Radio Drama · Old Time Radio · Drama · Comedy
The First Nighter Program
- Networks
- CBS, NBC (as its archives name them)
- Heard
- 1939–1953
- Episodes
- 35
This upload contains 34 episodes of the old time radio show, The First Nighter Program. Airing for 19 years on CBS from 1930-1949 (and another 2 years in repeats on NBC for a different sponsor from 1952-1953), the show brought you along with Mr. First Nighter as he attended opening night for hundreds of plays at the little theater just off Times Square.
More about it
The dramatic anthology starred a leading couple in plays written specifically for the show. The leading men were Don Ameche (1930-1937), Les Tremayne (1937-1943) and Olan Soule (1943-1949). The leading ladies were June Meredith (1930-1935), Betty Lou Gerson (1935-1937) and Barbara Luddy (1937-1949).
The show was popular and helped make Don Ameche a major star in the early 1930s, leading to his transition to movies. Although the show aired over 750 first-run episodes, sadly fewer than 40 appear to have survived. The plays are well-written and well-acted, and one hopes that additional episodes will be discovered.
Initial Upload - 33 episodes (12/9/2020)
1st Update - July 2022 (1 episode - 2/18/1953 show)
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Episodes, in broadcast order
Where it comes from 2
The archive items its episodes are played from, best first, with each one’s rights as its archive states them. An episode two sets both hold is played from the first.
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The First Nighter Program - 34 Episodes of the Old Time Radio Show
the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it.
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First Nighter
the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it.
From the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive, uploaded by the collector named.
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Radio drama, old-time radio and historic broadcasts from the Internet Archive (its Old Time Radio collection with the Old Time Radio Researchers' sets, WWII Era Audio Recordings, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Radio Haiti Archive, German radio plays and listeners' uploads), Wikimedia Commons (with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's broadcasts) and the Library of Congress. Every episode plays from its archive, which this site does not copy; rights are as each archive states them. Nothing here is called public domain on this site's say-so. In the United States, sound recordings first fixed before 15 February 1972 have federal protection under the Music Modernization Act of 2018, for most until 2067 at the latest, so most American radio of the 1930s to the 1950s is not in the public domain there. Each set shows the licence, mark or statement its archive gives, and says whose it is. Horror, crime, war and westerns are for teenage and adult profiles, racist caricature for adults only, and children’s profiles hear what was made for children. More about these archives.