Radio: Heigh-ho, Everybody!

RADIO & TV

"Height-ho, Eeverybody!"

For many a middle-aged radio listener, it was just like old times. The throaty "Heigh-ho, everybody!" was crooned above the strains of My Time Is Your Time. Last week Rudy Vallee, older (48), greying and without a megaphone, was back at the old stand with his new Rudy Vallee Show (weekdays, 11:15 a.m.) over Manhattan's WOR.

Even though his show is all chatter and records, Rudy insists that he is no disc jockey. "It's just an opportunity for me to bring up provocative things in show business," he explains. "It discusses why some people are successful and some are not —originally, I wanted to call it So You Want to Be a Star?" The new, kittenishly pedantic Vallee style ("Radio as I knew it is, alackaday, no more, no more") is a frank imitation of one of Vallee's old teachers, Yale's William Lyon Phelps ("one of the most unrestrained, lackadaisical and uninhibited speakers in the world").

At the moment, Rudy's radio earnings from nine sponsors are "negligible." But he is confident that radio, which paid him handsomely in the past, will do as well by him again. And money will be welcome, Rudy reports sadly, since his yearly income is now "down to around $150,000 or $225,000, depending on how my moving pictures make out."