Yesterday I was talking to a coworker about the Ed Sullivan Show. I told him I’d heard that in the early '50s, when the show was still called Toast of the Town, they didn’t have videotape, so they had to perform each show twice. They’d do a live performance for the eastern U.S., then bring in a new audience two hours later and do another performance for the western half. He didn’t believe me and asked me for a cite. Of course, I respect his position. But I only know the story from hearing some old-timers reminiscing on talk shows years ago. I’ve been Googling like mad, but I can’t find any evidence. Can anyone help me find a cite for this practice – assuming I didn’t just dream I heard it in the first place?
AFAIK, radio shows did exactly this. But I don’t think television shows did.
Instead they used kinescope, which was a sophisticated way of pointing a camera at a television monitor and filming what it showed.
Kinescope therefore preceded Toast of the Town.
But it wouldn’t matter, because doing a second show for the west coast was impossible. No nationwide television network existed until well into the 1950s. The networks slowly expanded the cable and microwave connections along the East and West Coasts and finally met in the middle, like the transcontinental railroad. I can’t seem to find the exact date, so someone will soon come along with it, I hope.
TV shows weren’t seen outside of the broadcast area until cables were set up for remote transmission except by shipping Kinescope film to the remote locations. So when the cables were laid and the Sullivan show was shown in other time zones there was no need to repeat the performances, the Kinescopes would have been used. That doesn’t mean they didn’t do it, but there was no need.
The show was being broadcast live to the east coast, in front of a live studio audience. Singer Jack Jones had just performed, and Ed came out to talk to him.
Ed asked, “Wasn’t your father Allan Jones?”
Jack replied, “He still is,” and the audience howled.
After the show, Ed told Jack that he liked the reaction to his ad lib, and they agreed to leave it in for the second performance for the west coast.
During the second show, with a different studio audience, Ed came out after Jack’s song and asked, “Jack, is your father still alive?”
Jack answered, “Uhh… yes.”
Ed reportedly never understood why one audience thought it was so funny and the other one didn’t.
I’ve searched for this story online, and gotten a few hits. One of them is a YouTube video of David Letterman telling Alan King the story and getting it completely fouled up. The others say that the first performance was a dress rehearsal – but a full dress rehearsal in front of a studio audience doesn’t sound likely to me. Was that a common practice?
Having Google search for “Ed Sullivan” and “full dress rehearsal” returns some books saying he’d have one for a studio audience between three & 7 hours before broadcast.
There were some shows that that did a second performance for the West Coast, but they were mainly news broadcasts.
One problem with the story is that Jack Jones was born in 1938. IMDB shows his first TV performance in 1957 and Wiki says he signed a recording contract in 1959. By that time videotape was used for big-time shows like Ed Sullivan.
It’s also possible that there wasn’t a studio audience at all; rather, it might have been the crew who broke up. Live TV shows of the 1950’s had a LOT of people working on them.
Thanks, I saw that but it was a one-time event. Just because it was possible to do once doesn’t necessarily mean that the four networks could immediately make the switch and stop sending kinescopes. It might have been immediate (or very soon) or it might have taken time, but I couldn’t find confirmation either way.
re-creating radio shows for the West Coast audience was standard prac tice, until Bing Crosby changed all that by tape-recording his shows for later rebroadcast. Crosby was a fan of new technology, and had invested in microphones and recording equipment, becoming an innovator in good fidelity recording. He even switched broadcasters from NBC to ABC because ABC was more receptive to his idea of recording and rebroadcasting.
And sometimes, when something goes terribly wrong with the live version, they will actually substitute the dress rehearsal version of a sketch when the show is broadcast (non-live) for the west coast.
A dress rehearsal in front of a live audience is handy for a live sketch comedy show like SNL. It allows the director to measure not only the time of a sketch but the time of audience reaction (laughter) also.
In England, most drama and light entertainment continued to be performed live through the 1950s, with filmed inserts where necessary to enable sequences that couldn’t be done in the studio, and give the cast time to change their costumes and get over to the next set. The Quatermass sci-fi serials were all performed live, and simultaneously telerecorded [kinescope] for reruns and overseas sales. Only the first two episodes of the first Quatermass still survive - apparently the technical quality of the recording process was judged to be so poor that no further money should be spent trying to record it (and in episode 2 an insect can be seen crawling on the monitor used in the telerecording process, no doubt attracted by the glow).
The quality of telerecordings was noticeably lower, so tended to be avoided.
Yup. I have a magazine article from 1971 (when Sullivan’s show was cancelled) where longtime stage manager Eddie Brinkmann notes the dress rehearsal was done around one o’clock. It wasn’t meant for broadcast at all, but more to troubleshoot any problems in the show. The reason Sullivan had a full audience for a rehearsal is because he felt audience reaction was the best way to figure out what was working and what wasn’t.