This Is Your Life is an American
television documentaryDocumentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
series broadcast on
NBCThe National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
, originally hosted by its producer,
Ralph EdwardsRalph Livingstone Edwards was an American radio and television host and television producer.-Early career:Born in Merino, Colorado , Edwards worked for KROW-AM in Oakland, California while he was still in high school...
from 1952 to 1961. In the show, the host surprises a guest, and proceeds to take them through their life in front of an audience including friends and family.
Edwards revived the show in 1971-72, while
Joseph CampanellaJoseph Campanella in Lewistown, Pennsylvania is an American character actor who has appeared in over 200 TV and film roles since 1955, including such shows as The Eleventh Hour, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke, The Road West, The Golden Girls and Mama's Family. He also had a role in...
hosted a version in 1983. Edwards returned for some specials in the late 1980s, before his death in 2005. The show originated as a radio show on NBC Radio airing from 1948 to 1952.
Other versions of the television show have also been made
in BritainThis Is Your Life is a British biographical television documentary, based on the 1952 American show of the same name. It was hosted by Eamonn Andrews from 1955 until 1964, and then from 1969 until his death in 1987 aged 64...
from 1955, as well as
in AustraliaThis Is Your Life is an Australian television documentary show based on the American show of the same name, in which the host surprises guests with a show documenting their lives, with audience participation from their friends and family....
,
in New ZealandThis Is Your Life is a New Zealand television documentary show based on the American show of the same name, in which the host surprises guests with a show documenting their lives, with audience participation from their friends and family....
and in Sweden. The
This Is Your Life format is distributed internationally by DRG.
Concept
The idea for
This Is Your Life arose while Edwards was working on
Truth or ConsequencesTruth or Consequences is an American quiz show originally hosted on NBC radio by Ralph Edwards and later on television by Edwards , Jack Bailey , Bob Barker , Bob Hilton and Larry Anderson . The television show ran on CBS, NBC and also in syndication...
. He had been asked by the U.S. Army to "do something" for paraplegic soldiers at Birmingham General Hospital, a Van Nuys, Los Angeles, California Army rehabilitation hospital (a site later
converted into a high schoolBirmingham Community Charter High School is a public coeducational high school in the neighborhood/district of Lake Balboa in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, California, United States...
). Edwards chose a "particularly despondent young soldier and hit on the idea of presenting his life on the air, in order to integrate the wreckage of the present with his happier past and the promise of a hopeful future." Edwards received such positive public feedback from the "capsule narrative" of the soldier he gave on
Truth or Consequences that he developed
This Is Your Life as a new radio show. In the show, Edwards would surprise each guest by narrating a biography of the subject. The show "alternated in presenting the life stories of entertainment personalities and 'ordinary' people who had contributed in some way to their communities." The host, consulting his "red book", would narrate while presenting the subject with family members, friends, and others who had had an impact on his or her life.
By the 1950s, the show was aired live before a theater audience. The guests were surprised by
Ralph EdwardsRalph Livingstone Edwards was an American radio and television host and television producer.-Early career:Born in Merino, Colorado , Edwards worked for KROW-AM in Oakland, California while he was still in high school...
and confronted by the microphone and cameras. They made their way to the studio during the first commercial break. Most of the honorees quickly got over their initial shock and enjoyed meeting bygone friends again, as with
Don DeForeDonald John DeFore was an American actor who played "the regular guy" and "the good, ol' boy next door" in many films in the 1940s and 1950s.-Life and career:...
on May 6, 1953. Movie producer
Mack SennettMack Sennett was a Canadian-born American director and was known as the innovator of slapstick comedy in film. During his lifetime he was known at times as the "King of Comedy"...
's response was typical: he hated being caught off-guard, but as the tribute progressed he relaxed, and by the end of the show he was quite pleased with the experience.
Planning for the broadcast meant that some would know in advance about the surprise.
Carl ReinerCarl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...
later admitted that he knew beforehand about his appearance. In some cases the episode was not a surprise:
Eddie CantorEddie Cantor was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter...
had a heart condition, so the show's producers made sure that he wasn't surprised.
Notable guests
Some celebrities were unpleasantly surprised.
Stan LaurelArthur Stanley "Stan" Jefferson , better known as Stan Laurel, was an English comic actor, writer and film director, famous as the first half of the comedy team Laurel and Hardy. His film acting career stretched between 1917 and 1951 and included a starring role in the Academy Award winning film...
of
Laurel and HardyLaurel and Hardy were one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comedy double acts of the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema...
was angered by being "tricked" into what would be the team's only American television appearance, on December 1, 1954. Laurel later said, "[Oliver Hardy] and I were always planning to do something on TV. But we never dreamed that we would make our television debut on an unrehearsed network program...I was damned if I was going to put on a free show for them."
Lowell ThomasLowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveler, best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous...
"displayed obvious anger and embarrassment"; when host Ralph Edwards tried to assure him that he would enjoy what was to come, Thomas replied, "I doubt that very much." In 1993,
Angie DickinsonAngie Dickinson is an American actress. She has appeared in more than fifty films, including Rio Bravo, Ocean's Eleven, Dressed to Kill and Pay It Forward, and starred on television as Sergeant Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson on the 1970s crime series Police Woman.-Early life:Dickinson, the second of...
refused to appear on a retrospective show.
One of the show's subjects was Rev.
Kiyoshi Tanimotowas a Methodist minister famous for his work for the Hiroshima Maidens. He was one of the six Hiroshima survivors whose experiences of the bomb and later life are portrayed in John Hersey's book Hiroshima....
, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. During the episode Edwards introduced Tanimoto to
Robert A. LewisRobert A. Lewis was a United States Army Air Forces Officer serving in the Pacific Theatre during World War II.Lewis grew up in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey and attended Ridgefield Park High School there, graduating in 1937....
, the co-pilot of the
Enola GayEnola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, mother of the pilot, then-Colonel Paul Tibbets. On August 6, 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb as a weapon of war...
, the plane that dropped the bomb on
Hiroshimais the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...
. Hanna Bloch Kohner, a
Holocaust survivor, was a subject on May 27, 1953.
In February 1953,
Lillian RothLillian Roth was an American singer and actress.-Early life:Roth was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She was only 6 years old when her mother took her to Educational Pictures, where she became the company's trademark, symbolized by a living statue holding a lamp of knowledge...
, a "topflight
torch singerA torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, either where one party is oblivious to the existence of the other, where one party has moved on, or where a romantic affair has affected the relationship...
of the
Prohibition eraProhibition in the United States was a national ban on the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol, in place from 1920 to 1933. The ban was mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act set down the rules for enforcing the ban, as well as defining which...
" was the subject of the show, "cheerfully admitt[ing] that she had been a hopeless drunk for 16 years before being rescued by
Alcoholics AnonymousAlcoholics Anonymous is an international mutual aid movement which says its "primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety." Now claiming more than 2 million members, AA was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio...
." Edwards described Roth's condition as "impending blindness, an inflamed sinus and a form of alcoholic insanity" and brought on a psychiatrist who had treated her, a brother-in-law "who had paid her bills" and several "glamorous foul-weather friends" such as
Lita Grey ChaplinLita Grey was an American actress and the second wife of Charlie Chaplin. She was born in Hollywood, California, in 1908, to a Mexican-born mother and a father of Irish heritage and christened Lillita Louise MacMurray.-Personal life:Grey married four times...
and
Ruby KeelerRuby Keeler, born Ethel Hilda Keeler, was an actress, singer, and dancer most famous for her on-screen coupling with Dick Powell in a string of successful early musicals at Warner Brothers, particularly 42nd Street . From 1928 to 1940, she was married to singer Al Jolson...
. Roth's story became the basis of her autobiography and the film,
I'll Cry TomorrowI'll Cry Tomorrow is a biopic which tells the story of Lillian Roth, a Broadway star who rebels against the pressure of her domineering mother and reacts to the death of her fiancé by becoming an alcoholic...
, with Edwards appearing as himself.
Kate Newcomb, a doctor who practiced in a "70-mile circle" around
Woodruff, WisconsinWoodruff is a town in Oneida County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 2,055 at the 2010 census. The census-designated place of Woodruff is located in the town.-Points of interest:...
and was later honored as the namesake of that town's Dr. Kate Newcomb Museum, was the subject of a 1954 episode, bringing attention to her "million pennies" drive to raise funds for a small community hospital; viewers of the episode donated over $112,000 in pennies.
According to
The Complete Directory of Prime-Time Network TV Shows, one celebrity that was definitely off-limits was Edwards himself, who supposedly threatened to fire every member of his staff if they ever tried to turn the tables on him and publicly present Edwards' own life.
Reception
This Is Your Life was nominated three times for as " Best Audience Participation, Quiz or Panel Program" at the
Emmy AwardAn Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
s, losing in 1953 at the
5th Emmy AwardsThe 5th Annual Emmy Awards, retroactively known as the 5th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards after the debut of the Daytime Emmys, were presented at the Hotel Statler in Los Angeles, California on February 5, 1953...
to
What's My Line?What's My Line? is a panel game show which originally ran in the United States on the CBS Television Network from 1950 to 1967, with several international versions and subsequent U.S. revivals. The game tasked celebrity panelists with questioning contestants in order to determine their occupations....
and sharing the category's award with
What's My Line? at the Emmys in 1954 and 1955.
By October 1960,
TimeTime is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine was calling
This Is Your Life "the most sickeningly sentimental show on the air"; it cited a May 1960 episode on "
QueensQueens is the easternmost of the five boroughs of New York City. The largest borough in area and the second-largest in population, it is coextensive with Queens County, an administrative division of New York state, in the United States....
housewife and mother" Elizabeth Hahn as evidence that the show had "run through every faded actress still able to cry on cue" and had instead "turned to ordinary people as subjects for its weekly, treacly 'true-to-life' biographies." The episode on Hahn was also cited as an example of the limited research that the show was doing on its guests. The show had presented Hahn as "devoted to her husband and so dedicated to her children that she had worked as a chambermaid, waitress and cook to further their education and keep them off the streets", ignoring details such as that Hahn, on the advice of her rabbi, had brought her daughter into a magistrate's court as a delinquent, and that before the episode was broadcast, Hahn's husband had sued Hahn for divorce.
Reruns and revivals
In the late 1980s, Edwards made many episodes that featured celebrities available for re-broadcasting: American Movie Classics aired them for several years, accompanying them with "screenings of movies from
studio-eraThe studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1960s. The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under...
Hollywood."
Edwards revived the series twice in syndication, the first with Edwards again as host and in 1983 with
Joseph CampanellaJoseph Campanella in Lewistown, Pennsylvania is an American character actor who has appeared in over 200 TV and film roles since 1955, including such shows as The Eleventh Hour, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke, The Road West, The Golden Girls and Mama's Family. He also had a role in...
. Both failed to capture the magic of the original series, mostly due to the series being filmed or taped and, in the case of the 1971-72 version, some stations that aired it gave away the surprise elements in ads and promos for the show. During the late-1980s, Ralph Edwards hosted a few single prime time network airings of
This Is Your Life, most memorably an episode featuring
Betty WhiteBetty White Ludden , better known as Betty White, is an American actress, comedienne, singer, author, and former game show personality. With a career spanning seven decades since 1939, she is best known to modern audiences for her television roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and...
and
Dick Van DykeRichard Wayne "Dick" Van Dyke is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer with a career spanning six decades. He is the older brother of Jerry Van Dyke, and father of Barry Van Dyke...
.
In November 2005,
ABCThe American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
announced that it was developing a new version of the show, to be hosted by
Regis PhilbinRegis Francis Xavier Philbin is an American media personality, actor and singer, known for hosting talk and game shows since the 1960s. Philbin is often called "the hardest working man in show business" and holds the Guinness World Record for the most time spent in front of a television camera...
. Coincidentally, the show's creator, Ralph Edwards, died not long after the announcement was made. In August 2006, Philbin decided not to renew his contract with the show (he was committed to hosting
America's Got TalentAmerica's Got Talent is an American reality television series on the NBC television network, and part of the global British Got Talent franchise. It is a talent show that features singers, dancers, magicians, comedians, and other performers of all ages competing for the advertised top prize of...
on
NBCThe National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
). ABC announced it was considering moving forward with another host in 2006.
In October 2008,
SurvivorSurvivor is a reality television game show format produced in many countries throughout the world. In the show, contestants are isolated in the wilderness and compete for cash and other prizes. The show uses a system of progressive elimination, allowing the contestants to vote off other tribe...
producer
Mark BurnettMark Burnett is a British television producer and executive producer, based in the United States. He currently is the executive producer of five network television series with seven hours of network programming. Works with which Burnett is associated have won multiple awards and recognition...
signed a deal with Ralph Edwards Productions to produce an updated version, though no further developments have been announced.
External links