Radio: Global Entertainment

One of the liveliest new shows on the air, which has been running for a month, is unavailable to most U.S. radio listeners. Studded with top-flight talent, free from commercials, bathos, exhortations to “keep ’em flying,” etc., it is a cheerful half-hour of unadulterated entertainment. Name of the show is Command Performance. Sponsor: Uncle Sam.

Seventeen times on Sunday, over 17 different wave lengths, Command Performance is short-waved by eleven U.S. radio stations to the armed forces on Bataan Peninsula, to frosty Iceland, Alaska, Ireland, the scorchy Caribbean, to the boys in the Antipodes, the Middle East, wherever they are. It is global entertainment, designed for global war.

Command Performance, a War Department idea, has struck sparks with the armed forces abroad. To date, an Alaskan private, lonesome for the songbirds which woke him mornings back home in Indiana, has heard his birds; another soldier overseas has heard the voice of his favorite cocker spaniel; bleary Robert Benchley has given a vernal lecture for sailors on The Facts of Life (e.g., “Fish are a very poor example of the Facts of Life . . . because they work under water and . . . don’t know anything”).

But most of the show is just good everyday stuff: a comic or two, a short sports summary, some popular and semi-classical music, a novelty number here, a Hollywood star there. No one draws pay; no one rehearses. The procedure is to conscript one of the big weekly commercials immediately after it goes off the air, build a new show with added acts and performers, transcribe it, and send the wax discs to the short-wave stations for the Sunday broadcast.

Last week’s Command Performance put the whole Fred Allen troupe on the air, plus Songstress Gladys Swarthout, Sportswriter John Kieran, Cinemactress Madeleine Carroll, Comic Henny Youngman. Mr. Kieran talked about sports and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The band played Deep in the Heart of Texas for some homesick Marines in the Caribbean.