My favorite performers in the history of mankind are, as we all know, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I've seen all their movies eighty quadrillion-zillion times…but did you know they almost got into radio? In 1944, they did a pilot for what was intended as a weekly series called The Laurel and Hardy Show.
It was performed and transcribed at NBC Studios on March 6 of that year but apparently never broadcast. The way it generally worked in radio was that a show would be done that way and then someone would take the disks around to advertising agencies and potential sponsors and if one was willing to buy, the program went onto the air. The Laurel and Hardy Show never did, presumably because a sponsor could not be found.
The premise of the show was that each week, The Boys would get a new job…and by the end of the half-hour, they would have botched things up and become unemployed again. The pilot episode was titled, "Mr. Slater's Poultry Market" and at the end of it, it's teased that next week, they'll be getting into the plumbing business. But of course, there was no next week.
The script is not wonderful…but this was '44 when Stan and Ollie were doing not-wonderful scripts for MGM and Fox, resulting in movies that were similarly not wonderful. As with the films, the radio script makes them somewhat stupider than they were in their best pictures and there's a lot of over-reacting to plot contrivances. Still, it's a shame their radio show didn't sell. Both men could have used the additional income…and maybe stardom there would have given them a little more clout in dealing with MGM and Fox. Alas, here's all that resulted from the endeavor…
