Thursday, September 6, 2007
Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, and Rochester (Eddie Anderson) in a group portrait.
The Jack Benny Program, starring Jack Benny, was a radio-TV comedy series which ran for more than three decades and is generally regarded as a high-water mark in 20th-century comedy.
Radio
The Jack Benny Program was telecast on CBS from October 29, 1950, to September 15, 1964, and on NBC from September 25, 1964, to September 10, 1965. 343 episodes were produced.
The television show was a seamless continuation of Benny's radio program, employing many of the same players, the same approach to situation comedy and some of the same scripts. The suffix "Program" instead of "Show" was also a carryover from radio, where "program" rather than "show" was used frequently for presentations in the non-visual medium.
The Jack Benny Program appeared infrequently during its first two years on CBS TV. The show then ran every fourth week for the next two years. During the 1953-54 season, half the episodes were filmed during the summer and the others were live, a schedule which allowed Benny to continue doing his radio show. From 1955 until 1960, the show was on every other week, and it was seen weekly after 1960.
In his unpublished autobiography, I Always Had Shoes (portions of which were later incorporated by Jack's daughter, Joan, into her memoir of her parents, Sunday Nights at Seven), Benny said that he, not NBC, made the decision to end his TV series in 1965. He said that while the ratings were still very good (he cited a figure of some 18,000,000 viewers per week... although he qualified that figure by saying he never believed the ratings services were doing anything more than guessing, no matter what they promised), advertisers were complaining that commercial time on his show was costing nearly twice as much as what they paid for most other shows, and he had grown tired of what was called the "rate race." Thus, after some three decades on radio and television in a weekly program, Jack Benny went out on top.
In Jim Bishop's book A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, JFK said that he was too busy to watch most television, but that he made the time to watch The Jack Benny Program each week.
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