Original Amateur Hour

The Original Amateur Hour was an American television program from the medium's early days. It is a progenitor of later, similar programs such as Star Search and American Idol.

The Original Amateur Hour was essentially a televised continuation of Major Bowes' Amateur Hour, which had long been a radio staple in the 1930s and 1940s. The television debut came in January, 1948, with Ted Mack as the new host. (Mack had served as one of Bowes' assistants during the program's radio days.) It was originally broadcast weekly on the former DuMont network, but moved to NBC in late 1949, remaining on that network until September, 1952. It was subsequently revived on that network in April, 1953, running there until June of 1957, then returning to NBC where it ran from September of that year until October, 1958. It then ran from May, 1959 until October of that year on CBS, before returning to ABC for a last prime-time run on that network from March until September of 1960. Even then the show was not finished; it ran on CBS for ten subsequent seasons on Sunday afternoons before being cancelled for good in 1970.

The format was always the same. At the beginning of the show, the talent's order of appearance was determined by spinning a wheel. After it was announced how many episodes the current one marked (which counted back into the radio days, so the numbers eventually got into the thousands), the wheel was spun. As the wheel spun, the words "Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows" were always intoned. Various acts, sometimes singers or other musicians, quite often vaudeville fare such as jugglers, tap dancers, baton twirlers, and the like, would perform, with the audience being asked to send in (by postcard) votes for their favorites, who were then invited back to appear on the next week's show. Mack insured that all of this was quite fast-paced (despite the program's title, it was generally only a half-hour show, the only exception to this rule being from March of 1956 to June of 1957 on NBC, when it was expanded to an hour). Many winners were invited back for several weeks and became minor celebrities at the time; few ever became really big show-business stars. By far the two greatest successes of the show's television era were Gladys Knight, then only a child, and Pat Boone, singing sweet ballads or occasional "covers" of songs which had been written and recorded by black artists which were then largely unknown to the show's predominately white (some would say "white bread") audience. In fact, Boone's appearances on the show probably caused the closest thing that it ever had to a scandal. After he had appeared, and won, for several weeks, it was revealed that he had in the past taken money for services as a Church of Christ song leader, which in the eyes of the producers meant that he was technically not an "amateur" singer. He was removed from the program, but by then his fame was assured, and he remained a popular music mainstay for several years.

The greatest fame ever achieved by anyone appearing on the show was that achieved by Frank Sinatra, who appeared on the show during its radio days in 1937. Interestingly, during World War II it was widely rumored among the U. S. Armed Forces that someone involved with the program was a Nazi sympathizer, "proof" being that shortly after many of the programs, an American naval vessel would supposedly be sunk; this was allegedly due to coded information being passed out in the course of the broadcast of the program. Some went so far as to accuse Bowes himself; obviously nothing of this sort was ever conclusively proven. As the years went by, the audience for this program aged as well; the best proof of this was that the CBS Sunday afternoon version of the 1960s was inevitably sponsored by Geritol, and the program will be permanently linked with this product in the minds of many viewers.

That this exact format could have been less than truly timeless may have been proven in 1992. That year, the program was revived on cable television's Family Channel (now the ABC Family Channel), hosted by weatherman Willard Scott. This revival lasted exactly 13 weeks.

Reference

• For the exact dates times that the program appeared on each network, see The Complete Directory of Primetime Network TV Shows by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, ISBN 0-345-45542-8