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TV excels in two areas – sports and Carson.

David Brenner, comedian and frequent Carson guest, 1971

THE CULTURE OF THE United States tends to treat any new field of endeavour like the Wild West – a vast wilderness to be colonised and tamed. The TV schedules were no different – beyond the evening hours lay the call of the untamed daytime slots in one direction, and in the other the heart of late-night darkness. NBC launched a daytime expedition in 1952, beginning with early morning chat-in Today. Two years later came a companion trek into the late-night zone, which opened up a lucrative and fiercely contested new territory.

Tonight! was shaped by its first host, Steve Allen. A classic vaudevillian drifter who fell into TV comedy after a subversive stint on local radio, Allen turned what was planned as a fairly straight talk-show-plus-sketch format into a self-contained world – a club with its own rules and customs that made the viewers feel part of something wonderfully mad. He’d arrange complex one-shot gags such as being dunked into hot water wearing a suit festooned with teabags, but most of his comedy was cheaply improvised. Regular stunts included walking out into the New York streets in police uniform and stopping motorists for various bizarre reasons, or just pointing a camera at the passing street life and reeling off an impromptu commentary on its comings and goings. Late night was established as a freewheeling refuge from the daily schedule grind.

Allen moved on to Sunday prime time after an unsuccessful splitting of Tonight! duties with Ernie Kovacs. Reverting to the chat format, the show gained a new, more earnest host. Jack Paar gathered a round table of fellow wits (including token Brit Hermione Gingold), welcomed heavyweight guests from JFK to Castro, and put his own thin-skinned personality centre stage. A fragile star, Paar would fight the network on-screen, most famously calling out their censorship of a whimsical gag based on misinterpretation of the initials ‘WC’.

Paar’s successor couldn’t have more temperamentally different. Johnny Carson boasted the ultimate down-home American background, having grown up in a backwater of Nebraska. His first TV success was the unpromising daytime game show Who Do You Trust? (formerly Do You Trust Your Wife?) where he built up the introductory banter with the contestants into a lengthy and often, for the time slot, bawdy art. He was also united with long-suffering Tonight second banana and announcer Ed McMahon.

Carson first appeared on Tonight! as a guest of Steve Allen, making a prank phone call to Jack Paar. (Paar rumbled the pair within seconds.) As host, he steered a steady course between the hyperactive pranking of Allen and Paar’s earnest inquiry. Whether delivering the opening monologue in front of theatrical curtains or sat at his desk in front of a mural of imposing Midwest scenery, idly tossing cue cards full of failing gags over his shoulder, he exuded a comfortingly straight-up bonhomie in increasingly fractious times. The wit was bolstered by a platoon of star writers, and the lurid sports jackets were from his own line of dresswear, but the easy manner and genuine interest in what his subjects had to say were all Carson’s own. The show soon became Carson’s, incorporating his name into its title and eventually relocating with him from New York to beautiful downtown Burbank.

Teetotal and averse to showbiz parties, Carson was a reluctant off-duty celebrity, becoming a star only after he’d parted the stage curtains following McMahon’s preparatory crescendo of ‘Heeeeere’s Johnny!’ Under the lights, he could converse with the cream of Hollywood and hold his own with New York’s literati. Long-standing tit-for-tat feuds, especially with actor and compulsive put-down merchant Don Rickles, escalated with each meeting into the realms of obsession; both men walking a fine line between the all-in-fun wink for the audience and all-too-convincing mutual animosity.

When the show ran out of stars, it made its own. Tiny Tim, a towering, baleful oddball who sang ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ in an unearthly falsetto, was discovered by Tonight and became a regular, even marrying his beau in mock-Georgian splendour on a special edition of the programme, with McMahon as chief usher: ‘We cordially request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki right here on The Tonight Show. But right now here are some words of wisdom from Pepto-Bismol tablets.’115

Away from the star circuit, Carson invited ‘ordinary folk with a story to tell’, especially pensioners such as a 103-year-old woman who still drove regularly, whom he handled with warmth and a total absence of condescension. Folk with odd obsessions were another rich vein: Carson was the first to televise the subsequently worldwide craze for domino toppling, inviting Robert Speca into the studio to knock down 6,999 pieces. All civilians were treated the same as the stars: Carson gave them all their due, resorting to his trademark conspiratorial sidelong glance to camera only if the subject was really asking for it. A tangible link between celebrity and public decades before social media, Johnny Carson sat at the fulcrum of American popular culture.

His unaffected largesse prompted generosity in his guests. When Alex Haley appeared on the show to promote the mini-series Roots, he brought with him a leather-bound book entitled Roots of Johnny Carson, a 400-page, intensively researched trawl of the Carson family tree reaching back to sixteenth century Essex. It was, of course, the perfect all-American heritage, another piece of the Average Guy legend.

Other chat shows filed up alongside Carson. On ABC, Dick Cavett creamed off the intellectual crowd for whom Carson felt too safe. For CBS, Merv Griffin tackled Carson’s populism head-on. From 1982, David Letterman followed Carson in the NBC schedules, triumphantly reactivating Steve Allen’s intricate horseplay (including the teabag suit) in an hour produced, as part of Carson’s uniquely favourable contract, by Carson’s own people. Carson’s stature was not so much presidential as kingly. Though Kermit the Frog was briefly mooted as a replacement in the late 1970s, the thought of Carson yielding his desk to anyone else remained taboo.

When Carson abdicated at the age of 66, the effect was of a long-peaceful kingdom plunged into civil war. Letterman, long seen as heir apparent, lost out to the less admired Jay Leno, and decamped to CBS, to be replaced by Conan O’Brien. Rivals, including Tom Snyder and Jimmy Kimmel, proliferated. Machinations behind the desks became as much a public spectacle as the encounters over them. The unholy viewing hour remained exceptionally popular, but it never regained the stature of the man whose one job was to introduce America to itself. Carson himself summed it up, when pausing for breath after an innocuous bit of business spun gloriously out of hand, climaxing in tearful laughter, trademark karate chops and cries of ‘Hi-yooo!’ ‘That,’ said the exhausted host, ‘is what makes this job what it is.’ ‘What is it?’ asked McMahon. Carson thought hard for a second, and eventually answered, ‘I don’t know.’116