Larry King Show

The Larry King Show was a radio talk show hosted by Larry King which aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System from 1978 to 1994. A typical show consisted of King interviewing a guest, then taking phone calls from listeners for the guest, and then taking phone calls on any topic. In 1982 the show won a Peabody Award.

In 1978, King went from a local show in Florida to a national show, inheriting the nightly talk show slot on the Mutual Broadcasting System, broadcast coast-to-coast, that had been "Long John" Nebel's until his death, and had been pioneered by Herb Jepko. One reason King got the Mutual job is that he had once been an announcer at WGMA-AM in Hollywood, Florida, which was then owned by C. Edward Little. Little went on to become president of Mutual and he hired King as Nebel's replacement. King's Mutual show debuted in Miami on January 30, 1978, where King's first guest was football coach Don Shula. The show soon moved to Mutual's studios near Washington, D.C. and it developed a devoted audience.

Mutual broadcast the show live Monday through Friday from midnight to 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time. King would interview a guest for the first 60 minutes, with callers asking questions that continued the interview for another 2 hours. When he interviewed authors, King said that he would not read their book in advance, so that he would not know more about the book than his audience. King said "The less I know, the better I feel about a person or book."

King recalled that due to the number of calls coming in on the early days of the show "there was more than one occasion when [area code] 703 blew". King said that they originally wanted a toll-free phone number for call-in, but came to believe that he got a better quality of calls when the callers had to pay. When he did this show, King said that doing an overnight show meant that his work came at the end of his day, unlike for most people whose work came at the beginning of their day. The show was successful, starting with relatively few affiliates and eventually growing to more than 500. It ran until 1994. Once King started doing Larry King Live for CNN, he would do both shows in an evening.

C-SPAN would annually record, and then repeatedly show, an entire show on cable TV. Some years, C-SPAN would simulcast the broadcast, so that TV viewers could see the show live (as radio listeners normally heard it).

...
Wikipedia