Early on in this week’s brioux.tv: the podcast episode with Dave Thomas the St. Catherines, Ont., native talks about his brief career in advertising. One of the things he learned in that business that helped his comedy career, he says, is the importance of brevity or “seconds.” So let me get straight to the point:
Christmas came early for me this year as I got to talk to Dick Cavett about Groucho Marx. The occasion was the American Masters‘ special “Groucho & Cavett,” premiering December 27 on PBS. Dubbed, “the thinking man’s talk show host,” Cavett emerged as a clear alternative to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show while on ABC from 1969 through 1975.
Bill Maher once said that, “Everybody who ever has done a talk show should pay a royalty to Steve Allen.” Allen would probably have agreed. He was the first host of NBC’s Tonight Show, starting with a local New York version in 1953 and then launching the series nationally in September of 1954. David Letterman,
You can draw a straight line from Mort Sahl to Dave Chappelle. Fearless, contentious, uncompromising and sometimes his own worst enemy. The Montreal native died Oct 26 at his home near San Francisco. He was 94. His rise in the mid- to late- ’50s was so pronounced it seems as if he should be older.
One of the great late night talk show guests of all time was Charles Grodin. Who else was cocky enough to slump down next to Johnny Carson and ask if he cared at all about any of his guests? (As he does in the above clip from 1990.) The studio audience and viewers at home
If you’re a late night talk show fan, you’re not going to want to miss a second of The Story of Late Night. The six-part docuseries premieres Sunday night on CNN. As executive producer of the series, author and former New York Times TV columnist Bill Carter takes a deep dive into the genre, one
The King of Late Night, Johnny Carson, took his final Tonight Show bow 29 years ago next month, His band leader, the man behind the Tonight Show orchestra, kept right on going. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, he’d still be touring all over America, playing 40 weeks a year, killing it on an instrument
It’s a sad fact: many hours of TV history have been lost in order to make room on shelves for large, bulky videotapes. Among the most tragic examples are the first nine or ten seasons of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. The years in question are 1962 to roughly ’71, the New York years