All ‘Shook’ up: Bob Hope, the USO, and How a Night in Greenland Changed Television

Abstract

Broadcast in January 1955, a single episode of The Bob Hope Show on the Colgate Comedy Hour, Hope’s first USO show on American television, reflects wider shifts taking place in television in the 1950s. The episode demonstrates the increasing importance of recorded and edited television over live TV; the shift in production from New York City to Los Angeles; the increasing role of Hollywood stars over New York’s theater community or radio personalities; changing public tastes; and advertising in the 1950s, which was about to undergo profound change as well. The show also reveals changes in the character of war as Americans get to see for the first time during the Cold War, US military personnel at a remote location. Hope’s jokes and William Holden’s monologue at the end of the show illustrate how Americans had come to see both the specter of communism and the American military after the armistice in Korea, all while broadcasting from the new ‘front lines’ of the Cold War, or in this case what Holden called ‘Malenkov’s patio’.