TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Arthur Godfrey Time" from CBS (Jan. 1958)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Panonni 9'
Length - 14:27

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

Arthur Godfrey, although an obscure figure to most people now, was a superstar of network radio and early television throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He was a folksy, informal figure (evident in this clip) who pioneered the deployment of these qualities in a broadcasting career that spanned forty years between the early-1930s and the early-1970s. At his peak in the mid-1950s he had three different TV programs--"Arthur Godfrey and Friends" (a weekly prime-time variety show), "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" (a talent-competition show), and "Arthur Godfrey Time" (a weekday morning talk show).

"Arthur Godfrey Time" started as a radio program, before beginning its eight-year run on the CBS weekday morning TV schedule between 1951 and 1959. (It ended on radio, too, airing until 1972 on CBS radio on weekday mornings.) Airing usually between about 10:30 and 11:30 am each weekday, the program ran for thirty, sixty, and ninety minutes at different times. As with many programs during this era, commercials were integrated into the program itself, which we see here with the short opening ad spot for Glamorene and with Godfrey's later demonstration of the carpet cleaning qualities of the same product.

This is the opening portion of an "Arthur Godfrey Time" episode from early (probably January) 1958, at a time when the program ran for a full hour. Guests include actress Faye Emerson, playwright/composer Meredith Willson (of "Music Man" fame), singer Tommy Hunter, and Carmen Quinn. All of the guests are seated in panel fashion in chairs on either side of Godfrey at the start of the program, and the banter and conversation (which also includes the show's band) seems familiar to us because many morning talk shows (such as "Live with Kelly & Ryan" and "The View") still use it. The conversation on this particular morning is dominated by Willson's smash Broadway hit "The Music Man" that had recently opened, in which Emerson had been a minor investor, and for which Quinn badly wanted to get tickets.