Last Wednesday, I was a guest on Stu's Show and the topic was Late Night Television. We started with a discussion of Mr. Letterman's departure, then began slogging through the history of that time slot, starting with Broadway Open House. That episode of Stu's Show lasted three and a half hours (!) and we only made it up to the early years of Carson.
We shall continue the topic on some future episode but in the meantime, if you'd like to listen to what we said ("we" being Stu, me and his resident TV critic-historians, Steve Beverly and Wesley Hyatt), you can download the program from the Stu's Show Archives for a measly 99 cents…but don't do that. Make it one of four shows you order and you'll get them for the price of three. I highly recommend Stu's past interviews with Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner and many, many others.
One thing we talked about last Wednesday was the six month transition between the time Jack Paar left The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson started. Why this happened was explained on this site back here and I also listed the interim guest hosts who included Art Linkletter, Soupy Sales, Merv Griffin, Groucho Marx and others. Jerry Lewis hosted one week and it led to ABC offering him his own talk show, which turned out to be a two-hour live flop on Saturday nights.
I said in that piece and I said on Stu's Show that all those shows were probably lost. I knew of only about eight minutes of one of the Jerry Lewis episodes that had survived. Then a listener wrote in — I'm sorry I don't have his or her name — to say that the entirety of that episode was not only not lost but was on YouTube! I have placed its five parts into the player below. The guests are Jack Carter, Nancy Dussault and Henry Gibson. Skitch Henderson came in in to replace Jose Melis (Paar's bandleader) to lead the NBC Orchestra but Paar's announcer, Hugh Downs, stuck around to announce for the temps. I believe they're working on a slightly redecorated version of Paar's set.
Before you click: Remember that in those days, The Tonight Show was an hour and 45 minutes long. Since some stations aired a 15 minute newscast at 11 PM then and some had a 30-minute newscast, Tonight was configured to accommodate both. The show would start at 11:15 and they'd billboard the guests and introduce the host…and then at 11:30, the show would start again and they'd billboard the guests and introduce the host. You'll see the two openings on this video.
I believe the show was only called Tonight during the Steve Allen and Paar eras but was sometimes referred to casually as The Tonight Show. It doesn't seem to have been until the fill-in shows began that it became officially The Tonight Show. Art Linkletter was the first of the guest hosts so if you wanted to split follicles, you could say Linkletter was the first host of The Tonight Show. (Paar's version, as I understand it, started as Tonight, then became The Jack Paar Show for a time. When he announced his retirement, NBC decided to re-establish the Tonight name and the show became The Jack Paar Tonight Show for the remainder of his run.)
Here's the whole show. It's interesting that with 105 minutes to fill, they didn't book more guests…and bigger ones. Nancy Dussault, who had taken over the lead in The Sound of Music on Broadway, was not hugely famous. Henry Gibson, several years from appearing on Laugh-In, was largely unknown. The loose, "we don't know what we're doing" style is fairly typical of late night TV in those days…
This is in five parts which should play one after the other in this viewer. That's assuming I've configured things correctly, which is always assuming a helluva lot…