Ticket valid for one entry into the Gardens, through the Honour Courtyard of the Palace or the gates of Little Venice, the Menagerie, Neptune or the Dragon. Please note that a second entry is possible, but only through a different gate than the one used for the first entry.
The Nocturnes de feu (Fire Night show) honours the royal fires, so dear to the history of Versailles ! It is in a magical atmosphere that you will immerse yourself in this luminous evening punctuated by a sublime firework display by the Groupe F collective.
From May 2 to October 31, 2024, discover the Belles Eaux de Trianon and enjoy the gardens of the Grand Trianon and Petit Trianon and their water fountains, including the Buffet d'eau, restored in 2023.
The 2024 Outside Lands Night Shows lineup is here! The premium festival vibes continue with 16 after hours shows around San Francisco. Don't miss favorites like Sturgill Simpson, FLETCHER, STRFKR, Roosevelt, Amen Dunes, Corinne Bailey Rae and many more.
A late-night talk show is a genre of talk show, originating in the United States. It is generally structured around humorous monologues about the day's news, guest interviews, comedy sketches and music performances. It is characterized by spontaneous conversation, and for an effect of immediacy and intimacy as if the host were speaking directly to each member of the watching audience.[1][2][3] Late-night talk shows are also fundamentally shaped by the personality of the host.[1]
The late-night talk show format was popularized by Johnny Carson and his sidekick Ed McMahon with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on NBC. Typically the show's host conducts interviews from behind a desk, while the guest is seated on a couch. Many late night talk shows feature a house band which generally performs cover songs for the studio audience during commercial breaks and occasionally will back up a guest artist.
Late-night talk shows are a widely-viewed format in the United States, but are not as prominent in other parts of the world. Shows that loosely resemble the format air in other countries, but generally air weekly as opposed to the nightly airings of those in the United States. They also generally air in time slots considered to be prime time in the United States.
Late-night talk shows had their genesis in early variety shows, a format that migrated to television from radio, where it had been the dominant form of light entertainment during most of the old-time radio era. The Pepsodent Show, which opened each weekly episode with host Bob Hope's rapid-fire, topical and often political observational comedy, was a particularly important predecessor to the late-night format.[4]
The first show to air in a late-night timeslot itself, Broadway Open House, aired on NBC in 1950 and ended a year later after host Jerry Lester left the show, a combination of frustration with being upstaged by his sidekick Virginia "Dagmar" Lewis, burnout from having to go through a large amount of material in a short time, and the lack of enough television sets in the United States to make television broadcasting in late nights viable. (Lester himself was a last-minute replacement host for up-and-coming 26-year-old comic Don Hornsby, whom Hope had recommended to NBC but who caught polio and died less than a week before the show began.) For the next season, the only late-night program on the networks was NBC's Nightcap, a preview of the next day's programming hosted by Mary Kay Stearns.
The first late-night television talk show was The Faye Emerson Show, hosted by actress Faye Emerson. It began airing on CBS on October 24, 1949, in local East Coast markets before the network moved the 15-minute show, which regularly aired up to 11pm, nationwide in March 1950. In 1950, Emerson also hosted a similar show on NBC called Fifteen with Faye for about six months before committing the CBS show. Emerson's show was distinguished from her competition on NBC in that she was more openly political; Emerson, an avowed Democrat, regularly interviewed political and intellectual figures on her show (among them Soviet leader Joseph Stalin) in addition to a smattering of vaudeville and variety acts.[5]
The first version of The Tonight Show, Tonight Starring Steve Allen, debuted in 1954 on NBC. The show created many modern talk show staples including an opening monologue, celebrity interviews, audience participation, comedy bits, and musical performances; it also had some holdovers from the radio era, including a vocal group (Steve and Eydie, who went on to decades of success after Tonight) in addition to the house band, something that later late-night shows would abandon. By this point, the Federal Communications Commission had lifted a freeze on new television stations, which allowed new stations to appear across the country, and television set sales soon grew exponentially. As a result, unlike Broadway Open House, Tonight proved to be a resounding success.
The success of the show led Allen to receive another show, entitled The Steve Allen Show, which would compete with The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights. Meanwhile, hosting duties of The Tonight Show were split between Allen and Ernie Kovacs; Kovacs had defected to NBC from his own late-night show on the then-crumbling DuMont Television Network. Both Allen and Kovacs departed from Tonight in 1957 in order to focus on Allen's Sunday night show. After the two left, the format changed to something similar to Today and was renamed Tonight! America After Dark, hosted first by Jack Lescoulie, and later by Al Collins, with interviews conducted by Hy Gardner, and a house band led by Lou Stein performing. The show was not popular, leading to many NBC affiliates dropping the show. The show returned to the original format that year and was renamed Tonight Starring Jack Paar.
The even greater success of the show during Paar's hosting resulted in many NBC affiliates deciding to clear the show. He was noted for his conversational style, relatively high-brow interview guests, feuds with other media personalities (his animosity toward print journalists Ed Sullivan and Walter Winchell marked a power shift from print to television; Winchell's career never recovered from the damage), and mercurial personality. Paar quit the show in 1960 in a dispute over a censored joke, but was allowed to come back a month later. He permanently left the show in 1962, saying that he could not handle the workload of The Tonight Show (at the time, the show ran 105 minutes a day, five nights a week), and he moved to his own weekly prime-time show, which ran until 1965.
After Paar's departure, hosting duties were filled by Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl, and many others. Johnny Carson took over as host of The Tonight Show in 1962 and the show was renamed The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson streamlined the format of the show, focusing more on entertainment personalities, tweaking the monologue to feature shorter jokes, and emphasizing sketch comedy. Ed McMahon served as Carson's announcer, while from 1962 to 1966, the band was led by Skitch Henderson, who hired, among others, Doc Severinsen. When Henderson left, Milton DeLugg took over. Severinsen assumed the position in 1967 and served as bandleader with the NBC Orchestra. The show originated from NBC Studios in New York City but, as part of Carson's shifting the show toward a more entertainment-oriented program, moved to Burbank, California, in 1972.
NBC's two other rivals during the early television era, CBS and ABC, did not attempt any major forays into late-night television until the 1960s. ABC's first effort at the late-night TV race was hosted by Les Crane, which pioneered the controversial tabloid talk show format that would not become popular until two decades later. With most viewers not accustomed to the visceral conflict it entailed, Crane's show lasted only six months. Shorter still was The Las Vegas Show, a Las Vegas-based late-night show hosted by Bill Dana that was the only offering of the United Network that ever made it to air (because that network only had a handful of affiliates, it also syndicated the program to CBS, ABC and independent stations); it, along with the network, only lasted five weeks in summer 1967.
Steve Allen himself returned to NBC late night in syndication twice in this time frame, first with a show that ran from 1962 to 1964 and then with a series that ran from 1968 to 1971. ABC added the Joey Bishop Show, with Regis Philbin as his sidekick, to its late-night lineup in 1967, employing a talk show format, in an attempt to compete against the Tonight Show, which lasted until 1969. CBS went without late-night TV (the closest thing it would have to a late-night show was its late-prime-time variety show The Danny Kaye Show from 1963 to 1967) until 1969, when it acquired The Merv Griffin Show from syndication; Griffin returned to syndication in 1972, and CBS would not air any further late-night talk shows until 1989, instead opting for reruns, lifestyle programs and, later, imported Canadian dramas in the time slot. By the 1960s, NBC had already cornered the market for late-night television viewing and would dominate the ratings for several decades in the future.
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