On This Day: Tonight Starring Steve Allen Premiered on September 27, 1954
XORit Editorial · Sources, AI assistance and corrections
On September 27, 1954, NBC aired the first nationwide broadcast of the late-night talk show Tonight Starring Steve Allen. Steve Allen was the host, and the program is considered the first incarnation of The Tonight Show.
Before that it was a local show: it aired in New York on WNBT under the name The Steve Allen Show, from 11:20 p.m. to midnight. In the fall of 1954 the program was moved to the entire NBC network. The first network broadcast ran 105 minutes rather than the hour that modern late-night shows run, and only a few stations saw the first fifteen minutes.
The show was produced at the Hudson Theatre in New York. Gene Rayburn announced it, and Skitch Henderson led the orchestra.
The Techniques That Became a Genre Classic
It was Allen's version that introduced the devices that became the backbone of the genre: the opening monologue, celebrity interviews, audience participation, comedy bits that sent the cameras outside the studio, and music. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé played in the orchestra and later became husband and wife. The show's success led to a separate weekly Allen show on Sundays.
Allen's Departure and the Change of Format
Allen hosted Tonight for two and a half seasons and left in January 1957: NBC asked him to focus on the Sunday program in order to compete with Ed Sullivan's show on CBS. Even before that he had given up the Monday and Tuesday editions, and in the summer of 1956 guest hosts filled in for him on those nights. From the fall of 1956, in the 1956–1957 season, Monday and Tuesday were hosted by Ernie Kovacs, who came over from the weakening DuMont network. Kovacs declined to host the show on a permanent basis, and it was decided to change the format.
After Allen left, NBC remade Tonight into a news program with segments modeled on the morning Today show, but it proved unsuccessful, and some stations dropped it. On July 29, 1957, the format was returned to a comedy talk show, with Jack Paar as host. A recording of the very first episode has survived, and Allen's opening monologue was later shown many times on anniversary specials: in it he says that Tonight will go on forever.
Image: UPI or AP Public domain
Translation editor: Ловушкин А.
Source: en.wikipedia.org ↗