Dinah’s Place

1 9 7 0 – 1 9 7 4 (USA)

After spending much of the 1950s and 1960s as one of nighttime TV’s top personalities, singer Dinah Shore came to daytime television in 1970 in this NBC talk show and made it her home for the rest of the decade.

She had a great deal of top-name guests doing the most unlikely activities. Among others, Burt Lancaster whipped up some spaghetti sauce, Joanne Woodward did needlepoint, and Ethel Kennedy played the piano.

But the best-remembered guest had to have been Burt Reynolds, who met Dinah for the first time on Dinah’s Place. The two of them embarked on a romance that lasted through the mid-1970s, but they never married.

Dinah taped an entire week of shows in two days, plus an extra one if she wanted a day off.

In 1973 the series won an Emmy for Outstanding Program Achievement in Daytime, but neither the Emmy nor the respectable ratings stopped NBC from unexpectedly cancelling the show the following year.

Undaunted, Shore returned to the airwaves in a similar syndicated talk show titled Dinah! in October 1974. The impressive guest roster on the debut included Jack Benny (in one of his last TV appearances), Sammy Davis Jr., Rock Hudson, Mary Tyler Moore, the Pointer Sisters, and Senator Edward Kennedy.

The show was available to stations daily for 90 or 60 minutes until its cancellation in 1980. In its last season, the producers tried unsuccessfully to woo viewers by retitling it Dinah & Friends and rotating as weekly co-hosts Fernando Lamas, Don Meredith, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Paul Williams.