Saturday Night Oldies

Saturday Night Oldies was a Saturday-night music and talk show on WABC Radio in New York City.

WABC Radio (770 AM, New York City) played rock and roll from 1960 until May 10, 1982, before changing to a talk radio format. With talk shows not quite as popular on the weekend, Tim McCarthy, WABC President and General Manager, and Phil Boyce, Operations Manager and Program Director, decided to bring back the oldies music on Saturday nights. Saturday Night Oldies premiered on December 3, 2005, exactly six months after WCBS-FM (also in New York) dropped the oldies format on June 3, 2005.

Mark Simone hosts the show, which features popular music from the late 1950s through the 1970s with an emphasis on songs that became popular, but have largely been forgotten. Original WABC jingles from the station's Top 40 era are played and the DJ takes phone calls and reads posts from the Message Board discussing a wide variety of events in popular culture from that time period.

The program's production crew includes Mike Gunzelman, the producer, who answers the phones, and Mike Savilli on the controls.

In July 2009 the show was renamed Saturday Night and shortened to 3 hours, airing from 6 PM to 9 PM. Newer music is now played, as well as oldies, and a wider range of guests from the entertainment world are interviewed along with more discussion of entertainment issues.

In September 2010 the show was further shortened to two hours, from 7 to 9 PM. It was also announced at that time that the Saturday Night show would soon be going national, and would be syndicated to stations in other cities.

The show was heard for the last time in December 2012 as Mark Simone resigned from WABC and joined WOR where he is heard Monday - Friday from 10 AM - 12 noon.

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