The Pioneers Of Early TV

 

 

 

 

I don’t normally include current TV shows in this blog, but today I’m making an exception for a PBS series called The Pioneers of Television.

 

I’ve now seen both seasons of this series (8 1-hour episodes), and can heartily recommend it to anyone who loves classic TV.

My only complaint:  I wish each episode were two hours long, more narrowly focused, and included more archival footage.

 

The attempt to cover each genre (Variety, Sci-Fi, Crime Dramas, Childrens TV, etc) in just an hour whets the appetite, but leaves you wanting more.

 

While Season 2 has just finished, three episodes from season 1 are about to be reprised on PBS, and so if you haven’t caught them, or want to record them (they are `keepers’), you have a fresh opportunity.

 

This from the PBS Pioneers of Television website.

An encore presentation of three episodes from the first season of PIONEERS OF TELEVISION, which explore the early years of sitcoms, late night and variety shows, will air Tuesdays, February 15-March 1, 2011, 8:00-9:00 p.m. ET on PBS.

Late Night

The late-night escapades of Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson enter primetime in this episode about the formative years of late-night television.
Airs: 2/15/2011

Sitcoms

Rediscover television comedy classics, as this episode focuses on five key sitcoms: "I Love Lucy," "The Honeymooners," "Make Room for Daddy," "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show."
Airs: 2/22/2011

Variety

From Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" and Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater" to "The Carol Burnett Show," "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and "Laugh-in," among others, this episode celebrates the variety show.
Airs: 3/1/2011

As an added bonus, the PBS website also has more than 2 dozen video clips online, many of which are from the `cutting room floor’, and did not appear in the finished episodes.

 

Interviews with Betty White, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Doc Severinson, James Garner, Jonathon Winters, Rod Serling, and many more.

Just a few of nearly 30 video clips

You’ll also find 16 short biographies of Pioneering TV people, including Andy Griffith, Bill Cosby, Merv Griffin, and Betty White and 3 entertaining trivia quizzes to test your classic TV knowledge.

How To Have A Wonderful Crime

 

 

 

 

 

I am, admittedly, a fan of mystery stories.

 

I grew up reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery magazine, The Saint Detective Magazine, along with Shell Scott, Sherlock Holmes, a plethora of assorted crime novels, and my personal favorite – anything by Travis McGee creator and fiction writer extraordinaire John D. McDonald.

 

Which likely explains my fondness for many of the old low-budget `B’ mystery movies – programmers really – released by poverty row studios like Monogram and Grand National during the 1930s and 1940s.

 

The Saint, Bulldog Drummond, The Falcon, Boston Blackie, The Lone Wolf . . .  formulaic to be sure, but for me they are the mac & cheese of early cinema.

 

Comfort food for the mind.

 

Likewise, during the late 1930s and into the early 1950s, crime & mystery dramas on radio were almost certainly the most popular dramatic genre.

 

Some . . . like Sherlock Holmes,Casey Crime Photographer, Boston Blackie, Box 13, Dangerous Assignment,  and Adventure by Morse all featured recognizable recurring characters.

 

Anthology shows, like Murder at Midnight, Suspense, The Whistler, and Crime Club – with the exception of the host/narrator – used different characters in every episode.

 

Crime Club – which aired from 1946-47 - while not the best remembered of these radio shows, has an interesting pedigree.

 

The Crime Club began as a series of crime fiction books in 1928, published by Doubleday.   Over a period of 63 years they published nearly 2,500 titles, including all 50 of  The Saint by Leslie Charteris.

 

In 1931, an early version of The Crime Club appeared on radio first as a 6 day-a-week 15 minute show, and then twice-a-week, sponsored by Eno’s Effervescent antacid salts.

 

This was one of the earliest crime dramas on radio, and for a time was very popular. Unlike the later radio version, the stories (taken from Crime Club books) were reworked for two recurring detective characters, Detective Spencer Dean, and his sidekick Danny Cassidy.

 

During the 1930s, Universal Studios inked a deal with Doubleday to use The Crime Club imprint for a series of mystery films, starting with The Westland Case in 1937.

 

In 1946, The Crime Club took to the airwaves once more, this time with a little more polish.

 

Directed by Roger Bower, and with Crime Club stories adapted by the likes of writers like Stedman `The Shadow’ Coles or Wyllis `Quiet Please’ and `Light’s Out’ Cooper these 30 minute mysteries used the contrivance of the host/librarian who speaks to the listener as if they have just requested one of the Club's books.

 

He would settle his `guests’ into an easy chair, and begin the tale.

 

The Internet Archive has a nice selection of 30 episodes from the 46-47 run of this series.   You can download each episode individually, or listen online using their embedded player.

The link for these episodes is HERE.

With MP3 CD players common in new cars, these make excellent traveling companions.   I download, and burn about 50 hours of OTR audio to a single CD.

 

Beats the heck out of listening to what passes for radio today.

The Other Famous Humphrey

 

 

 

 

 

In the entertainment world, when it comes to famous men with the first name Humphrey – you can count them on the fingers of one hand.

 

Even if it is missing three fingers.

 

Everyone thinks of Bogart, of course. But many - particularly from Britain - will come up with Humphrey Lyttleton – famed post-war jazz musician and a BBC radio personality for 4 decades.

 

Americans are likely less aware of Lyttleton than our cousins across the pond, but hopefully today’s blog will do a little to rectify that.

 

While I’ve known of `Humph’s’ jazz recordings for decades, and was vaguely aware of his BBC career, I confess I’d not thought of him in many years.

 

That is, until one of my regular readers (Lucy from Montana – Thanks!) of my `other’ blog (Avian Flu Diary) sent me a Youtube video of some music she thought I’d enjoy.

 

The piece was `Bad Penny Blues’, which became the first jazz recording to break into Britain’s top 20 (clung tenuously to #19 for 6 weeks!) in 1956.

 

Humph, who was born and educated at Eton (his father was a house master there) picked up the trumpet in 1936 (at the age of 15) and twelve years later – after exiting the service following WWII – Lyttleton joined George Webb’s Dixielanders jazz band.

 

Lyttleton played jazz, and maintained a `day job’ as a cartoonist for the Daily Mail until 1956.  Lyttleton formed his first jazz band in the late 1940s, and after achieving notoriety in the mid-1950s, toured successfully for decades.

 

Humph often teamed up with other jazz greats like Mr. Aker Bilk, and George Melly.  Here is a clip with Mr. Aker (‘Stranger on the Shore’) Bilk, and the Harlem Ramblers from 1982 doing Avalon (written by Al Jolson).

In 1967 Lyttleton began a 40-year stint as presenter on BBC radio’s Best of Jazz radio show, using his near encyclopedic knowledge of jazz to great advantage. Along the way, Humph  penned 8 books, and numerous magazine articles on jazz.

 

In 1972, he was picked to chair the panel of what would become a hugely popular radio show; I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. 

The show was billed as `an antidote’ to conventional panel shows which were ubiquitous on radio and TV, and consisted of a chairman (exclusively Humph after the first season) who gave the panel (4 comedians working in pairs) `silly things to do’.

 

His dry British wit, exquisitely bored delivery, and his ability to make delightfully risqué comments that could be innocently interpreted – and thus able to get past the censors – helped to make the show a smash.

 

A Taste of ISIHAC, but fear not, there will be more to come:

There is a Humphrey Lyttleton Official website, where you can delve deeper into his career.  But today is all about video clips of Humph you can enjoy.

 

First stop is a 1 hour (albeit split into 6 parts on YouTube) documentary from The South Bank Show, called  A Tribute to Humphrey Lyttleton.

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6

A few choice videos of Humph playing include:

 

 

Sweet Georgia Brown

Tin Roof Blues

Fidgety Feet

Mood Indigo

Struttin’ With Some Barbeque

 

 

For those appreciative of British humor (as am I), we’ve hundreds of short (under 10 minute) snips from ISIHAC’s long broadcast history available on Youtube.

You can access them HERE.

 

We lost this jazz great, radio icon, and historian in 2008.  You can read a detailed, and loving, tribute to the man and his career in his obituary that appeared in UK’s Independent Newspaper.

 

Humphrey Lyttleton. A remarkable life, well lived.

 

And we are all the better for it.

 

Anne Francis And A Forbidden Planet Cast Reunion

 

 

With the passing of two Hollywood greats in the past month, the lovely Anne Francis and the equally lovely Leslie Nielson (I’m sure he’d appreciate that description), one can’t help but think back to the movie that did much to launch both of their careers:

Forbidden Planet, arguably the first great modern science fiction movie.

Watch the Theatrical Trailer for Forbidden Planet.

Nielson was a familiar face to early TV viewers, appearing frequently in such shows as Tales of Tomorrow, Suspense, and Lights Out.

 

Like Nielson, Anne Francis had appeared in a fair amount of early television, but had already made her mark in movies as well, having appeared prominently in Blackboard Jungle and Bad Day at Black Rock, and to a lesser extent in Battle Cry.

 

For all of its attributes (special effects, Technicolor production, and decent budget), MGM’s forbidden Planet was a (high grade) B movie, never envisioned to become a classic of the genre.

 

The cast reads like a roll call of soon-to-be TV stars.  In addition to veteran movie actor Walter Pidgeon (top billed), Francis and Nielson were joined by:

Jack Kelly              - Maverick

Richard Anderson   – 6 Million Dollar Man

Earl Holliman         -  Police Woman

James Drury          -  The Virginian

Warren Stevens     - Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers

                                     & 150+ guest appearances

 

Today, I ran across a 30 minute filmed cast reunion, from 1999, moderated by Star Trek’s George Takai.

 

The occasion was the re-release of Forbidden Planet, and herein we get a delightful visit from Anne Francis, Warren Stevens, Earl Holliman, and Richard Anderson, with remembrances of the filming of that classic movie.

Leslie Nielson, noticeably absent, sent his regrets but was in Europe filming a movie as part of his `second’ career.

 

Although it rarely happens in Hollywood, Nielson – who had been type cast as a dramatic actor (The Bold Ones, The Poseidon Adventure)– broke into comedy and restarted his flagging career after his brilliantly dead-pan performance in AIRPLANE!.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.  He became the rubber faced clown of the TV series Police Squad! and nearly two dozen of movie parodies.

 

Anne Francis would go on to star in the short-lived but well remembered detective series Honey West – a spin off from a 2nd season episode of Burke’s Law.

 

For more on her career, friend and fellow blogger, Andrew Fielding recently wrote of his remembrances of the star of Honey West in his tribute to Anne Francis.

 

Hollywood On The Air

 

 

 

 

The symbiotic (and sometimes incestuous) relationship between Hollywood movies and radio blossomed in the 1930s with the maturation of both mediums, and the two remained heavily intertwined for decades.

 

Move stars were often required to appear on popular radio shows as part of their contract to help promote their latest movie – and many ended up with their own radio shows as well.

Jimmy Stewart was The Six Shooter, Alan Ladd starred in Box 13, and Bogie and Bacall co-starred in Bold Venture . . . just to name a few.

 

It was common practice to produce condensed radio versions of popular movies – often with the same stars – to help promote films.

 

Lux Radio Theatre is perhaps the most famous, and enduring, of these shows but others included Screen Director’s Playhouse, Academy Award Theater, and Matinee Theater.

 

Radio stars (and sometimes entire entire radio shows) would show up on, or even starred in, Hollywood productions.

 

 

Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee & Molly,  and Lum & Abner all migrated successfully – and often – into the movies.

 

 

While all of the major (and sometimes minor) movie studios worked hand-in-hand with radio, MGM studios was probably better positioned with its musically inclined roster of talent to take full advantage of the radio medium.

 

For nearly two decades MGM studios produced 15-minute promotional radio shows called LEO is On The Air, each featuring vignettes, musical performances, and frequently guest appearances by the cast members from upcoming theatrical releases.

 

 

Similarly, Hollywood Is On The Air, was a 15 minute preview of upcoming movies from other studios.

 

Sure . . . these are little more than commercials, or `radio trailers’ for upcoming movies  . . .  but they manage to package a great deal of entertainment, and fun, into 15 minutes.  

 

And if you are an old movie buff, you’ll find a lot to like in these old radio programs.   The Internet Archive has a mixed bag of this genre of radio show, with more than 40 assorted episodes spanning the 1930s and 1940s.

 

 

Hollywood Is On The Air

 

 

 

A partial list of what’s available includes:

 

Life Begins for Andy Hardy

Little Nelly Kelly

Love Finds Andy Hardy

Marx Brothers Go West

Mutiny On the Bounty

New Faces of 1937

Northwest Mounted Police

Roberta

Rosalie

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The Bells of St. Mary's

The Courtship of Andy Hardy

The Fleet's In

The Gay Divorcee

 

 

Each show runs about 15 minutes, and is about 3 Mbytes in size.

 

Enjoy.