| The Arthur Murray Party | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Variety show |
| Presented by | Arthur Murray Kathryn Murray |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Jack Philbin |
| Camera setup | Multi-camera |
| Running time | 22–24 minutes |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | ABC DuMont CBS NBC |
| Picture format | Black-and-white Color |
| Audio format | Monaural |
| Original run | July 20, 1950 – September 6, 1960 |
The Arthur Murray Party is an American television variety show which ran from July 1950 until September 1960.[1] The show was hosted by famous dancers Arthur and Kathryn Murray, and was basically one long advertisement for their chain of dance studios. Each week the couple performed a mystery dance, and the viewer who correctly identified the dance would receive two free lessons at a local studio.
The Arthur Murray Party is notable for being one of only four TV series—the others were Down You Go, Pantomime Quiz, and The Original Amateur Hour -- broadcast on all four major commercial networks in the 1950s during the Golden Age of Television. It may, in fact, be the only series which had a run on all four networks at least twice.
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The show was set up like a large party, with Kathryn hosting a variety of guests, from sports stars to actors or musicians. Murray dance studio instructors would help Kathryn and Arthur to show their guests how to perform a particular dance step. At the end of the show, the couple would perform a Johann Strauss waltz. The dancers often dressed in elegant clothing, which could cause amusing problems at times; In one surviving episode, the well-dressed female dancers are heard squealing with teenage-like excitement at guest star Johnnie Ray. A rare surviving kinescope of that episode survives and has surfaced online. Buddy Holly and The Crickets performed "Peggy Sue" on a December 1957 telecast, also preserved on a kinescope.
The J. Fred and Leslie W. MacDonald Collection at the Library of Congress contains thirteen kinescoped programs and partial programs of the various incarnations of Arthur Murray television. These include a complete half-hour show from August 17, 1954 featuring guest Don Cornell; a complete one-hour show from late 1950 featuring guests The DeMarco Sisters plus Andy and Della Russell; a segment from September 27, 1956 in which The Platters perform "You'll Never Know" and Andy Williams sings "Canadian Sunset;" and a segment from August 5, 1957 in which celebrites Jack E. Leonard, Bert Lahr, Paul Winchell, and June Havoc compete in a dance contest.
The show appeared on ABC for the first few months of its broadcast as Arthur Murray Party Time,[2] then moved to the DuMont Television Network, ABC, CBS, DuMont, CBS, NBC, CBS, and finally NBC (in that order).