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 unmistakable 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., Carmen Miranda, Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis, Ginger Rogers, George Sanders, and Gloria Swanson; musical/comedy stage stars Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Judy Holliday and Gordon MacRae; opera stars Lauritz Melchior and Robert Merrill; and, jazz and popular music titans Louis Armstrong, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, The Ink Spots, Frankie Laine, Judy Garland, Édith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, Rudy Vallée and Sarah Vaughan.
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 Berle, Bob Cummings, Joan Davis, Ed Gardner (Archie from Duffy's Tavern), Phil Harris, Garry Moore, Jan Murray, Ozzie & Harriet Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), Phil Silvers, Danny Thomas, Paul Winchell and more.
Other shows in the radio universe were referenced. The Big Show's November 26, 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 satirized 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."
Read more about this topic: The Big Show (NBC Radio)
Famous quotes containing the words top and/or talent:
“Saving lives is not a top priority in the halls of power. Being compassionate and concerned about human life can cause a man to lose his job. It can cause a woman not to get the job to begin with.”
—Myriam Miedzian, U.S. author. Boys Will Be Boys, ch. 2 (1991)
“I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)