What happens
Jack Benny plays himself on this episode of his radio comedy series, first broadcast on March 19, 1950, on NBC with Lucky Strike as sponsor. Benny, Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson as Rochester, Phil Harris and Dennis Day trade jokes around the Academy Awards, with Benny joking that he was robbed of a nomination. The program then turns to a dramatized version of a prize-fight story, The Champion, in which a young hitchhiker named Mitch Benny, with his friend Bubbles, seeks to become a boxer and is drawn into the ring under a manager named McNally. The story follows his early career and a match with the champion, Slugger Brown.
Benny's radio studio and home, then a dramatized boxing story set on Kansas roads, in Los Angeles, Omaha and a boxing gym.
Characters: Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, Don Wilson, Mitch Benny, Bubbles
Listen for: Benny's jokes about being robbed of an Academy Award nomination, and the boxing story's turn when McNally tells Mitch he must take a dive.
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.