What happens
Jack Benny opens his Mother's Day broadcast with Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Kenny Baker and Don Wilson, trading jokes about Boy Scouts and mothers. Kenny Baker sings a song for his mother, and then the cast begins a dramatized version of the film Gunga Din, with Benny in the title role and Mary Livingstone reciting Kipling's poem to set the mood. Rochester phones with trouble over Carmichael, the bear on roller skates, and the sketch continues. Gunga Din enlists in the Bengal Lancers and is sent with Baker across the desert to find the bandits' hideout, where the two are left stranded in the heat. The episode is presented in two parts and is set in India around 1900.
A radio studio broadcast in Hollywood, with a dramatized story set in the Indian town of East Cobra and the surrounding desert around 1900.
Characters: Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Kenny Baker, Don Wilson, Eddie Anderson, Gunga Din, Captain Harris
Listen for: Kenny Baker's song for his mother and the desert scene where Gunga Din and Baker are stranded.
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.