The Edsel Show

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The title image from The Edsel Show

The Edsel Show was an hour-long television special broadcast live on CBS in the United States on October 13, 1957, intended to promote Ford Motor Company's new Edsel cars. It was a milestone in Bing Crosby's career, and was notable as the first full-length television program to use the new technology of videotape.

Overview

The Edsel Show starred Bing Crosby and featured Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, and Lindsay Crosby and The Four Preps. It replaced the Ed Sullivan Show in CBS's Sunday lineup and was one of the year's most successful programs, although its popularity did not transfer to the Edsel cars. It has been credited as Bing Crosby's real television breakthrough [link], and set the pattern for his many television specials to come; in its wake he signed a lucrative contract with ABC under which he would produce two specials per year.

Videotape

The show was also noteworthy for being the first major broadcast to be recorded on videotape for time-delayed broadcast to the western U.S. It was performed at CBS Television City in the afternoon in California and broadcast live in the eastern part of the country. A videotape was made of the performance and was played back three hours later for western audiences. As videotape was a new technology, CBS made a film-based kinescope of the show and played it back alongside the videotape, so that the broadcast could switch to the kinescope if problems were encountered with the tape. In the event there were none.

Videotape was a technology that had interested Crosby for several years, and his company Bing Crosby Enterprises had investigated several technologies, ultimately investing in Ampex, the first company to demonstrate a practical broadcast-quality videotape system when it unveiled the first 2" Quadruplex videotape machine in 1956. Crosby's interest as a performer was to avoid having to make repeated live performances of the same show.

See also

• 1957 in television
• An Evening With Fred Astaire

External links

• [A page about the show featuring a short clip]
• [From the same site, about the discovery of the master videotape]
• [Another clip showing various Edsel models]
• [}}}] at YouTube
• [}}}] at YouTube

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