Spring Tryouts

In the spring, radio's small fry get their big chance to try out new program ideas. Reason: most of the big-name, expensive radio shows leave the air during the spring and summer, when listeners presumably spend less time at home. At summer's end, when the regulars return, small-fry survivors are few. Of last year's dozens of new shows, the standout success is Information Please.

Worth dialing among this year's spring tryouts:

Author, Author's maestro is Humorist Sidney Joseph Perelman (Dawn Ginsberg's Revenge), who manfully keeps gagging while a collection of fictioneers ad lib stories to fit mystery-tale situations contributed by listeners. Sample situation Why did Little Nell scorn Dick Goodfellow to marry Squire Sourpuss? Regular aides to Perelman are Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, a detectifiction team known as Ellery Queen. Guests have included Dorothy Parker, Carl Van Doren Heywood Broun, Rupert Hughes, Ruth McKenney, Ludwig Bemelmans, Alice Duer Miller, Henry F. Pringle. Impaired at first by talkiness and the occasional complete blankness of literary minds, Author, Author has pepped up considerably since its start, April 7.

Mr. District Attorney, which will substitute for Pepsodent's Bob Hope, program on NBC-Red this summer, is typical of the vulgate radio shows by Phillips H. Lord (Seth Parker, Gang Busters, We, the People). Racket situations are dramatized and a Dewey-style prosecuting attorney goes to work on the fictionized culprits.

Name Three, a quiz show based on bank night, is a Monday night MBS half-hour sponsored by Dunhill Cigarettes. Candidates picked from the studio audience, asked to name, for example, three vegetables beginning with S, win $2 for each right answer. If a mike-scared quizee can think of spinach, cannot remember squash or salsify, he wins only $2, and the remaining $4 goes into a jackpot. Near the program's end the candidates get a chance to share the jackpot by writing answers to a Toughie (e.g., Name three State capitals named after Presidents). If there is still no winner, the money goes into next week's pot. Biggest jackpot thus far, a three-weeker: $88.

Inside Story is a Chicago-made Tuesday nighter over NBC-Blue which dramatizes true-life hair raisers. Last week one scheduled tale-teller was ex-Convicf Pat Reed, a counterfeiter who finished his five-year stretch in Alcatraz last October. Pat Reed was to say: 1) that Convicts Ralph Roe and Theodore Cole had made a clean getaway from Alcatraz in 1937, had not drowned, as the G-men reported; and 2) that a mass escape is now being planned, involving the seizure of a strategic control tower.

NBC got cold feet about Pat Reed's story, showed it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was "requested" not to broadcast it. Mad as hops was Pat Reed, who had expected to turn an honest penny with his radio yarn. Said he: "NBC is controlled by the Government anyway."

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