Best of All Radio Program

Background

With widely expanded access to popular and readily available Television, Radio networks found themselves seeking more compelling programming to recapture the audience they'd lost in ever-increasing numbers to Television. Large networks had it both ways, benefitting handsomely from the exponential increase in Television's popularity, while dramatically decreasing programming production costs over Radio.

Both the audiences still stradding Television and Radio, and those who couldn't yet afford a Television receiver, were beneficiaries of some of the finest Radio programming ever produced by Radio networks during its Golden Age. Ironically, trade papers and newspapers of the era were both praising and damning the quality of new Television offerings while a new wave of prestigious Radio offerings usually went begging for trade and newspaper ink. And indeed, throughout the mid-1950s, the major networks continued to mount some of the most prestigious and innovative programming in Radio's 30-year-old history. Some of the "important" 1950s programs of note were:

• 1937-1954 NBC Symphony
• 1948-1954 The Railroad Hour
• 1951 New Theater
• 1951-1952 NBC Presents Short Story
• 1951-1952 Hollywood Sound Stage and CBS Screen Guild Theater
• 1951-1954 Hollywood Bowl Concert
• 1952-1953 Best Plays
• 1945-1953 Theatre Guild On the Air
• 1953 America's Composers
• 1953-1954 On Stage with Cathy and Elliott Lewis
• 1953-1954 Theatre Royal
• 1953 General Electric Theater
• 1954 Best of All
• 1954-1955 Anthology
• 1955-1958 Biography in Sound
• 1956-1957 CBS Radio Workshop
• 1955 Monitor

The majority of these productions were either sustained by their networks or bankrolled by well-heeled sponsors. At the same time, networks sustaining their own prestige productions were doing everything in their power to keep the cost of these more prestigous productions below $5,000 to $7,000 per half hour. One of the more inventive ways, was to introduce prerecorded music and interview clips into prestige broadcasts on a scale never before utilized in Radio.

This was a tricky proposition during the era. Both CBS and NBC had held long-standing proscriptions against the use of prerecorded sound clips or performances. It was the advent of Television that drove both great networks to revise these policies. Compounding this sea change, permissions and clearances to employ prerecorded musical tracks and personality interviews didn't come cheap. Conversely, the use or libraries of prerecorded clips or selections were far more cost-effective--and versatile--than staging original, live presentations. Indeed, in the case of retrospective productions many of the personalities showcased had passed on. Clearances and permissions from their respective estates were required. CBS and NBC in particular had vast stores of prerecorded historical clips, music selections and interviews upon which to draw, utilizing them with great effect in productions such as Biography in Sound, Best of All, CBS Radio Workshop and Anthology.

NBC in particular, identified a growing demand for high quality music anthologies during the 1950s. Seizing on this perceived demand, NBC produced some of Radio's finest music anthologies in its history during the 1950s. NBC Symphony had aired almost continuously between 1937 and 1954, showcasing the work of its legendary conductor/composers Dr. Frank Black, Arturo Toscanini, Leopold Stokowski, Mark Warnow, Leith Stevens, and Dr. Leroy 'Roy' Shield. During 1953-1954 alone, NBC continued producing NBC Symphony while introducing its remarkable Biography in Sound series, its Anthology series, and America's Composers. All three were widely praised for their extraordinary quality, composition, and sound engineering.

NBC introduces its Best of All music anthology

NBC's deep bench of talented composers and conductors placed the network in a unique position throughout the era. For its new Best of All anthology of the work of America's greatest composers of operettas, musical comedies, and motion picture scores, NBC tapped one of its latest rising stars, 'Skitch' Henderson, as Music Director.

Best of All premiered as an NBC-sustained production on July 1st 1954 in a half-hour format replacing NBC's long-running The Voice of Firestone [The Firestone Hour] for the Summer of 1954. The Voice of Firestone moved to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) after twenty-five years over NBC.

After Best of All's first two presentations the series expanded to an hour-long format replacing NBC's long-running The Railroad Hour (1948-1954). This was an inspired fit, given The Railroad Hour's long history of presenting musical comedy productions over most of its run. After its seventeenth presentation, a salute to the 40th Anniversary of ASCAP, the series reduced its format to a 45-minute production.

As with many of the more ambitious and well-produced Radio programs of the 1950s, Best of All owes a great deal of its enduring fidelity, quality and sound engineering to the use of the magnetic tape technology to record and transcribe its broadcasts. Along with Biography in Sound, Anthology, CBS Radio Workshop, and many of the other similar, high-profile productions of the 1950s Radio era, the broadcasts' high-fidelity mag-tape recordings also benefited from more seamless splicing and time-shifting capabilities available to the new medium. After Best of All returned to the air in September 1954, the expanded hour-long format afforded Skitch Henderson the opportunity to reach out to both coasts for timely interviews and pre-recorded (transcribed) sound clips from contemporary Film and Stage performers of the era.

It would appear that Best of All was also recorded in a 'modular' format. With its expansion to an hour-long broadcast, Best of All aired in two 'parts.' Each half-hour part of the broadcasts could be aired as an independent program for regional NBC affiliates that could only accomodate a half-hour broadcast of Best of All in their respective program lineups.

An extraordinary array of talent and music selections

Skitch Henderson was a gifted and versatile talent in his own right, but Best of All further gilded the lily with an extraordinary array of Stage and Film talent with virtually every presentation. The wide array of musical selections for each program were also unprecedented for the era. From live interviews with Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers, Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson, to pre-recorded messages and narrations from Gene Kelly, Otto Preminger, Cyd Charisse, Jose Ferrer and several others, Best of All was an embarassment of riches. The production also introduced much of America to Polly Bergen, Debbie Reynolds, and Florence Henderson at the earliest stages of their remarkable careers.

The series also celebrated over sixty American composers in the course of its thirty-nine broadcasts. The series also highlighted several European composers by way of background exposition. As mentioned above, Best of All was very tightly produced and quickly paced, moving through as many as eighteen musical selections during its hour-long broadcasts. But even more extraordiary, in addition to the sixteen to eighteen selections aired during each program, Skitch Henderson and his star-studded guest talent regularly provided a great deal of background exposition for each composer, musical selection or series of selections.

Enduring impact

There's little argument that America's mid-20th Century produced some of the finest, most enduring music compositions of America's history. Best of All's director George Voutsas and Skitch Henderson, along with its supporting cast of guests and regular artists produced one of Radio's most comprehensive and educational programs in NBC's history.

Owing as much to Best of All's extraordinary production values as to its use of cutting-edge magnetic tape technology, virtually all thirty-seven Best of All exemplars that survive are of the same fidelity and sheer musical delight today as they were in 1954-1955. As both a Music History anthology and a time capsule of the finest American music composition talent of the 20th Century, Best of All remains truly nonpareil by any measure.

Series Derivatives:

[Hosts]

Skitch Henderson, Marion Anderson, Ben Grauer, Kenneth Banghart, Kay Armen, Irving Kolodin

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were the log of the RadioGOLDINdex and newspaper listings.

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