Variety show Stan Laurel revisited his music hall days when he performed at the "Royal Variety" show. In the United States, former vaudeville performers such as the Marx Brothers, George Burns and Gracie Allen, W. C. Fields, and Jack Benny honed their skills in the Borscht Belt before moving to talkies, to radio shows, and then to television shows, including variety shows. Variety shows were among the first programs to be featured on television during the experimental mechanical television era. Variety shows hosted by Helen Haynes and Harriet Lee are recorded in contemporary newspapers in 1931 and 1932; because of technical limits
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