The run
- Network
- NBC / CBS
- Years active
- 1938–1945
- Surviving broadcasts
- 220
- Genre
- talk
Information Please ran from 1938 to 1951, first on NBC and later CBS and Mutual. Listeners mailed in questions intended to defeat the resident panel — Franklin P. Adams, John Kieran and the pianist Oscar Levant, joined weekly by guests including Wendell Willkie, Boris Karloff and Gracie Allen — and were paid when they succeeded. It was among the first American programmes electronically transcribed for repeat broadcast on both coasts. The surviving recordings are public domain.
Restoration quality — measured from the surviving files
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
12 dated broadcasts across 8 years on the air, with 2 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 1938, in original transmission order.
- 1. Harry Overstreet Marcus Dufield · 17 May 1938
- 2. Gene Tunney · 18 Oct 1938
- 3. John P Marquand · 16 May 1939
- 01
Harry Overstreet Marcus Dufield
17 May 1938 · 30 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 17 May 1938. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 02
Gene Tunney
18 Oct 1938 · 28 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 18 October 1938. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 03
John P Marquand
16 May 1939 · 28 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 16 May 1939. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 04
Christopher Morley John T Flynn
10 Oct 1939 · 28 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 10 October 1939. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 05
Clair Boothe
1 Oct 1940 · 28 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 1 October 1940. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 06
Jan Struther Sir Wilmot Lewis
7 Feb 1941 · 28 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 7 February 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 07
William'Tilden
13 Jun 1941 · 28 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 13 June 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
- 08
Cornelia Otis Skinner
21 Nov 1941 · 27 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 21 November 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Information Please collection (public domain).
Also on NBC / CBS
NBC / CBS in 1938–1945
Other series the network carried while Information Please was on the air.
Same seasons
talk on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The roundtable of experts
Put clever people around one microphone, give them a question from a listener, and let the disagreement be the entertainment. Information Please and Town Meeting invented the format.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Information Please
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
Chosen by the same editors.
