Les Crane

Les Crane was a radio announcer and television talk show host. He was the first network television personality to compete with Johnny Carson. Crane also scored a spoken word hit with his 1971 recording of the poem Desiderata. The first American TV appearance of The Rolling Stones was on Crane’s program in June 1964 when only New Yorkers could see it.

About Les Crane in brief

Summary Les CraneLes Crane was a radio announcer and television talk show host. He was the first network television personality to compete with Johnny Carson. Crane also scored a spoken word hit with his 1971 recording of the poem Desiderata. The first American TV appearance of The Rolling Stones was on Crane’s program in June 1964 when only New Yorkers could see it. The Paley Center for Media has available for viewing the first 15 minutes of one of the last episodes before executives finally cancelled ABC’s Nightlife in early November 1965. The UCLA Film and Television Archive has a digitized collection of clips from the Les Crane Show early episodes in August 1964. The National Archives has a transcript of the August 1964 OswaldBelli episode in its documents related to the JFK assassination. The collection includes kinescope of various episodes from various episodes that were released in 1993 and 1994. The entire episode of that broadcast was erased but still photographs and silent 8mm film survive in its 8mm silent film collection. An archive of material on Malcolm X’s December 1964 appearance is circulated online, transcribed and transcribed by Bob Dylan’s daughter Caprice Crane, who said she believes her father saved the entire episode until he died in a car accident in 1996.

The show debuted nationwide with a trial run in August 1964 starting at 11: 15 p. m. on the ABC schedule and titled The Les Crane show. It was thefirst network program to compete with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and was canceled in November 1965 after three months on the air. The two kinecopes that ABC used to pitch TheLes Crane Show to its affiliates in 1964 constitute most of the surviving video and audio of Crane’s show. In late June 1965, following Crane’s three-month absence from television, The LesCrane Show was retitled ABC’sNightlife, sometimes advertised in newspapers as Nightlife, and it returned to the late-night schedule of the ABC network. In 1963, Crane moved to New York City to host Night Line, a 1: 00 a.m. talk show on WABC-TV, the American Broadcasting Company’s flagship station. He later moved to KRLA, where he was the original people \”responsible for creating the Top 40,\” said Casey Kasem in a 1990 interview. Crane can be seen and heard delivering his monologue, joking about words that could be censored and bantering with his sidekick Nipsey Russell.