Don McNeill’s TV Club – Nostalgia Central

1 9 5 0 – 1 9 5 5 (USA)
60 minute episodes

Beginning in the 1930s as a radio broadcast from the Tip Top Club at the Allerton Hotel in Chicago, ABC’s Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club featured celebrity interviews, music spots and audience participation segments, including “memory time” and “prayer time” (a moment of silent prayer).

The show was made available to TV viewers in 1950 as Don McNeill’s TV Club through the simple device of posting a couple of television cameras in strategic places around the studio (the Terrace Casino of the Hotel Motel in Chicago).

As a TV show, it was definitely not for the sophisticated, but its lengthy radio tenure proved that many people liked this type of entertainment.

A big, good-natured fellow, McNeill’s stock in trade could best be described as folk humour, and the show was pitched at a hinterlandish-type audience, as demonstrated by the small towners who showed up in the studio each morning.

McNeill was joined by a talented group of performers, including his chief heckler, comedian Sam Cowling; singers Johnny Desmond and Eileen Parker; the Eddie Ballantine Orchestra, and Fran Allison of Kukla, Fran and Ollie as Aunt Fanny (pictured below).

The final televised show aired on 25 February 1955, though McNeill continued with the Breakfast Club on ABC radio until 1968.

Don McNeill died on 7 May 1996 in Evanston, Illinois, after a short illness. He was 88.

Host
Don McNeill
Aunt Fanny
Fran Allison
Orchestra Leader
Eddie Ballantine
Announcer
Ken Nordine