RADIO & TV 1949: Milton Berle's TEXACO STAR THEATER

Jack of All Turns

As the clock nears 8 along the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. In Manhattan, diners at Lindy's gulp their after-dinner coffee and call for their checks as they did in the days of the Roosevelt fireside chats. On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot. For the next hour, wherever a signal from an NBC television transmitter can be picked out of the air, a large part of the population has its eyes fixed on a TV screen.

The center of all this to-do is Milton Berle, a jack-of-all-turns vaudeville comic who has gone into television and won a bright new feather for his very old hat. In a space of eight months, Berle's Texaco Star Theater (Tues. 8 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) has made him the undisputed No. 1 performer on U.S. TV. His show is a weekly catchall of the things the 40-year-old comic has learned in 35 hard-working years in show business. Berle uses not only his brash, strongbow-shaped mouth to get off his loud, fast, uneven volley of one-line gags; with expert timing and tireless bounce, he also hurls his whole 6 feet and 191 dieted pounds into every act of his show. His motto is still "anything for a laugh"—and practically anything he does gets one.

Berle is not universally admired. His detractors find his brassiness glaring and his talent often tasteless. They point out that television is still in its infancy and declare that Berle just happens to be the man who is taking candy from the baby.