Quote of the day:
Laughter is much more important than applause. Applause is almost a duty. Laughter is a reward.
—Carol Channing
When I was growing up and it was a Sunday evening and it wasn’t a school day, I would nearly always stay up well past my usual bedtime and watch TV.
And one of the shows that I enjoyed watching was What’s My Line?, which was broadcast live on the CBS network at 10:30 PM.
When I say live, I mean live. The show debuted in 1950 and video tape had not yet become a thing, so live TV was really live TV in those days. But it was only live for the Eastern and Central time zones. The rest of the country had to make do with kinescope replays.
Kinescopes were literally filmed off the TV screen and then broadcast to the Mountain and Pacific zones a couple hours later. Obviously the quality wasn’t very good, but it’s only thanks to those kinescopes that we still have most of those shows preserved after all this time.
And now some kind soul has uploaded most of the ones that still exist to YouTube.
Including the very first episode that was broadcast on Thursday, February 2, 1950. The show didn’t make its way to the Sunday time slot until October of that year.
Clearly I wasn’t able to watch that first one in real time, being less than a year old at the time.
For anyone who is familiar with the show during its heyday, the episode will seem very strange.
There are only two familiar faces: John Daly and Dorothy Kilgallen. (In the second episode Kilgallen’s place is taken by Arlene Francis; each of them would become longtime regular panelists.) The set is completely reversed from what it will eventually settle into.
Plus, the rules of the game hadn’t been firmed up yet. For the first year or so of the show, the contestants were forced to make an embarrassing perp walk past the panelists and perform whatever little task the panelists would request of them. Thankfully that was eventually discontinued. Also, the panelists were given a free guess before the questioning began.
If you aren’t familiar with the show, you might be surprised that the contestants were playing for a top dollar prize of merely $50. Those were the days when playing the game was 90% of the fun.
Anyway, here is the first episode. You’ll notice that there seems to be only one commercial break. That’s presumably because they didn’t yet have a regular sponsor. You’ll also notice that the cameras were often not pointing at the persons who were speaking. That was one of the fun things about live TV in the early days of the medium.