern to radio’s immediate future was the rapid growth of television.
By December, 1948, another 33 television stations had begun operations with 50 more under construction. New television stations attracted new viewers and TV penetration grew faster than 10,000 new homes per month in 1948. Momentum for set ownership snowballed to avalanche proportions in early 1949 and a million households were soon in sight. It was still less than three percent of the radio homes, but television was the new nightly center of family gatherings and neighborhood parties. By coincidence - or perhaps not - the Top 50 Network Radio programs’ average audience dropped by over a million homes during the season.
Merlin Aylesworth, NBC’s founding president from 1926-1932, predicted in the spring that television would wipe out radio as America knew it within three years. He wasn’t far off the mark. (See Dr. DuMont’s Predictions.)
Paley's Piece of The Rock. In the four seasons since Bill Paley’s return from World War II with his vow to take CBS to the top of the ratings, the network had averaged a scant 18 shows in the annual Top 50. Paley had America’s most popular program in Lux Radio Theater and there were encouraging signs from the CBS stable of home grown shows - most notably Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, My Friend Irma and The Adventures of Sam Spade. (See CBS Packages Unwrapped.) But NBC’s comedy stars continued to dominate the Top Ten year after year.
Paley’s network lacked the power and prestige of radio’s biggest names. He determined to get them for CBS - and with an eye to the future, lock them up for CBS-TV which required huge amounts of capital to compete with NBC. To accomplish the job he bor-rowed $5.0 Million from Prudential Insurance.
His first target was the resurgent Amos & Andy - which had scrambled back into the annual Top Ten since its conversion to an NBC half hour sitcom in 1943. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll owned their program and its characters. Paley convinced them to sell their property to CBS for $2.0 Million in September. Their windfall from the sale was subject to a capital gains tax of 25% instead of an income tax that could soar close to 80%.
Then CBS captured the team’s NBC sponsor - Lever Brothers’ Rinso laundry soap - and paid Gosden and Correll an additional fee as “technical advisors” to their own program. It was a win-win situation for A&A and CBS. The only losers were NBC and the IRS.
When You Diss Upon A Star... With Amos & Andy back in his fold, Bill Paley landed an even bigger prize for CBS - his friend Jack Benny. Accountants and attorneys for network and the comedian floated another capital gains deal similar to the Amos & Andy coup, but the IRS refused the idea. It ruled that Amos & Andy were fictional characters and the program was indeed a property that could conceivably exist without Gosden and Correll. (1). Benny was different - he was an actual person and without him, his program was worthless.
Benny’s move to CBS appeared costly to the comedian. As 60% owner of his program’s production company, Benny’s personal tax liability after signing with Paley was just over $1.0 Million - more than three times the amount that a capital gains deal would have been. Although the sum was undoubtedly covered by CBS, Benny jumped networks for personal reasons.
Unlike CBS chief Paley who displayed true interest in Benny‘s welfare, NBC’s David Sarnoff refused to meet with his star of over a decade in an attempt to keep him in the fold. Instead, Sarnoff assigned an RCA staff lawyer to negotiate with Benny - a former federal prosecutor against whom Benny had a rare personal grudge stemming back to an overblown jewelry smuggling charge in the 1930's. Sarnoff’s thoughtless insults pushed Benny to CBS. (See Sunday At Seven.)
Jack Benny was highly respected in the entertainment community. With his endorsement, the personable Paley lured Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton and Burns & Allen from NBC plus Bing Crosby and Groucho Marx from ABC for his 1949-50 schedule. Paley’s loan from Prudential was paid off promptly while Sarnoff’s insensitive blunder with Benny eventually cost NBC millions of dollars in radio and television revenue.
A Revolutionary Battleground. Sarnoff and Paley took their battle into the phonograph and recording industries when Columbia Records introduced the 33 1/3 revolutions-per- minute, microgroove “Long Playing” disc on June 21, 1948. CBS had offered to share the technology with RCA, but Sarnoff rejected the idea. Instead, RCA came out with its own 45 r.p.m. system seven months later. The battle of systems went on for several years until the record buying public decided the issue, preferring the seven inch, 45's for singles and the twelve inch, 33 1/3 discs for albums That forced both companies to share their technologies. The bulky 78 r.p.m. records that had been popular for decades were on their way out and sales of phonographs employing the new slower playing records boomed.
The Federal Party Pooper. The FCC complained in August, 1948, that Network Radio schedules contained 40 quiz and giveaway programs that awarded over $160,000 in prizes, every month. Particular targets of the complaint were ABC’s Stop The Music! and Truth Or Consequences on NBC. It went conveniently unmentioned by the FCC that the Truth Or Consequences promotions also raised over $3.0 Million for charities.
The commission floated a broad reinterpretation of the 1934 anti-lottery statutes which it directed at giveaway and quiz shows. The bureaucrats proposed to outlaw any effort on the part of listeners as a requirement to win a radio contest. - writing a letter, answering the telephone or even listening to a specific program. Although there were wide loopholes in the edict, ABC, CBS and NBC prepared to file injunctions against it. The giveaways continued as the argument continued during a year of hearings.
Only Mutual complied immediately, piously observing that giveaway programs, “Were not healthy for radio.” That said, Mutual cancelled its only prime time giveaway show, Three For The Money, which had been unable to attract a sponsor for three months and was thus deemed, “Not healthy for radio”.
TV Freezes & Expands. Television’s growth was stalled in September when the FCC “froze” all pending television station applications while it considered ways to alter its 1945 rules regarding channel usage and TV signal separation distances between cities. The freeze, originally projected at 90 days, lasted for four years.
But the freeze didn’t effect television stations already established or under construction. By early 1949, new stations were coming on the air at the rate of one every week. Mean-while, AT&T officially opened coaxial cable networking from the east coast to the Midwest in January, 1949. The video chains were linked as far west as St. Louis and live network programming became available to most of the country’s largest markets.
Television Wrestles With Programming. ABC and CBS began regularly scheduled television programming in 1948, joining the year old NBC and DuMont networks. All four were wrestling with their program schedules - or boxing with them, depending on the night. NBC televised boxing on Monday and Friday nights, wrestling on Tuesday. Both CBS and DuMont scheduled boxing against ABC’s wrestling shows on Wednesday. Combined, the four networks logged eight boxing or wresting shows a week in the prime time 10 o’clock hour. It was this kind of programming that prompted Fred Allen to quip, “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”
Nevertheless, boxers and wrestlers provided the networks with cheaply produced “reality” programming while network and agency producers scrambled for ideas to create programs likely to attract audience interest and advertising investment.
Look, Don’t Listen. For a decade the networks had taken radio income in huge chunks to finance television’s technological development. Now they looked to radio to provide television with programming content beyond the “saloon” appeal of boxing, wrestling, baseball and Roller Derby. The networks’ cannibalization of radio programming to feed television began with just a few nibbles.
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts was the sudden new radio hit for CBS a year earlier, finishing in the season’s Top Ten. It was a simple studio show with a small audience that could easily be covered with just two or three cameras. CBS-TV began simulcasting Talent Scouts on December 6th - replacing Roller Derby. The radio version of Godfrey’s show lost almost ten percent of its previous season’s rating in the process, but the maneuver gave CBS and sponsor Lipton Tea a solid foothold in the new medium. (See Arthur Godfrey and Monday’s All Time Top Ten)
Then CBS simulcast We The People on Tuesday night and its radio ratings slid 12.5%. ABC simulcast Break The Bank on Friday nights, losing 20% of its radio audience. The network’s long running public affairs feature, America’s Town Meeting was simulcast on Tuesday and lost 17%.
The pioneering but short-lived Dumont Television Network, (1946-56), produced only one program on Sunday nights, a video version of The Original Amateur Hour hosted by Ted Mack. (2) Simultaneous video of ABC Radio’s Friday Night Boxing, aka The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, had first appeared on NBC-TV a year earlier. NBC’s television network borrowed just one more program from radio in 1948-49 - Mutual’s Meet The Press, with co-creators Martha Roundtree and Lawrence Spivak. The program was first seen in November on Sunday nights at 8:30. (3)
NBC was slow to translate its own radio favorites to television. That would all change in a big way the following season when advertising executive Pat Weaver was appointed President of NBC Television. Regardless of the danger to Network Radio’s ratings, the adaptation of radio favorites to television inspired imitation - and lots of it.
Paley’s Lucky Bet. Bill Paley’s acquisition of Jack Benny for CBS didn’t mean that sponsor Lucky Strike would automatically follow its star to his familiar Sunday time period on a different network. So Paley guaranteed American Tobacco that Benny’s program on CBS would either match or better his NBC ratings - or CBS would refund $1,000 for every rating point that the show lost. Paley didn’t refund a penny.
Benny’s audience moved with him. The comedian’s October through December NBC ratings averaged 22.7 - his January through June average on CBS was 22.9 His defection to CBS gave the network its first Sunday night leader since 1935 when Eddie Cantor became the first major star to jump from NBC to CBS. The Lucky Strike Program starring Jack Benny was a CBS fixture at 7:00 for the next seven seasons. (See Lucky Gets Benny on this site.)
Benny Breaks A&A’s Fall Fall. Jack Benny gave CBS additional value as a lead-in for its Sunday programming. Amos & Andy premiered on CBS at 7:30 on October 10th, three months before Benny arrived with his show at 7:00. For those three months Gosden and Correll were stuck with Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch as their lead-in - a program that appealed primarily to juvenile fans of the cowboy hero. The veteran comedy duo lost 25% of their audience from the same three months on NBC the previous season. Amos & Andy lost their time period, too, lagging behind Phil Harris & Alice Faye’s sitcom which still had Benny as its lead-in on NBC.
The situation was reversed in January when Benny joined CBS and became Amos & Andy’s lead-in. Harris & Faye lost a whopping 42% of their audience on the month he left while Amos & Andy recovered for a third consecutive Top Ten season. (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten and Sunday’s All Time Top Ten.)
Welcome To The Clubbing. Horace Heidt joined a sadder-but-wiser group that included Eddie Cantor, Kate Smith and Gene Autry, plus detectives The Thin Man and Sherlock Holmes. Over the years all had been programmed against Jack Benny on Sundays at 7:00 and none had succeeded.
Heidt’s Youth Opportunity Program was doing nicely on NBC’s Sunday schedule at 10:30. Then the network convinced Heidt and his sponsor Philip Morris to move the show back to 7:00, vacated when Benny jumped to CBS in January. The result was an immediate 40% loss of audience against Benny’s show on CBS and a drop into single digit ratings for the next four months. The sponsor and its star cut their losses and moved the show back to 10:30 in late April then rectified their mistake to an even greater degree the following season. They joined Benny and moved to CBS’s Sunday schedule where Horace Heidt’s Youth Opportunity Program enjoyed three consecutive Top 50 seasons.
Stop’s Summertime Stats. By the beginning of the 1948-49 season, ABC‘s Stop The Music! had been on the air for six months and had awarded three jackpot prizes averaging nearly $20,000 in retail value, ($202,000 in today‘s money) The show continued to make news with its pyramiding piles of prizes which spurred accusations that it “bought” its audience and further emboldening the FCC to redefine prohibited lotteries to new dimen-sions. Stop The Music! remained on the air through the summer of 1948 to build a following and attract major sponsors for each of its four quarter-hour segments. Lorillard’s Old Gold Cigarettes bought two of the segments while Smith Brothers Cough Drops and Spiedel Watch Bands each sponsored one .
Prospects were even rosier for Stop The Music! when Edgar Bergen went on vacation in June and left his 8:00 timeslot on NBC to his summer replacement, the bland Robert Shaw Chorale. Regardless, CBS won the summertime 8:00 half hour with The Adventures of Sam Spade starring Howard Duff as producer William Spier’s wise-cracking version of Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective. Spade consistently won its time period in July, August and September with 7.5, 9.4 and 9.7 ratings against Stop The Music’s 5.9, 6.3 and 8.3. (See Stop The Music! and The Curse of Dashiell Hammett.)
Cowan Vs. Cowan. Ford and NBC brought in a summer replacement for the sophisticated humor of Fred Allen at 8:30 against Stop The Music! that can only be termed puzzling. RFD America was a simplistic quiz show that featured farmers as contestants. More puzzling was the fact that RFD America was created by Stop The Music’s producer, Louis Cowan. As a result, Cowan’s two shows were programmed opposite each other on competing networks. Against NBC’s rural quiz and actor Herbert Marshall’s espionage drama, The Man Called X on CBS, Stop The Music! easily won the 8:30 time period.
Bergen Beats The Band. The real Sunday night battle resumed in October when Edgar Bergen and Fred Allen returned after summer hiatus. Well publicized momentum appeared to be on Stop The Music’s side. But the half hour charts for the last quarter of 1948 tell a different story:
October November December
8:00 8:00 8:00
NBC Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 18.9 9.8 21.7
CBS Adventures of Sam Spade 15.6 15.8 18.4
ABC Stop The Music 11.6 12.2 13.0
8:30 8:30 8:30
NBC Fred Allen 17.5 18.6 20.0
ABC Stop The Music 15.2 17.2 17.1
CBS Cabin B-13 (Sustaining & Not Rated) NA NA NA
Despite Stop The Music’s also-ran ratings, ABC had every right to be delighted with its hour-long giveaway show that attracted headlines, listeners and advertising revenue. Then in late 1948, CBS Chairman Paley did a huge favor for Stop The Music! He hired Edgar Bergen away from NBC and broke up the Bergen-Allen ratings tandem in January, 1949. The ventriloquist left the air for the rest of the season before joining the CBS Sunday lineup at 8:00 ten months later.
Bergen’s long absence was the giveaway show‘s big break. Whether he was at NBC or CBS, the soft spoken Scandinavian and his popular alter egos consistently stopped. Stop The Music! in its tracks.
The Wit’s End. The same wasn’t true for Fred Allen in his fight against Stop The Music! NBC and Allen’s sponsor, Ford Motors, seemed to be at a loss when Bergen left in January. Instead of keeping Allen in his familiar timeslot of three and a half years and supporting him with a suitable lead-in that could attract respectable numbers, the network moved him into Bergen’s vacated half hour at 8:00 with disastrous consequences. Rating breakouts for the time period illustrate Allen’s decline:
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
ABC Stop The Music 16.3 16.8 17.6 14.6 9.8 8.8
CBS Adv of Sam Spade 10.7 12.5 11.3 9.5 10.1 8.3
NBC Fred Allen Show 11.7 11.3 9.4 8.9 9.5 5.8
Some reports claim that Allen welcomed the fight. Indeed, he did offer a tongue-in-cheek reward of $5,000 to any listeners who could prove that they missed a shot at Stop The Music’s jackpot by listening to his show. But by June and five straight months of third place finishes, Allen was discouraged, bitter and once again in ill-health. The 55 year old comedian abandoned his weekly series on June 26th, closing out a 17 year career in Network Radio.
Stop The Music’s 1948-49 full-hour ratings record was truly remarkable. It reflects an unmatched popularity growth in which the show added at least one rating point each month - over 376,000 homes per point - for six consecutive months from September through March, rising from an 11.3 to a 20.4. It was all downhill from there, but it was a great ride while it lasted for the ABC giveaway show that stopped Fred Allen - with strong assists from both CBS and NBC. .
Winchell Gets A Grand Deal. After a successful 16 year association, Jergens Lotion and Walter Winchell parted company in December, ending the longest sponsor-program relationship in prime time radio. The columnist - reported to be another target of the CBS talent raid - became radio’s first “Thousand Dollar A Minute” star when he signed a widely publicized 90 week, $1.35 Million contract with ABC which had sold his broadcasts to Kaiser-Frazer automobiles in December.
Winchell repaid his new sponsor's faith by tying with Jack Benny for Network Radio's most popular program in January, then taking the Number One slot by himself in February, March and June, giving ABC the greatest number of monthly wins that the network ever experienced. Winchell’s ratings rose 25% over the season but the automaker saw no results from his endorsements and dropped his Sunday broadcasts after 26 weeks. ABC was left with the problem of finding a sponsor - any sponsor - who would pick up the high-priced tab for its expensive and increasingly controversial star’s program. (See Walter Winchell,)
Hollywood Highs. Although Jergens pulled out of the high-priced Winchell broadcasts, it kept its sponsorship of Louella Parsons following Winchell at 9:15 p.m. ET. For the first time since her Hollywood Hotel days a decade earlier, Parsons returned to the season’s Top 50 with her film colony news and movie star interviews. Meanwhile, Jimmie Fidler continued his two quarter hour Sunday shows on ABC and Mutual. Parsons and Fidler combined to produce a aggregate total of 23.8 rating points on Sunday, evidence that the public was still hungry for Hollywood news and gossip in the postwar years before television drove movie attendance down.
ABC’s Steel Plate of Prestige. ABC had a record high nine programs in the season’s Top 50 - four of them were broadcast on Sunday. The network’s fourth winner followed its successful 90 minute block of Stop The Music!, Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons. It was a complete change of pace - the prestigious Theater Guild On The Air, aka The U. S. Steel Hour.
Unlike its Hollywood counterpart Lux Radio Theater which adapted familiar film stories and depended heavily on the box office appeal of its stars, Theater Guild On The Air adapted what its producers considered to be the finest plays of Broadway’s “legitimate” stage, featuring highly skilled, if not immensely popular actors. The program was introduced to the ABC Sunday schedule at 10:00 p.m. ET in 1945 and started slowly with single digit ratings for two seasons against radio favorites Take It Or Leave It, We The People and The Bickersons.
It was moved back 30 minutes in September, 1947, to take advantage of Winchell and Parsons’ lead-in and nearly doubled its audience. By the 1948-49 season it was an established hit for ABC, topping all competition in its time period. Unfortunately for ABC, its successful Sunday lineup was fragile. Theater Guild sponsor United States Steel moved the program to NBC the following season.
Monday Awash With Hits. CBS’s domination of Monday seemed like it would never end - and it never did as long as the Golden Age lasted. The network’s peak was 1948-49 when it won every time period from 7:00 until 11:00. Lever Brothers and CBS repeated with Monday’s Top Three programs packaged from 8:30 to 10:30 - Lux Radio Theater, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and My Friend Irma. The three were again in the season’s Top Ten and Lever again had five of the season’s Top Ten most popular programs. (See Monday’s All Time Top Ten, Lux…Presents Hollywood! and Arthur Godfrey.)
Hawk Returns To The Nest. After one year on NBC’s Thursday schedule and a fall from the season’s Top 50, R .J. Reynolds Tobacco moved The Bob Hawk Show comedy quiz back to CBS where it had been a fixture for five years. The quipping quizmaster remained on CBS with Camel Cigarettes sponsorship for the next five seasons, all rated in Monday’s Top Ten and the annual Top 50.
Railroads Express Style. The National Association of Railroads introduced its stylish Monday night Railroad Hour on ABC in October. The program featured handsome baritone Gordon MacRae, 27, as host and singing lead in each week’s presentation of a Broadway operetta or a Hollywood musical with popular guest stars from the stage and screen. MacRae was a best selling artist for Capitol Records and just beginning a film career that peaked seven years later when he starred in the movie versions of Oklahoma and Carousel. Like its predecessors, The Telephone Hour and Carnation Contented Hour, The Railroad Hour was never an hour in length. It began as one of network radio’s few 45 minute programs. The “hour” was further reduced in April when it was shortened to 30 minutes. Unfortunately for ABC, the railroad association, like U.S. Steel, moved its prestigious theatrical presentation and its sponsorship money to NBC the next season.
NBC Laughs Off Tuesday. Three of Tuesday’s Top Ten shows - comedies headlining Amos & Andy, Red Skelton and Milton Berle - were gone from the NBC schedule. Amos & Andy jumped to CBS while Brown & Williamson Tobacco curiously swapped Tuesday’s Red Skelton Show with its Friday success, People Are Funny. The Art Linkletter stunt show picked up a fraction of a point and finished in the season’s Top Ten, but Skelton lost 30% of his audience on Friday and his season rating fell below 20.0 for the first time in seven years.
Meanwhile, Texaco installed Milton Berle as permanent host of NBC-TV’s Texaco Star Theater on September 21st - in the same 8:00 timeslot on Tuesday that he had occupied on NBC Radio the previous season. Berle’s television success was rapid and legendary - forever leaving the question of why NBC allowed Berle’s television comedy hit to be programmed against its own Tuesday comedy lineup on radio.
In yet another questionable maneuver, NBC reversed the decade-old scheduling order of its two reliable Tuesday hits, Fibber McGee & Molly and Bob Hope. Although FM&M held its own as Tuesday’s Number One program, Hope dropped from the season’s Top Five for the first time in nine years and his annual rating fell into the teens.
One maneuver that did pay off for NBC was Lever Brothers’ Lifeboy Soap takeover of Big Town - a ten year hit on CBS - and moving it to NBC. The newspaper drama lost 25% of its audience in the shift but remained in Tuesday’s Top Ten, winning its time period against a CBS entry in the big money quiz craze - Hit The Jackpot, hosted by a glib newcomer, 28 year old Bill Cullen. (See Big Big Town.)
The Surprise Hit. This Is Your Life grew out of a Truth or Consequences segment from 1946 when the U.S. Army asked Ralph Edwards to "do something" for a despondent paraplegic veteran. Edwards hit on the idea of profiling the young man’s life on the air - with surprise appearances and tributes from his family and friends. The idea was to bridge the soldier’s happier past with the promise of better things to come beginning with a parcel of gifts presented by Edwards. The segment drew immediate praise and inspired a new program based on the biographical concept. This Is Your Life, which usually surprised its unsuspecting guests of honor, had a two year radio run for Philip Morris cigarettes and became a nine year television hit for Edwards beginning in 1952 .
Listeners Turn Tums Down. Tums gave itself unnecessary ratings heartburn in January. The Lewis Howe antacid tablets cancelled A Date With Judy starring Louise Erickson at mid-season. The sitcom had passed perennial favorite Aldrich Family as radio’s most popular teen comedy the previous season with a Top 20 finish. It had another one in the works with 16.4 average rating when it was abruptly shut down in January. Tums replaced A Date With Judy with The Alan Young Show - a sitcom starring the 29 year old Canadian comedian. Curiously, it co-starred the displaced Erickson in the role of Young’s girlfriend. Listeners obviously missed her as Judy because The Alan Young Show limped in with a 9.6 average and was cancelled at the end of the season.
The Beached Blonde. When Amos & Andy moved their highly rated Lever Brothers show to the CBS Sunday schedule, the shift bumped another Lever Brothers hit, Blondie, out of its timeslot. The sitcom starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake had enjoyed nine seasons on CBS, eight of them in the annual Top 50. The 1947-48 season was its highest rated yet, finishing 24th in the annual Top 50. (See Bloonn…dee!)
Besides their radio success, Singleton and Lake had starred in two dozen of an eventual 28 Blondie movies for Columbia Pictures all based on the immensely popular Chic Young comic strip. But Lever uprooted Blondie from its network home and put it into NBC‘s Wednesday schedule where it floundered, losing 37% of its CBS audience. (4) Blondie’s short-lived run on NBC was cancelled at the end of the season and the sitcom left radio.
Soap Star In Disguise. Blondie lost her 8:00 time period ratings to another blonde, handsome Karl Swenson, star of Frank & Anne Hummert’s detective series, Mr. Chameleon, on CBS. (5) Swenson’s Chameleon sleuth was described as a “Master of disguises.” To match each disguise that he used to catch the killer du jour, Swenson would employ one of his many character voices and neatly wrap up each week’s potboiler in a predictable, formulaic fashion. The format was virtually identical to the Hummerts’ simplistic but successful Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. Not surprisingly, both programs were sponsored by products from Sterling Drug, the biggest booster of Frank Hummert’s philosophy to keep his programs simple and repetitive as not to challenge or confuse even the most backward or casual listeners.
Like Mr. Keen, Mr. Chameleon was a program that critics loved to hate. It was con-founding to them when the show became one of the season’s Top Ten programs two years later. (See Karl Swenson.)
Mr. Television Misses Radio. Despite his smash success on NBC-TV’s Texaco Star Theater, Milton Berle hadn’t given up on radio. Berle‘s television popularity was so great that Texaco gladly picked up the tab for a radio version of Texaco Star Theater which was placed with ABC on Wednesday at 9:00 opposite NBC’s Duffy’s Tavern and the classically themed Your Song & Mine starring concert baritone Thomas L. Thomas on CBS.
To insure his radio success, Berle retained much of his cast from the previous two seasons on NBC and beefed up his comedy writing crew with Nat Hiken and brothers Danny and Neil Simon. Berle expressed confidence that he was ready to conquer radio like he had television. But the show failed. Berle & Company could only generate a 9.6 rating, losing the time period to both Duffy’s comedy and the CBS recitals. “Mr. Television” left series radio for good - his own good - in June.
ABC ’s Wednesday Wins & Woes. Bing Crosby was in the last season of his three-year Philco Radio Time contract on ABC. After two seasons of mediocre ratings with few signs of improvement, it became common knowledge within the industry that Crosby wanted out, while both CBS and NBC wanted him back despite his demand to pre-record his programs.
NBC Vice President Sid Eiges, licking the wounds from his network’s loss of its top comedy stars to CBS, told the press, "NBC is negotiating with the greatest name in the entertainment world, an international figure.” It was no secret that he was referring to Crosby - who undoubtedly appreciated the accolades but nevertheless signed with CBS. Ironically, Crosby finished his last season on ABC back in the annual Top 50 as did his lead-in, Groucho Marx’s comedy quiz, You Bet Your Life. Then Marx followed Crosby’s lead and signed with CBS, too. (See The One, The Only…Groucho!)
A Dramatic Comeback. For the first time in 14 years CBS won Thursday and did it in dramatic style by winning every time period from 7:00 until 11:00 p.m. ET.
The returning Suspense topped Al Jolson’s Kraft Music Hall at 9:00. The mystery anthology scored its highest-ever rating and became one of the year’s Top 15 programs. Jolson lost a third of his previous season’s audience and left the show in May. The long-running Music Hall itself folded four months later. (See Sus…pense!) The FBI In Peace & War beat NBC’s Aldrich Family at 8:00. FBI established itself as a solid Top 25 hit while the family sitcom starring Ezra Stone lost a third of its ratings and barely remained in the season’s Top 50. (See FBI vs. FBI.)
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons outrated Burns & Allen at 8:30 and became one of the season’s Top 15 programs. It was George and Gracie’s last series for NBC before heading back to CBS for their final Network Radio season and subsequent hit series on CBS-TV. Casey, Crime Photographer destroyed Dorothy Lamour’s Sealtest Show at 9:30. Casey bounded into the season’s Top 20 while the beautiful movie star took the once strong Sealtest half hour into single digit ratings. Sealtest then joined co-owned Kraft Foods and left Network Radio at the end of the season. Newcomer Hallmark Playhouse edged NBC’s transplant from CBS, Screen Guild Players, at 10:00 and the long running anthology of light drama, First Nighter, beat Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians at 10:30.
The CBS publicity department crowed the Thursday triumph while those who scoffed at Bill Paley’s concept of 1946 that CBS could beat NBC’s hit variety shows with drama were forced to eat crow.
To Care Enough To Air The Very Best. Kansas City greeting card giant Hallmark entered Network Radio in 1946, taking on sponsorship of the CBS series Radio Readers Digest, based on material found in the popular monthly magazine. Digest was a respectable program but never reached a season’s Top 50 in its five year run Hallmark Greeting Cards founder Joyce Hall often said that good quality was good business, leading to his company’s slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best.”
He was determined to prove it in the programs that carried his company’s name too. .Digest was replaced on CBS in 1948 with The Hallmark Playhouse, weekly half hour radio adaptations of classic and popular novels. British author James Hilton was chosen to host and select the books used in the series. Hilton’s credits included the best selling Goodbye Mr. Chips, Random Harvest and Lost Horizon. Hilton also won a 1942 Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for MGM’s Mrs. Miniver.
Hallmark Playhouse was the surprise hit of the year. Opposite longtime listener favorite Screen Guild Players on NBC, Hallmark immediately established itself as one of the season’s Top 50 programs and remained on the list for the next five years. More importantly, Hallmark Playhouse set the pattern for broadcast quality that Hallmark Cards would follow in its many years television programming that succeeded its radio series. .
Friday’s Flips & Flops. Listening tastes were changing and Friday was in turnover. Six of the previous season’s most popular shows of the night were gone. Illness forced Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks off the air for a year. People Are Funny was moved to Tuesday and Waltz Time was cancelled after its best rating and ranking in 14 seasons. (See Baby Snooks, People Are Funny and Frank Munn's Golden Voice.)
The same fate was suffered by It Pays To Be Ignorant after five seasons. The Adventures of The Thin Man and Can You Top This? were both relegated to Mutual’s home for aging programs. (See It Pays To Be Ignorant, The Curse of Dashiell Hammett, and Can You Top This?)
Only ABC held steady with its four proven winners - three low cost dramas and a big money quiz - This Is Your FBI, The Fat Man, The Lone Ranger and Break The Bank. In response to the upstart ABC, NBC programmed what would have been an unbeatable comedy lineup just a few seasons earlier - Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton and Jimmy Durante plus William Bendix in The Life of Riley. But they simply weren’t the drawing cards they once were. Television, however, would be a different story for all four.
Easy Does It - Finally. One fascinating exception to Friday’s demise of veteran comics was Easy Aces - identified during its final season on the air as Mr. Ace & Jane. Goodman and Jane Ace had logged twelve multi-network seasons when CBS brought them back after a three year absence for an encore. Jane continued to earn her title, The Queen of Malapropisms, uttering such lines as, “We’re insufferable friends,” while Goodman portrayed her long suffering husband. Although he actually wrote her material, he muttered asides to the listener in response to her lines like, “Isn’t that awful?”
Easy Aces was the quiet little program from which the industry didn’t expect much. The Aces had the last laugh - finishing for the first time ever in a night’s Top Ten and the season’s Top 50. Nevertheless, General Foods cancelled Easy Aces at mid-season to make way for a new sitcom from which great things were expected - My Favorite Husband starring Lucille Ball. Lucy’s radio predecessor to her television classic could only score half of Easy Aces’ ratings. As Jane might have said of the network and sponsor that cancelled her show , “You certainly hit the nail on the thumb that time!” (See Easy Aces.)
Another Shot At Ford’s Theater. Ford Motors had decided in 1947 to pursue prestige with The Ford Theater, a late Sunday afternoon hour comparable to U.S. Steel’s successful Sunday night anthology, Theater Guild On The Air. NBC and the auto maker boasted that no expense would be spared to bring adaptations of the finest Broadway plays to listeners, interpreted through the talents of radio’s best actors. And Ford delivered. Critics agreed that the program was highly commendable.
Unfortunately, listeners preferred the cheap thrills offered by The Shadow on Mutual and ABC’s Counterspy. Ford Theater was destroyed in the ratings and the automaker went back to the drawing board. Following Lux Radio Theater’s successful lead of 1935, Ford abandoned New York for Hollywood, moved to CBS and opened the 1948-49 season with a carbon copy of radio’s most popular program: hour-long adaptations of popular films performed by Hollywood’s biggest stars.
The new Ford Theater opened with a flourish but finished third in its time period behind ABC’s Break The Bank and Eddie Cantor on NBC. It became painfully obvious that Americans didn’t listen to the movies on Friday night - they went to the movies on Friday night. The program was cancelled at the end of the season.
Saturday Night Becomes Day Time. A major change in its Saturday schedule didn’t dislodge NBC from the Top Five positions. Missing after eleven seasons and ten Top 50 finishes, Kay Kyser was gone from NBC and prime time radio with Colgate’s cancellation. Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge was picked up in November by Pillsbury for a seven month run on ABC’s weekday schedule where it finished a poor second to NBC’s long running soap operas, Backstage Wife and Stella Dallas.
To replace Kyser, Colgate moved A Day In The Life of Dennis Day from NBC’s Wednesday schedule to Saturday and paired the singer’s sitcom with its successful Judy Canova Show. As a result, Day and Canova rose to the top of Saturday’s ratings.
The big loser in Saturday’s situation was Truth Or Consequences. The FCC’s far-fetched lottery edict prohibiting giveaways spooked Ralph Edwards and sponsor Procter & Gamble into abandoning the secret identity contests that had scored big ratings and raised millions for charity. The stunt show lost nearly 40% of its audience, falling from sixth to 30th in the season’s rankings.
A Bang Up Saturday On CBS. CBS recovered from its 1947-48 Saturday shutout by placing four programs in Saturday’s Top Ten. Among them was the gunshot-filled Gangbusters, which the network lifted from ABC at mid-season for Procter & Gamble sponsorship. Another was the wildest music show ever broadcast, hosted by a dead-panned bandleader dressed in a clownish suit who addressed his audience as, “Music lovers.” .
By his late 20's Spike Jones was regarded as one of the best studio drummers in radio, performing anonymously, but profitably, in John Scott Trotter’s Kraft Music Hall orchestra and Billy Mills’ Fibber McGee & Molly band. He was also known among his peers as a comedian - just like his fellow bandsman, trombonist Jerry Colonna. (See “Professor” Jerry Colonna.)
Jones’ big break came in 1942 when he gathered a group of studio players and recorded Der Fuehrer’s Face for RCA’s Bluebird label. The anti-Nazi novelty became an instant hit and led to the formation of Spike Jones’ “City Slickers” - a group of highly skilled musicians who doubled on washboards, cowbells, auto horns, sirens, pistols filled with blanks and most anything else that could lead to musical mayhem.
Two years on the Bob Burns Show followed along with a string hit records - all parodies of familiar classical and popular songs - most notably The William Tell Overture, and Cocktails For Two - plus the holiday novelty All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth featuring the falsetto voice of trumpeter George Rock. Coca Cola and CBS gave Jones his own Friday timeslot in the 1947-48 season. The show was moved briefly to Sunday at 6:30 in January, 1949, and two months later to Saturday at 7:00 - opposite the NBC Symphony under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. Spike Jones won the time period.
Multiples Run Out of The Money. For the first time and only time, no Multiple Run program finished among the season’s Top 50. Nevertheless, CBS continued to place its entire 6:45 to 8:00 block in the Multiple Runs’ Top Ten. Serial sitcom Beulah became the first CBS program in six seasons to beat NBC’s Chesterfield Supper Club and win prime time’s keynote quarter hour at 7:00.
ABC set new marks for its early evening programming by placing both of its alternating half-hour adventure dramas in the Multiple Run Top Ten. The Lone Ranger was in the second of its three year run topping the list at 7:30 p.m. ET. (See The Lone Ranger.) Counterspy, a crime fighter from a different era, filled the 7:30 timeslot on Tuesday and Thursday.
From Super Spy To Soaper Star. Radio actor Don MacLaughlin was 35 when he was cast as David Harding, Counterspy, in 1942. It turned out to be one of the steadiest jobs in Network Radio - he held it for 15 years. Counterspy was producer Phillips H. Lord’s interpretation of the government agents fighting espionage genre - it predated both The FBI In Peace & War and This Is Your FBI by several years. (See FBI vs. FBI on this site.) The purely fictional Counterspy was supposed to be to G-Men what Lord’s Gangbusters was to local police. MacLaughlin had played various roles in Gangbusters melodramas since the show’s inception.
Counterspy bounced around the Blue/ABC prime time and Sunday afternoon schedules for seven seasons before achieving its highest ratings on the network in the two years when it alternated with The Lone Ranger at 7:30 under Pepsi Cola sponsorship. Pepsi took the show to NBC’s Thursday schedule in 1950 and Gulf Oil took over its sponsorship the following season.. But after two years of disappointing ratings Counterspy was relegated to NBC’s Sunday afternoon schedule and offered to participating sponsors. Counterspy’s final stop was Mutual in 1953 where it was programmed in various time periods under participating and co-op sponsorship for four and a half years.
MacLaughlin’s tour of duty with the fictional government crime fighting unit ended in 1957, but he was busier than ever. A year earlier he originated the role of lawyer Chris Hughes on CBS-TV’s As The World Turns - a part he played for 32 years until his death in 1986 at age 78. Don MacLaughlin knew how to keep a job.
Henry’s Leads Turn To Lead. Veteran West Coast newsman Bill Henry had reported the 8:55 p.m. ET Johns-Manville News strip on CBS since 1943 when Cecil Brown walked out in a dispute over the network’s editorial policy. Henry had averaged double digit ratings in the timeslot and constantly placed in the Multiple Runs’ Top Ten. But interest in news had waned since the end of World War II - evidenced by the absence of any newscasts in the season’s Top Five Multiple Run programs. It was the first time that had ever happened.
CBS anticipated the drop-off and discontinued Henry’s popular news strip on June 25, 1948. His Johns-Manville News immediately began a new five year run on Mutual, but not to the 11.7 rating he had enjoyed on CBS with lead-in’s provided by the likes of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Mr. Keen and Dr. Christian. His first season on Mutual averaged a 2.6 rating - down 80%.
(1) Television later proved the IRS point when black actors Alvin Childress played Amos and Spencer Williams was Andy.
(2) ABC Radio broadcast a separate production of The Original Amateur Hour on Wednesdays.
(3) Meet The Press remains on NBC-TV’s Sunday television schedule to this day - but nowhere near prime time.
(4) Penny Singleton left the Blondie radio series at mid-season and was replaced by movie star Ann Rutherford.
(5) Karl Swenson was one of weekday radio’s busiest actors - the male lead in Frank & Anne Hummerts’ afternoon soap operas Our Gal Sunday and Lorenzo Jones.
Top 50 Network Programs - 1948-49
A. C Nielsen Radio Index Serv, Sep 1948 - Dec 1948
& C.E. Hooper Semi-Monthly Reports, Jan 1949 - Jun 1949.
Total Programs Rated, 6-11 PM: 164 Programs Rated 13 Weeks & Ranked: 148 37,623,000 Radio Homes 94.2% Coverage of US One Rating Point = 376,230 Homes
1 1 Lux Radio Theater 25.5 Lever Bros/Lux Soap Mon 9:00 60 CBS
2 2 Fibber McGee & Molly 23.5 Johnson Wax Tue 9:30 30 NBC
3 10 Jack Benny Program 22.9 American Tobacco/Lucky Strike Sun 7:00 30 CBS (1)
4 30 Walter Winchell’s Journal 21.7 Kaiser-Frazer Autos Sun 9:00 15 ABC (2)
5t 10 Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts 20.1 Lever Bros/Lipton Tea Mon 8:30 30 CBS
5t 4 Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 20.1 Standard/Chase & Sanborn Sun 8:00 30 NBC
7 5 Bob Hope Show 19.8 Lever Bros/Swan Soap Tue 9:00 30 NBC
8 8 My Friend Irma 19.5 Lever Bros/Pepsodent Toothpaste Mon 10:00 30 CBS
9t 3 Amos & Andy 16.9 Lever Bros/Rinso Laundry Soap Sun 7:30 30 CBS
9t 33 People Are Funny 17.1 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Cigarettes Tue 10:30 30 NBC
11 15 Duffy’s Tavern 16 7 Bristol Myers/Vitalis & Trushay Wed 9:00 30 NBC
12 12 Mister District Attorney 16.6 Bristol Myers/Ipana & Sal Hapatica Wed 9:30 30 NBC
13t 19 A Date With Judy 16.4 Lewis & Howe/Tums Antacid Tue 8:30 30 NBC
13t 50 Suspense 16.4 Autolite Spark Plugs Thu 9:00 30 CBS
15 33 Mr Keen 16.0 American Home Products/Kolynos Toothpaste Thu 8:30 30 CBS
16 44 Casey Crime Photographer 15.7 Toni Home Permanents Thu 9:30 30 CBS
17 9 Phil Harris & Alice Faye 15.4 Rexall Drug Stores Sun 7:30 30 NBC
18t N Mystery Theater 15.2 American Home Products/Bayer Aspirin Tue 8:00 30 CBS
18t N Stop The Music 15.2 Participating Sponsors Sun 8:00 60 ABC
20 22 Inner Sanctum 15.0 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Mon 8:00 30 CBS
21 17 Big Town 14.8 Lever Bros/Lifeboy Soap Tue 10:00 30 NBC
22t 36 A Day In The Life of Dennis Day 14.6 Colgate/Palmolive Soap Sat 10:00 30 NBC
22t 42 The FBI In Peace & War 14.6 Procter & Gamble/Lava Hand Soap Thu 8:00 30 CBS
22t 25 This Is Your FBI 14.6 Equitable Life Insurance Fri 8:30 30 ABC
25 13 Red Skelton Show 14.4 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Cigarettes Fri 9:30 30 NBC
26 55 Bob Hawk Show 14.1 RJ Reynolds/Camel Cigarettes Mon 10:30 30 CBS
27t 28 Judy Canova Show 13.9 Colgate Palmolive Peet/Halo Shampoo Sat 9:30 30 NBC
27t 14 Life of Riley 13.9 Procter & Gamble/Prell Shampoo Fri 10:00 30 NBC
29 15 Your Hit Parade 13.8 American Tobacco/Lucky Strike Sat 9:00 30 NBC
30t 42 The Fat Man 13.7 Pepto Bismol Fri 8:00 30 ABC
30t 31 Mr & Mrs North 13.7 Colgate Palmolive Peet/Halo Shampoo Tue 8:30 30 CBS
30t 6 Truth Or Consequences 13.7 Procter & Gamble/Duz Laundry Soap Sat 8:30 30 NBC
33 18 Great Gildersleeve 13.4 Kraft Foods/Parkay Margarine Wed 8:30 30 NBC
34t 36 The Big Story 13.3 American Tobacco/Pall Mall Cigarettes Wed 10:00 30 NBC
34t 76 Louella Parsons Hollywood News 13.3 Jergens Lotion Sun 9:15 15 ABC
34t N Your Song & Mine 13.3 Borden Dairies Wed 9:00 30 CBS
37 25 Burns & Allen Show 13.0 General Foods/Maxwell House Thu 8:30 30 NBC
38t 20 Al Jolson's Kraft Music Hall 12.8 Kraft Cheese Thu 9:00 30 NBC
38t 36 Break The Bank 12.8 Bristol Myers/Sal Hapatica Fri 9:00 30 ABC
40t 27 Adventures of Sam Spade 12.6 Wildroot Cream Oil Sun 8:00 30 CBS
40t 62 Bing Crosby's Philco Radio Time 12.6 Philco Radios & Televisions Wed 10:00 30 ABC
42t 6 Fred Allen Show 12.5 Ford Motors Sun 8:00 30 NBC (3)
42t 31 Manhattan Merry Go Round 12.5 Sterling Drug/ Dr Lyons Tooth Powder Sun 9:00 30 NBC
44 N Mr Chameleon 12.3 American Home Products/Bayer Aspirin Wed 8:00 30 CBS
45 N Mr Ace & Jane (Easy Aces) 12.2 General Foods/Sanka Coffee Fri 8:30 30 CBS
46t 47 Theater Guild On The Air 12.1 US Steel Sun 9:30 60 ABC
46t 72 Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life 12.1 Elgin-American Costume Jwlry Wed 9:30 30 ABC
48 53 Hallmark Playhouse 12.0 Hallmark Cards Thu 10:00 30 CBS
49t 23 Aldrich Family 11.9 General Foods/Grapenuts & Jello Thu 8:00 30 NBC
49t 76 Curtain Time 11.9 Mars Candy Wed 10:30 30 NBC
(1) Jack Benny Program Oct - Dec American Tobacco/Lucky Strike Sun 7:00 30 NBC
(2) Walter Winchell Sep - Dec Jergens Lotion Sun 9:30 15 ABC
(3) Fred Allen Show Oct - Dec Ford Motors Sun 8:30 30 NBC
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com