[quote name=\'Adam Nedeff\' date=\'Oct 13 2005, 07:30 PM\'][quote name=\'PaulD\' date=\'Oct 13 2005, 07:13 PM\']This may be a bit off topic but it feature same game show personalities. Does anyone know the formatt of Steve Allan's 'Tonight Show' (as opposed to later prime time shows).
Doubtless kinescopes are real hard to come by but from what I read it seemed to be all over the map with monologs at Steve's piano, skecthes, talk and even David Letterman style remotes.
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That's about right. I admit I haven't seen it either, but I've read piles of books and watched documentaries, so that automatically makes me qualified to answer this. You have to realize that TV was still pretty new, and while a lot of shows at that point amounted to "radio with a picture" people like Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs used their shows to go all over the map and figure out what exactly a television show could be.
What Steve discovered was that 105 minutes of live TV in an era of fewer commercials was a lot of time to fill, and the format was just what you described. Steve did monologues, desk pieces, audience games (he invented "Stump the Band" if I'm not mistaken), remote segments, guests doing stunts outside the theater, interviews, simple chit-chat, news reports (both serious and satirical), and prank phone calls. It worked so well that every late night talk show since has basically been elements of Steve's show plucked and molded to fit the host.
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And those of you who only know him from "MG" would be amazed that for a good portion of the run Gene Rayburn did a straight newscast every night on "Tonight."
I should also mention that there was a good deal of music on "Tonight"--along with Skitch Henderson's band were guests and regular house singers Andy Williams, Steve Lawrence and Edyie Gorme at the beginning of their careers. Some nights the show would be mostly music.
In fact, no two nights of "Tonight" would be as standardized in format as today's late-night shows, so you never really knew what would happen when you watched it. Allen and some NBC execs initially didn't see eye-to-eye on the show (they wanted it to be more news-oriented, like the "Today" show), they did come around to the fact that the show had to be most nights an entertainment show (but that didn't stop Allen from doing a panel discussion on race relations or inviting Carl Sandburg to read his poetry).
