What happens
Jack Benny stages a broadcast from Fort Meade, Maryland, with his cast and the McFarlane Twins' orchestra. The show includes a comic exchange over an upside-down cake from the army's baking school and a bit about the twins' salary. Jack then introduces a spoof of the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which a young senator from Illinois named Jack Benny, with secretary Mary Livingstone and a senator from Colorado played by Don Wilson, travels to the capital and struggles to find a room. The sketch is built around jokes about wartime hotel shortages and the trip's frustrations. The series' original air date is January 24, 1943, and the lead actors are Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson and Phil Harris.
Fort Meade, Maryland, during a live radio broadcast, and then a comic train journey to Washington, D.C.
Characters: Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Dennis Day, Rochester, Don Wilson, Art McFarlane, George McFarlane, Fred Allen
Listen for: The bit where the McFarlane twins are hard to tell apart, and the hotel-hunting sequence in the Washington sketch, where Jack keeps asking for rooms and gets absurd answers.
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.