The Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney Show

The Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney Show united two of the biggest names of mid-20th Century American entertainment in one of the last efforts to revive the glory days of network broadcast radio. The show featured songs by its two stars, interspersed with snappy patter and commercials in an informal, relaxed manner. It aired midday and sponsors were primarily manufacturers and marketers of household and home-related products, ranging from Good Housekeeping Magazine to Del Monte canned goods to Fels cleaning products. The show aired from 1960 til 1962.

Clooney and Crosby had worked together before, most notably in the 1954 move, White Christmas, and were a good fit in the show. Nevertheless, despite its spontaneous feel, the show was a triumph of the radio engineering of the day. Dialog was scripted (though the stars tended to follow the scripts loosely) and taped months in advance in mammoth taping sessions. Engineers then spliced the dialog together with the songs to produce the twenty-minute segments. (If you listen closely, you can sometimes hear slight differences in the acoustics of various segments in a particular episode.)

As an aside, I remember hearing this show during school vacations, as my parents tended to favor our local CBS station (likely one reason was that we lived out in the country and it had the best reception).

For more information, see Wikipedia.

Series description provided by Frank Bell.