Everyone thinks of Johnny as an announcer, but he kind of fell into that job in the mid-1950s. Before that, he had hosted a number of shows, first on network radio, then network television.
The warm-up guy basically gave some technical information the studio audience needed to know about applauding and behaviour during the broadcast. But he had to get them in the mood for fun. Olson did silly and funny stunts to get the people in the seats primed for the big show ahead.
We’ve written about warm-ups, and Johnny Olson, before, but I’ve spotted another wire service story from June 20, 1963. Olson was working out of New York then, mainly on Goodson-Todman game or panel shows. For whatever reason, his name was constantly misspelled in newspaper stories. I don’t envy anyone trying to warm up an audience for Keefe Brasselle.
What the Stars Owe To Warmer-Upper
By JOAN CROSBY
New York — When Bud Collyer, John Daly, Gene Rayburn, Robert Q. Lewis, Keefe Brasselle, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar and Victor Borge walk out on a stage to face a television studio audience, they find a group of relaxed, happy people waiting to laugh at the least flicker of an eyebrow. And the performers owe it all to Johnny Olsen, the industry's number one audience warmer-upper.
To give you an idea of the esteem in which Olsen is held, Jackie Gleason flew him to Florida this past season to perform a ten-minute warm-up for a ten-minute skit to be inserted in one of the Great One's shows. Johnny, in addition to warming up the audience is also the off-camera announcer for most of-these shows, and he is even, occasionally, seen on-camera.
Olsen is a 25-year veteran of radio and television—20 years in New York—and one of the busiest commercial men around. Between his announcing and warm-up chores, it's not unusual for him to be scheduled for 23 shows within one week.
Why is it considered so important for an audience to be warmed-up before the star appears? "The majority of people in audiences are not from New York," Johnny said. "They are often distracted in a television studio by the lights, the cue cards, the technicians and the cameras--which get in their way. Well, we can't have them grumbling 'I'd rather stay home.' So the warm up man comes out ahead of show time and acts as a liaison between the personality and the audience."
Johnny works Play Your Hunch, then follows this immediately with The Match Game. "Here I act as a Pied Piper. Many times at Hunch, I tell the audience I'm going upstairs to do another show, and I ask them if they want to join me. We march up the stairs together, and I know at least I've got part of the group set and ready to respond."
• • •
OLSEN, who hosted such shows as Ladies, Be Seated, Break the Bank and Rumpus Room, sometimes has some tight schedules which necessitate an imaginative to the problem of beating New York traffic.
"Once I hired two detectives to take me from one show to another. With their help I got 23 blocks uptown and 8 blocks crosstown in four-and-a-half minutes. "Another time I had approximately 70 seconds to get five blocks down Sixth Avenue. But, Sixth Avenue is a one-way street, going the wrong way for my purposes. I finally hired a Western Union kid and his bicycle and we sped through the one-way traffic and made it just in time."
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