The Big Show (NBC Radio)

For the professional wrestler, see Big Show. For the 1980 television series, see The Big Show.

When The Big Show premiered November 5, 1950, this ad, showing NBC's full evening schedule, ran in Sunday newspapers across the country. Here's how it looked in the Kingsport Times-News (Kingsport, Tennessee).

The Big Show, an American radio variety program featuring 90 minutes of top-name comic, stage, screen and music talent, was aimed at keeping American radio in its classic era alive and well against the rapidly-growing television tide. For a good portion of its two-year run (1950-51), the show's quality made its ambition not terribly far-fetched.

Banking on Bankhead

Hosted by legendary stage actress and personality Tallulah Bankhead, The Big Show's November 5, 1950 premiere on NBC was a great success, and it stayed on Sunday nights from 6:00-7:30pm EST for the next two years. NBC went full-throttle in an attempt to keep radio from its predicted death, and The Big Show was thought to be a key to that effort. Newsweek stated it was "the biggest bang to hit radio since TV started." As if to prove big bang and big bucks were mutual partners, some $100,000 could be budgeted for a single installment.

The show's success was credited to Bankhead's notorious wit and ad-libbing ability in addition to the show's superior scripting. She had one of the funniest writers in the business on her staff: Goodman Ace, the mastermind of radio's legendary Easy Aces. She included renowned ad-libbers in the show---particularly Fred Allen (he and his longtime sidekick and wife, Portland Hoffa, appeared so often they could have been the show's regular co-hosts) and Groucho Marx, both of whom appeared on the first season's finale and appeared jointly on three other installments.

As Bankhead recorded in her memoirs, she took the show because she needed the money but nearly changed her mind when she feared she'd be little more than a glorified mistress of ceremonies with nothing to do but introduce the feature performers. "Guess what happened?" she continued. "Your heroine emerged from the fracas as the Queen of the Kilocycles. Authorities cried out that Tallulah had redeemed radio. In shepherding my charges through The Big Show, said the critics, I had snatched radio out of the grave. The autopsy was delayed."

Top talent

The show opened each week with Bankhead quietly trumpeting the high profile of each show's guests. Those guests would then introduce themselves in alphabetical order before Bankhead finished with her own unmistakeable rasp, "And my name, darlings, is Tallulah Bankhead."

The show's lineup, including Allen and Marx, was a literal "who's who" of American entertainment of the time. They included film stars Ethel Barrymore, Charles Boyer, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Judy Garland, Carmen Miranda, Ginger Rogers, George Sanders and Gloria Swanson; musical/comedy stage stars Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Judy Holliday, Bob Hope, Ethel Merman and Gordon MacRae; opera stars Lauritz Melchior, Robert Merrill, and Ezio Pinza; and, jazz and popular music titans Louis Armstrong, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, the Ink Spots, Frankie Laine, Edith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, Rudy Vallee and Sarah Vaughan.

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The show also featured many of the nation's most familiar radio stars, some of whom were beginning to shine on the medium the show was intended to help hold at bay: Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs), Milton (Mr. Television) Berle, Bob Cummings, Joan Davis, Ed Gardner (Archie from Duffy's Tavern), Phil Harris, Garry Moore, Jan Murray, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Phil Silvers, Danny Thomas, Paul Winchell and more.

Other shows in the radio universe were referenced. The Big Show's 26 November, 1950 installment, for example, took the cast of Bankhead, Fred Allen, Jack Carson, Melchoir and Ed Wynn to the fictitious Duffy's Tavern, where Ed Gardner, in character as Archie the manager, awaited them.

Fred Allen, who frequently joked about his own radio demise, joined Bankhead in recreating one of the best-remembered routines from Allen's old show: the "Mr. and Mrs. Breakfast Show" routine that ruthlessly satirised the often saccharine husband-and-wife morning shows that became something of a radio staple a decade earlier. And, it was on The Big Show's premiere that Allen delivered his famous wisecrack about TV: "Television is a new medium, and I have discovered why it's called a new medium---because nothing is well done."

"The Big Show was not just more grand than most radio shows---it was also more witty, smoothly produced, smart, and ambitious, with an interesting juxtaposition of guests, but it wasn't significantly different," wrote radio historian Gerald Nachman in Raised on Radio. "It was just a more lavish, inflated revival of radio's earliest form---the variety showcase; you could almost hear the sequins." Yet Nachman admired the show, which he said was "as close to a Broadway show as radio could whip together each week."

Finale

Except for special tributes (the series premiere, coinciding with the anniversary of George M. Cohan's death, was a particularly slam-bang tribute: a medley of Cohan musicals' signature songs), the show usually concluded with each guest taking a turn singing music director Meredith Willson's composition "May The Good Lord Bless and Keep You," a touch which proved sentimental but not saccharine. So did Bankhead's likewise customary sign-off, wishing "Godspeed" to American armed forces around the world.

In the surviving episodes, including that first-season finale, Bankhead and her guests breeze through the comic banter and music sequences. Bankhead benefited from a first-class musical director in Willson. Ace's staff writers included Frank Wilson, George Foster, Mort Greene and Selma Diamond. Fred Allen, a longtime friend of Goodman Ace, contributed as well and is considered (at least by historian Nachman) to have been the show's unofficial script doctor.

The Big Show wasn't quite big enough to put television in its place and keep it there. NBC cancelled the show after two seasons and a reported loss of $1 million, a major figure in those years. The show's failure to pull the audience needed to keep it alive longer than two years might also have been due to the former NBC hits now nestling on rival CBS, including The Jack Benny Program, Amos 'n' Andy and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy). But The Big Show is remembered as one of the great final stands, at its best, of classic American old-time radio and---for its wit, colorful music and dramatics---as good as broadcast variety programming got on either medium. There remain those who believe Bankhead never had quite as unfettered and effective an outlet to shine, before or after, as she did hosting this show.

In the spring of 1980, a 90-minute TV series titled The Big Show, premiered on NBC. It was nominated for several Emmy awards but died a quick death after only a few months.

Listen to

• The Big Show (May 6, 1951) first season finale with Fred Allen, Lucienne Boyer, Portland Hoffa, George Jessel, Groucho Marx, Ginger Rogers, Margaret Truman and Meredith Willson.
• Radio Nostalgia Network: The Big Show (April 1, 1951)
• The Big Show (April 8, 1951) with Jimmy Durante, Rudy Vallee, Vivian Blaine, William Marshall, Ossie Davis and Jane Morgan.
• Same Time, Same Station: The Big Show (April 15, 1951) with Eddie Cantor, Jack Carson, Olivia De Haviland, Eddy Arnold and Martha Raye.

References

• Ace, Goodman. Interview with Richard Lamparski, WBAI, 1970.
• Ace, Goodman. The Better of Goodman Ace. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
• Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.
• Carrier, Jeffrey L. Tallulah Bankhead: A Bio-Bibliography, page 35. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1991.
• Crosby, John. Out of the Blue. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
• Nachman, Gerald. Raised on Radio. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

External links

• Philip Oliver's Tallulah: A Passionate Life