Imagine an hour long "Saturday Night Live" episode, every weeknight at 11pm Eastern time. That's essentially what "Broadway Open House," television's first ever "late night" entertainment broadcast, was.
Let's just keep in mind, performing live on television every night required some serious skills. If a joke didn't work, how do you recover? That was Jerry Lester's forte. With a booming voice and a rubber face, Lester was ready to make audiences laugh by reading the names of the countries that belonged to the brand new United Nations on the East Side! And honestly? He had the ability and the chutzpah to do it!
With his high energy personality and his "anything for a laugh" attitude, Mr. Lester turned into a fan favorite and the program became a popular event at the end of each weekday broadcast night. But, surely even a talent like Jerry Lester couldn't do this all alone. What would it take to make this concept work? It would take a great musical director like Milton de Lugg. It would take great writers/performers like Morey Amsterdam (who was the previous MC and who alternated with Lester as host as the show gained viewers). It would take singers like Jane Harvey and David Street.
And it would take something extra, and that "extra" was known as Dagmar.
Dagmar was "invented" on "Broadway Open House" as a "ditzy blonde" character, which was already cliché at the time, thanks to comics like "Archie" and "Blondie." But she soon transcended the stereotype and became a show favorite and the first female superstar of late night. She even got her own spinoff show, "Dagmar's Canteen," where she would talk with servicemen about their lives and then perform a song or two, just like a USO Canteen in various ports-of-call.
Filling time and killing time was part of the process on this show. Gags were tried on the spot and if they worked, great. If they flopped, then you had to laugh it off and move on to the next thing. There was no playbook here. "Broadway Open House" was WRITING the playbook on how to handle a telecast like this as they went! That was why people had to tune in - you never knew what was going to happen.
Conversely, that need to "fill and kill" often meant a lot of really bad jokes, or really obvious jokes, and watching live television with someone doing unfunny "comedy" sketches brought groans, at best, or it was truly painful to witness. Imagine one of the worst episodes of "Saturday Night Live" you remember, run every weeknight!
New York played a part because they packed the audience with people for each show and their excitement fueled the cast's enthusiasm. This gets to why the show isn't higher on the list. It appears they got so used to either coming up with material on the fly and having it supported by an amped up crowd, or were able to weather the bad routines even when they went really wrong, they either didn't want or get to put in much writing or rehearsal time.
To be fair, doing this every night was a massive challenge! The 2024 incarnation of "SNL" does, at most, THREE shows in a row, and they're only doing one show a week and they have a team of writers, plus different hosts and musical guests for each episode to provide topics and themes that help vary the material. While "Broadway Open House" did have guests some of the time, the heavy lifting was done by the main cast and crew.
Partially because of the technology of the day (many episodes were either lost or destroyed) and partially because there aren't a lot of "vintage" clips that are worth viewing (despite Amsterdam's and Lester's best efforts at comedy), "Broadway Open House" will remain an historic but obscure part of the Annals of Television.
