What happens
George Burns and Gracie Allen share a Christmas-season broadcast in which Gracie frets over gifts and tangles with friends and relatives. Tony Martin, the singer and a guest, is caught between their banter and a plan for a holiday play. Gracie announces that she and the cast will stage a special Christmas adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with Burns as Scrooge, Gracie as Mrs. Fezziwig, Henry King as one ghost and Martin as another. Jack Benny's voice and jokes come into the rehearsal, and the cast rehearses the holiday story with frequent interruptions. The broadcast is a Campbell's Soup program, and the series is Burns and Allen, first aired on 1937-12-23 on CBS and NBC Radio.
A radio studio during a Christmas-season broadcast, moving into a rehearsal of a Christmas play.
Characters: George Burns, Gracie Allen, Tony Martin, Henry King, Jack Benny
Listen for: Gracie's rambling logic about gifts and the telephone call from her mother, and the Christmas play's comic jokes about Scrooge.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.