What happens
Roger Pryor hosts a New Year's Eve broadcast of the Gulf Screen Guild Theater. Eddie Cantor plays a struggling comedian stuck at home with his wife and five daughters, waiting for a sponsor to pick up his show. Gene Autry and Joan Blondell appear in the program's variety sketches, which include a stage-romance routine and a few musical numbers. The episode, from the Screen Guild Theater series and broadcast on December 31, 1939, mixes comedy sketches with song and sponsor messages about Gulf products. Pryor and Oscar Bradley's orchestra provide the connecting material as the show moves through its different segments.
A New Year's Eve variety broadcast in a radio studio, with comic scenes set in Eddie Cantor's home and an office at the studio.
Characters: Roger Pryor, Eddie Cantor, Gene Autry, Joan Blondell, Johnny Conte, Oscar Bradley
Listen for: Eddie Cantor's comic sketch with his daughters and the family servant Guffy, and Gene Autry's scene with Cantor and Joan Blondell.
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.