Steve Allen talks "The Tonight Show"- EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

a year after the show was launched Pat Weaver was then president of NBC decided to air your show on the full NBC network yes I'll always be grateful to Pat for that decision how did that come about well I guess he was just looking at the show from time to time think for the first few months we were on there he even knew we were not his business to check local stations he was a network thinker and doer and a very good one too but as it happened he already had a big hit with the Today Show which is still successful in the morning of course so inevitably he or some member of the programming department would have thought oh how about a late show called tonight shows just the opposite end of the calendar of the clock so I don't think he had anything more than a title in mind and eventually I do I'll never know until he writes his memoirs what other possibilities might have occurred to him but none of them ever saw the light of day because he just called us up one day spoke to our producer bill Harvick said I like that show that you guys are doing and how would you all feel if we put it on the network so naturally we were all overjoyed and the only practical change that was made the only important change was it was no longer called the Steve Allen show then we had to go with the title tonight and I was willing to do that in fact years later the full title would be The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson end of title I never thought of that or didn't really get much of a damn if I had everybody knew who I was and they know it was with Johnny Carson or Donald dr. Steve Allen or whoever it was the host but it was called tonight and only later did the phrase The Tonight Show come to pass what did this mean to you going from a local show to Network what were your feelings well it took a load off my mind because I had just come from several years of network experience both in radio and in television and as I've earlier mentioned it was definitely a step down to come off the the highly prestige into a lowly local program however I never had any grand ambitions and in those days or subsequently for that matter whatever happened like you can't control the universe so sometimes you take whatever you can get and also whatever you can do whether you're grated brain surgery or Moke motorcycle maintenance whatever it is there's something in you that wants to do that and if it pays well so much the better so New York is not Pocatello and just to be on the air in New York was a big deal capital a capital B capital D but now you were going to the whole country yeah but as I say I had for years been talking to the whole country already so it was no suddenly a new universe to me it was getting restored back to my flesh my former level whatever would be appropriate and of course it was a pleasure we'll move it's much better to be on whatever the number of stations 157 instead of one how many people you did you reach to yeah I never did no nor does anybody know scientifically precise terms but you can tell in you know around millions or hundreds of thousands so of course you're talking to vastly larger audience although in those days what what is true even now was I suppose even more true then that America basically goes to bed about 10:30 because they have to be up on the farm at 6:00 or at the factory at 7:30 and even now in a night when a late-night show considers itself happy with its ratings it's talking to very tiny percentage of the American people so that was a given I didn't worry about that and sure enough when they finally later would put us into primetime and we had access to 30 40 million people in some hot nights did NBC put any kind of program restrictions on you material-wise and The Tonight Show when it went that worked no what they did was make some suggestions why they bothered with suggestions at all when the show was already a hit and the very success of it that's what led them to put it on the network but I can understand that a network is your toy when you're the boss and I guess you can't resist incurring with your toys also I had learned enough about life at that time never to close my mind to any suggestions you must always entertain them that later you can say hey that's great we'll do that or that is stupid I'll fight that to the death and unfortunately the few practical suggestions they made were in that latter range I'll be specific the first shock at least in terms of memos and meetings came to a when they said now we'd like to add a I think they mentioned three minute segments each night so I'm waiting for the end of the sentence I don't know maybe three minutes of great stuff what is it they've said ski condition reports and we only hire back and I and the others looked at each other and kept our faces deliberately blank it was really a dumb idea so I said in my response memo have you gentlemen done any research as to what percentage of the American people give a damn about skiing I said it's a lovely sport I have nothing against it more people should ski but very few do and even of those on any given night they're not too likely to be going skiing so what do they care whether there's light powder at Stowe or something at Steamboat Springs you know so nevertheless it was their network and for I don't remember how long it seems to me about two weeks for gene Rayburn who was our announcer actually stood in front of a blackboard and gave ski candy conditioned report now this would come out of half an hour of screaming comedy and hot jet and suddenly the audience in the studio was seen talking about snow you know who gave it that well they they finally realized they had made a dumb suggestion and we dropped that the other suggestion was not that dumb abstractly it's not a bad idea but in practical terms it was a bad idea suggestion number two was we will have a resident critic sort of like gene Shalit in the morning and he will come on and give you a little two-minute reviews of all the great Broadway shows that opened that sounds like a good idea but I had to actually point out to these gentlemen who were running the major network in the world in the great city of New York that the great Broadway opening nights are few and far between something opens almost every night and it's pretty lousy but how many nights are there when Oklahoma opened her South Pacific or you know from here to whatever so nevertheless they assigned a critic to the show brain ice fellow I think his name was Bob Joseph's from that mistake it was a personal friend of social friend but charming camerawork was not his area of expertise it was basically a writer a good critic as far as I ever knew but his personality was not ideally adapted television and most nights he had lightweight fare to talk about in many a night nothing whatever the target I so again there was about a two or three-week embarrassing period and then they dropped that suggestion did you go to that as a area of satire at any time I was tempted but since it would have been satirizing my own Shore or being personally rude to were Bob no I didn't do anything of that sort I held my old my own council as we say and the thing finally fell off the wagon of its own way well did the network have script approval I don't know the philosophical question was never put to me directly but I knew that they had in those days men I wish they had more of today when they could really use it what's the technical term program practices program practices and whatever there are the censors they don't like to use that word but that's what they are and I think we need them now where are they when we need them is in those days nobody ever tried to say a four-letter word on television or frontal nudity or anything else that they do now and consequently I guess the fellas with the blue pencils occasionally just to justify their salaries really used to come up with some dumb suggestions but very little with our show first of all not that much of it was written and sometimes what censoring there was had to do with commercial considerations for example if your sponsor was Chesterfield nobody could say well that was certainly lucky you know even if you're talking about a lucky stick or some so there was a little of that but that's understandable we show business is a business and I never argued about that I thought okay we won't say lucky on the show you

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Views: 32,971

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Keywords: NBC, The Tonight Show (Award-Winning Work), Steve Allen (TV Writer), Entertainment (TV Genre), Late Night Television (TV Genre)

Id: Y2RakIfeYPI

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2010