The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show else." Harris and Faye stayed with NBC rather than succumb to the CBS talent raids of the late 1940s that began when Benny was lured to CBS and took a few NBC stars (including George Burns and Gracie Allen) with him. NBC offered the couple (as well as Fred Allen) a lucrative new deal to stay, though occasionally Harris would allude to Benny's network switch on the Harris-Faye show. (Typically, Harris would crack an odd joke and then say, "I gotta give this one to Jackson! It might bring him back to NBC.") Despite the network conflict and a grueling
Variety show Lewis had been gone from the telethon several years, it was down to two hours). Another popular telethon, for United Cerebral Palsy, ended its run in 1998 shortly after the death of its founder and figurehead, Dennis James. Likewise, only a handful of long-established local telethons remain. The prime time variety show format was popular in the early decades of Australian television, spawning such series as "In Melbourne Tonight", "The Graham Kennedy Show", "The Don Lane Show", and "Hey Hey It's Saturday", which ran for 27 years. Recent prime time variety shows include the short lived "Micallef Tonight" and "The