What happens
Fred Allen hosts his Town Hall program, opening with a parade of comic sketches and music. Among the bits, a psychology demonstration in a drugstore, a prison-cell breakfast, and a women's barbershop set up the evening's humor. A visit from a Pogo-named caller, Portland Hoffa as a rural family member, and quarreling country boys lead to a song about a farm boy who joins a circus band. The show then turns to the Mighty Allen Art Players, who present a jungle melodrama, The Wild Women of the Wilderness, featuring explorers Pinsky and Beagle captured by a tribe of Amazon women. The guide covers only the first part of the broadcast. Fred Allen, Portland Hoffa, Kenny Delmar and Minerva Pious star in the 1935 program, which aired on CBS and NBC.
The Old Town Hall, a weekly radio variety show in New York, with a mock town hall audience and a series of comic sketches.
Characters: Fred Allen, Portland Hoffa, Kenny Delmar, Minerva Pious, Peter Van Steeden, Harry Von Zell, Pinsky, Beagle
Listen for: The comic sketches, including the drugstore psychology test, the prison breakfast scene, the women's barbershop and the Mighty Allen Art Players' jungle melodrama.
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.