Before he was on late night, Dick Cavett had a morning show on ABC. It went on the air on March 4, 1968 under the title, This Morning. Later, they changed the name to The Dick Cavett Show but it didn't make a lot of difference. Nobody watched under either name and it left the air as of January 24, 1969. It was a great program in absolutely the wrong time slot. (In 1980, NBC made the exact same mistake with a kid they'd found named David Letterman.)
Cavett went from the AM show to a brief summer replacement series in prime time…and then on to a late night slot that he inhabited for three years of steady telecasts and two more in a rotating format with other shows. Before he left the morning slot, he did a prime-time special replaying some of his most interesting segments. Our video embed today consists of excerpts from that special — about twenty-five minutes of it with a few abrupt edits. In it, you'll see Groucho Marx, Jack Burns, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, Pat McCormick and a few other folks. I wish someone would just rerun these shows intact.
