Here is the first episode of the Jack Benny Program. This aired on the CBS channel on October 28, 1950. This is only one out of four episodes in the first season. Please enjoy.
Jack Benny was absolutely so very funny and really appreciate being able to see The Jack Benny Program! God Bless Everyone Who was on the show and all the director, producer, writers... Thank you for sharing these. Great Fun and Wonderful memories.
I actually met Jack Benny in 1961. He was playing his Stradivarious violin at a charitable concert in Toronto. i was 11 years old at the time. He was handsome, all aglow, warm hearted, kind and generous with his time.
GREAT! Great to see this very first television broadcast of the Jack Benny program that was a very popular radio program that became a very popular television program. Those were the golden age of comedy days that's a fact! Thanks to the classic comedians like Jack Benny and the classic tv shows like this one posted here.
LSMFT -- wow. Saw this when I was 5 years old on my fathers new B/W GE TV from Boston. - WBZ, Channel 2 I think. Lucky Strike Means 'Fine Television'. Such good memories. This was the first time I saw Broadway as it really was . . never can be duplicated. All live too! Totally amazing.
Live TV in 1950. AT&T Long Lines didn't yet have the coaxial cable from El Paso to LA upgraded to handle video, so all shows seen live from NYC as far west as St. Louis were filmed on kinescope and sent to the West for broadcast sometimes weeks later. That cable finally was upgraded in 1954. A few years later, live shows could be transmitted coast-to-coast via the new TD and TH microwave systems. Once videotaping systems from AMPEX became available in '56, the same show could be in the same time slot on both coasts. It was a really big deal.
Both coasts were finally linked via coaxial cable in September 1951- and "coast-to-coast television" became the norm. However, kinnies and film prints were still used in certain areas of the country, because some stations didn't carry "live" programming {they had to depend on more than one network for their schedules, as several were the ONLY station on the air in certain communities}.
Thanks for the upload! I was born in 1963,,and didn't know who Jack Benny was until my Dad got me listening to 'When Radio Was''. At the time of this writing I'm listening to the radio broadcasts,from the 1932 Canada dry broadcast on up. I'm up to Dec 1944 episodes,with a lot to go! You can get the apps on your smartphone,free!
When i was a teen in the 70's,my dad got a set of "old time radio" shows from comedy to drama to mystery. I lived them. That was the first I had heard about Jack Benny and bib hope and Burms and Allen and so many others crin the golden era of TV in its infancy. I'm talking good, wholesome CLEAN TV!
When I was a young child in the early-1970s, I was familiar with Jack Benny from his TV specials on NBC, and his guest appearances on "The Tonight Show, (Starring Johnny Carson)". Even during the last years of his life, Jack Benny still was very funny and very entertaining.
Believe me my old hometown of NYC was really exciting and adventurous even before the Mad Men era of the 1960s which I call the Roaring 60s. I was around then attending elementary school in the borough of Queens. 😊
Even though the main credits weren't seen at the end of the program, this is what they were, according to VARIETY's review of it [November 1, 1950]: PRODUCER: HILLIARD MARKS DIRECTOR: DICK LINKROUM WRITERS: SAM PERRIN, MILT JOSEFEBERG, GEORGE BALZER, JOHN TACKABERRY MUSICAL DIRECTOR: MAHLON MERRICK
Chump,chump, chump, and Chump! Ahhhhh! Tastes good like a cigarette should. I am old enough to remember Winstone cigarettes TV commercials from the 1960s. 😊
Yes, this was Jack's first appearance on "national" television (although the West Coast saw this via kinescope film- like this- a week after this was televised "live" as far west as St. Louis, as Jack noted; coaxial cables enabling "live" coast-to-coast telecasts weren't completed until September 1951). Jack wanted to do a 45 minute program because he felt an hour was "too long", and a half-hour would be "too short" {yet in the end, the show "ran over"}. CBS filled the remaining quarter-hour [at 8:45pm] with a Sam Levenson "audition", sponsored by Wildroot Cream Oil hair tonic. Sam's monologue, which were often featured on Ed Sullivan's "TOAST OF THE TOWN", touched on his boyhood in New York and his days as a schoolteacher. He was successful enough to earn his own program (sponsored by Oldsmobile), beginning on the network in January 1951.
Dorothy Collins, who also appeared on "YOUR HIT PARADE", and appeared in Luckies commercials often enough to be known as "The Sweetheart of Lucky Strike", is right next to him.
At 37:23 old JB lets out how much Lucky Strike's paid for Ms. Shores appearance . Snooky Lanson had that southern drawl like the old tobacco auctioneer .
