The Larry King Show was a national radio talk show hosted by Larry King which aired over the Mutual Broadcasting System from January, 1978 to May, 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.
Origin
In 1978, King went from a local show on station WIOD in Miami, Florida to a national show, inheriting the nightly nationwide talk show slot on the Mutual Broadcasting System, that had previously been hosted by "Long John" Nebel and Candy Jones on the network until Nebel's illness and death, and had been pioneered by Herb Jepko in 1975. The main 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 debut program on Mutual was broadcast from Miami on January 30, 1978, where his first guest was Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula. Production of the show soon moved to Mutual's main studios in Crystal City, Virginia near Washington, D.C. and it rapidly developed a large and devoted audience.
Show format
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 hour, with callers asking questions that continued the interview for another 2 hours. When he interviewed authors, King said that he would not read their books 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 703 blew". King said that he 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 for them. The show was successful, starting with relatively few affiliates and eventually growing to more than 500, when King stepped down from the show in 1994. In 1985, King began appearing on television with Larry King Live for CNN; he would continue to broadcast his Mutual radio show later in the evening. C-SPAN would annually record, and then repeatedly show, an entire program on cable TV. Some years, C-SPAN would simulcast the Mutual radio broadcast, so that TV viewers could watch the show live.
Open Phone America
At 3 a.m., King would allow callers to discuss any topic they chose with him, until the end of the program, when he expressed his own political opinions. That segment was called Open Phone America. Many stations in the western time zones would carry Open Phone America live, followed by the guest interview on tape delay. Thus listeners from across the country could call into Open Phone America. Callers to the show would be told to call the number and "When the connection rings, let it ring. We'll answer when it's your turn." Some of King's regular callers used pseudonyms, or nicknames given by King such as "The Numbers Guy", "The Chair", "The Portland Laugher," "The Scandal Scooper," "The Miami Derelict," "The Todd Cruz Caller," "The Water Is Warm Caller", and "Mr. Radio". "Mr. Radio" made over 200 calls to King during Open Phone America.
Humor
King would occasionally entertain the audience by telling amusing anecdotes from his youth and early career in radio, such as a story about him and his friends faking the death of a schoolmate, or his popular Carvel ice cream story . The show also occasionally featured a "fictional alien, Gork of the planet Fringus", "who supposedly existed one year in the future, giving highlights of the coming year on Earth". During the early years of the program, King would occasionally play music featuring the "Mutual Symphony Orchestra".
Final year
King's primary guest host since the early 1980s had been Jim Bohannon, who began hosting his own Saturday evening call-in show on Mutual in 1985, with a format identical to King's program. In 1993, Mutual moved the Larry King Show to an afternoon time slot and offered King's late evening time slot to Bohannon. Most radio stations with a talk show format at that time had an established policy of broadcasting local programming in the late afternoon time-slot that Mutual now offered King's program. As a result, many of King's overnight affiliates declined to carry the daytime show and it was unable to generate the same audience size. After sixteen years on Mutual, King decided to resign from the program, with his final broadcast heard on May 27, 1994. Mutual gave King's afternoon time-slot to David Brenner. Mutual affiliates were given the option of carrying the audio of King's new CNN evening television program. The Westwood One radio simulcast of King's CNN show continued until December 31, 2009.
