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To
cover the history of Night After Night, we have to go back in time.
Back to a time before Cartoon Network. Back before the premieres of
E.R. and Friends. Back to when MTV still showed music videos. Back to
1989. Back to when Viacom created some small network devoted to
comedy. This was the Comedy Channel. The first incarnation of the channel was composed of an MTV-like plethora of hosts. Rachel Sweet had her show, The Sweet Life. The Higgins Boys and Gruber hung out in a kitchen where they talked in between airings of episodes of Supercar and Clutch Cargo. Tommy Sledge, private eye was an anachronistic look at hard boiled detective stories. Oh, and his show had old Batman serials too. Then there was Rich Hall's Onion World, a skewed look at the world around us. And then there was Allan Havey.
Night After Night was on for 3 hours, since all the hosts did VJ duty, introducing video clips from the latest comedy film out in theaters, or some classic comedy routine from Monty Python. But, there was something about Allan. He had the late shift. His set was the most intimate one on the network. When guests started getting booked on the show, the intimacy remained.
The show survived the Comedy Channel's merger with HA! to become Comedy
Central. It was the only show besides Mystery Science Theater 3000 to
survive the merger relatively intact. Where all the other "VJ"-centric
shows failed, Night After Night succeeded. It was trimmed down to a
tight one hour show, which is how it remained until the very last
episode aired, in December of 1992. Why am I, your humble webpage creator, devoting an entire section of my site to this relic? Well, in every boy's life, there is a Summer of '72. Or in this case, in every girl's life, there is a three year period during high school where she grew up watching obscure TV talk shows. MTV didn't seem as fulfilling as watching Allan kick up his legs with the Rockettes. Strange teen? Oh, yeah, I was...It's a bit frightening to think that Night After Night was the foundation of my formative teen-age years, but it's absolutely true. MST3K and Night After Night provided laughter and entertainment where other things couldn't.
And I'm getting misty-eyed for a show that's been cancelled over 10 years ago.