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 Life with Luigi was a radio comedy-drama series which began September 21, 1948 on CBS, broadcasting its final episode on March 3, 1953. The story concerned Italian immigrant Luigi Basco, and his experiences as an immigrant in Chicago. Many of the shows take place at the US citizenship classes that Luigi attends with other immigrants from different countries, as well as trying to fend off the repeated advances of the morbidly-obese daughter of his landlord/sponsor.

Luigi was played by J. Carrol Naish, an Irish-American. Naish continued in the role on the short-lived CBS television version in 1952 and was later replaced by Vito Scotti when the series was briefly revived in the spring of 1953. With a working title of The Little Immigrant, Life with Luigi was created by Cy Howard, who earlier had created the hit radio comedy, My Friend Irma. Other characters on the radio show included Pasquale (Alan Reed), another Italian-American who was always trying to set Luigi up with his daughter Rosa; and Shultz (Hans Conreid), a German immigrant and fellow student in Luigi's citizenship class.

The show was sometimes regarded as the Italian counterpart to the radio show The Goldbergs, which chronicled the experience of Jewish immigrants in New York.

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Visit show page HERE

At a time when much of the television news revolves around the analog to digital change and reality television hijinks, YouTube has made some news of its own. The Google-owned video Web site has moved to put full-length television shows on its site for the first time.

Historically, YouTube has hosted a bewildering and attractive variety of video clips, the vast majority of which have been less than ten minutes in length. YouTube announced on Friday that it had finalized a deal with CBS to offer shows such as Star Trek, MacGyver, Beverly Hills 90210, and The Young and the Restless.

In some ways this new offering is more of a change in length and legality than an abrupt left turn. There have been small segments of television shows on YouTube almost since the beginning, but these also adhered more or less to the ten-minute time limit and were not sanctioned by the owners of the content. Often, such segments were removed after the copyright owner complained about their inclusion on the site. That will no longer be the case, at least for the content covered by the deal with CBS.

YouTube also said that it was in negotiation with other providers of lengthier content, specifically mentioning other television networks. This announcement follows on the heels of the introduction of their TheaterView product, which is aimed at the provision of a higher quality online viewing experience. It is not too far a stretch of the imagination to assume that these two new services are somehow related.

The new services also put YouTube head to head with Hulu, competing directly for the full-length television show viewer. Hulu currently has more of this sort of content than YouTube, but YouTube has the lion’s share of the Web video audience. It is estimated that YouTube has 100 times the viewers that Hulu has. With viewership being the key number in this marketplace, and with a business plan that now includes full-length television content, YouTube (and Google) are positioned to make a serious run at their competition. . (From BLORGE)

Hear It Now, an American radio program on CBS, began in 1950 and was hosted by Edward R. Murrow and produced by Murrow and Fred W. Friendly. It ran for one hour on Fridays at 9 pm.

Go to Hear It Now page