The Arthur Murray Party

For other uses, see Arthur Murray (disambiguation).

The Arthur Murray Party
Genre	Variety show
Presented by	Arthur Murray Kathryn Murray
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
Production
Executive producer(s)	Jack Philbin
Camera setup	Multi-camera
Running time	22–24 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC DuMont CBS NBC
Picture format	Black-and-white Color
Audio format	Monaural
Original run	July 20, 1950 (1950-07-20) – September 6, 1960 (1960-09-06)

The Arthur Murray Party is an American television variety show which ran from July 1950 until September 1960. The show was hosted by famous dancers Arthur and Kathryn Murray, and was basically one long advertisement for their chain of dance studios. Each week the couple performed a mystery dance, and the viewer who correctly identified the dance would receive two free lessons at a local studio.

The Arthur Murray Party is notable for being one of only four TV series—the others were Down You Go, Pantomime Quiz, and The Original Amateur Hour -- broadcast on all four major commercial networks in the 1950s during the Golden Age of Television. It may, in fact, be the only series which had a run on all four networks at least twice.

Overview

The show was set up like a large party, with Kathryn hosting a variety of guests, from sports stars to actors or musicians. Murray dance studio instructors would help Kathryn and Arthur to show their guests how to perform a particular dance step. At the end of the show, the couple would perform a Johann Strauss waltz. The dancers often dressed in elegant clothing, which could cause amusing problems at times; In one surviving episode, the well-dressed female dancers are heard squealing with teenage-like excitement at guest star Johnnie Ray. A rare surviving kinescope of that episode survives and has surfaced online. Buddy Holly and The Crickets performed "Peggy Sue" on a December 1957 telecast, also preserved on a kinescope.

The J. Fred and Leslie W. MacDonald Collection at the Library of Congress contains thirteen kinescoped programs and partial programs of the various incarnations of Arthur Murray television. These include a complete half-hour show from August 17, 1954 featuring guest Don Cornell; a complete one-hour show from late 1950 featuring guests The DeMarco Sisters plus Andy and Della Russell; a segment from September 27, 1956 in which The Platters perform "You'll Never Know" and Andy Williams sings "Canadian Sunset;" and a segment from August 5, 1957 in which celebrites Jack E. Leonard, Bert Lahr, Paul Winchell, and June Havoc compete in a dance contest.

Broadcast history

The show appeared on ABC for the first few months of its broadcast as Arthur Murray Party Time, then moved to the DuMont Television Network, ABC, CBS, DuMont, CBS, NBC, CBS, and finally NBC (in that order).

See also

• List of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network
• List of surviving DuMont Television Network broadcasts

Bibliography

• David Weinstein, The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004) ISBN 1-59213-245-6
• Alex McNeil, Total Television, Fourth edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1980) ISBN 0-14-024916-8
• Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, Third edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964) ISBN 0-345-31864-1

External links

• The Arthur Murray Party at the Internet Movie Database
• The Arthur Murray Party at TV.com
• DuMont historical website
• A film clip of "The Arthur Murray Party" with Johnnie Ray is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]