Soup and Savings

Amos 'n' Andy are not what they were seven years ago, when the nation used to drop whatever it was doing to listen to them and echo such of their darktown phrases a.s "ow-wah!" and "I'se regusted." But they still command the top five-a-week 15-minute radio audience estimated at 40,000,000 weekly. For eleven years the faithful have heard Amos 'n' Andy over NBC stations, but beginning April 3 Amos 'n' Andy will move to CBS.

For stanch Amos 'n' Andy fans this means little more than a slight change in tuning, since CBS and NBC outlets duplicate each other in most important areas. But in the business of radio advertising the changeover was big doings. It indicated that henceforth Campbell Soup's huge outlay for radio advertising time (last year it was $2,279,425) would all be spent with

CBS, which at present collects only about a third of it. Last year Campbell paid NBC $1,468,353 for Amos 'n' Andy's time, and $97,284 for the Edwin C. Hill broadcasts, which will be terminated this month.

In any business but radio the loss of a million and a half account would be a crusher, but to NBC it was just an unhappy horse trade. NBC lost Amos 'n' Andy, but promptly picked off the Robert Benchley-Artie Shaw Old Gold show, a Sunday night half-hour that was bringing CBS $10,830 weekly. This becomes an NBC show beginning May 23.

In addition to the discount, Campbell stands to gain even more under CBS's summer policy, announced officially last week although it had been a CBS selling point for a year or so. Radio programs canceling for the summer usually take the chance of losing their old spot on the air come fall. NBC is still hard-boiled on this point, but CBS now permits advertisers "brief hiatuses during the summer . . . without forfeiture of time." A summer vacation on all Campbell shows would bring its savings to about $400,000.

No one was willing to admit, however, that the most consistent troupers on the air would be silenced this summer. Since March 1928, when Freeman F. Gosden became Amos and Charles J. Correll Andy, they have had one vacation, eight weeks in 1934, when they were plugging for Pepsodent. Other than that, they have missed only two broadcasts--one episode was silenced by a general SOS, but later printed in many newspapers; and once they went hunting in Maryland and were snowed in. Even when Correll's baby died last January, the show went on, the pair doing the first broadcast together, and Gosden reading all the parts at the rebroadcast few hours later. Although other radio teams are older than Amos 'n' Andy (see p. 59), when they leave NBC for CBS they will have given 5,208 performances including rebroadcasts, an unapproached radio record.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.