Eternal Couch Potato Flashback: At Home (January 18, 1950)

One from the backlog, featuring singing and elaborate carpet ads

What I watched: An episode of At Home, a musical series hosted by Earl Wrightson. This episode’s special guest is Margeurite Piazza. This episode first aired on Wednesday, January 18, 1950, at 7:45 pm on CBS, and is available to watch on Youtube via Free the Kinescopes.

What happened: We open with a very jaunty animated commercial for Masland Beautyblend Broadblooms, although I’m not sure what those are. This takes us into our host Earl Wrightson, who sings that he feels a song coming on. I can already tell that this guy is a cornball. Wrightson then banters with his orchestra leaders Norman Parris. He explains that it’s been a trend for the host to make fun of the orchestra leader, but there’s nothing to make fun of Norman about.

Earl sings again about how beautiful the viewer is. He rolls out the Beautyblend Guest Carpet for a recurring guest, Margeurite Piazza. She sings a more operatic-style love song. Earl talks her over to the “talking department.” He asks her about starring with Burgess Meredith in a play called “Happy as Larry.” He talks over her and reads positive reviews of her performances.

You could make fun of him for looking at the ceiling, Earl.

We get the rare actually informative commercial, as I learn that Masland Beautyblend Broadblooms are a type of carpet. We then get a segment caused “Masland Showtime” looking back at Broadway shows of the past, in this case the 1932 musical Music in the Air. Margeurite sings the title song. Earl joins in on a love song to close the show.

What I thought: At Home is an example of the type of show we’ve seen occasionally in early television. It’s fifteen minutes, unassuming, and consists mostly of Tin Pan Alley-style singers performing and being vaguely genial to each other. There’s very little visual element to the program, and indeed it could have been broadcast on radio, but they needed to fill time on television, so why not bring on Earl Wrightson?

Wrightson was an opera singer by training, but found his profession in more popular media. He appeared frequently on radio and in Broadway productions, but his only starring role was in the failed Kurt Weill musical The Firebrand of Florence. There’s relatively little in his biography that suggests he would make a great TV star but, again, networks needed to fill time.

This is what the “talking department” looks like.

Even from the perspective of ten months later, where we are in the main ECP project, this type of show seems somewhat quaint, as TV became increasingly professionalized and visual. There’s an amateurish quality to the camera work, which zooms in way too close on the singers’ faces, and to the house-like set. The talking segments in between songs are awkward, with Wrightson reading out positive press clippings instead of really letting his guest talk.

At Home would prove not to be a star-making vehicle for Wrightson either. But he would go on to be a frequent variety show guest and host a Sunday-afternoon show, The American Musical Theater, for which he would win an Emmy. TV would gradually find ways to make music-based shows work in a visual medium, but we’ll have to see how many of these shows were preserved throughout the 50s.

Coming up next: We get back to November, and KFO, with Ollie hosting a “culture corner.”