Shep begins this show lighting up a cigar and singing "I'm forever blowing bubbles.
He then sets up the theme of the show by reading an article about a group of collage students in London that show up at a housing project one day claiming that they are filming a commercial for beans. They gather up about 74 of the local residents and get them marching around the recreation grounds yelling "BEANS, BEANS, BEANS" for forty-five minutes. Then they pack up and leave. There never was a commercial - the people had been HAD.
This leads Shep to tell three stories about practical jokes in radio.
1) While working at a station in Cincinnati, the station invites listeners to apply for taking part in a talk about a product and their experiences with it. They choose 45-50 pompous old ladies from the applicants and bring them into a room at the studio. Here they are invited to talk all about "Hot Digity Dog" with secret ingredient "Zowie 7". This of course is a fictitious product, but they all sit around and talk about how swell it is for 45 minutes.
2) Also while working in Cincinnati, Shep is the emcee for "Preview Star Time" an all new coast to coast radio show, which of course was not real. Shep warms up the audience until it's "airtime" and then everything 'goes wrong'. Shep starts off with a really dirty joke stunning the audience, then a totally drunk singer comes out to sing "Danny Boy", and finally the band breaks out in a fight. At this point the NBC executive stops the show, yelling at everyone, and sends the unsuspecting audience out into the street. The phony show was never intended to go on the air.
3) The last story is about a seasoned newscaster who takes his work seriously. When he's on the air, no one is allowed in the studio with him. One night while he's on, Eddie the salesman walks into the studio smacks him on the back, and says "Hey you old son of a gun, you still giving them that old jazz?" and walks out saying "Give 'em hell Charlie." Shaken by this he tries to get back on track with the news when the door opens again and in walks an engineer carrying a soldering iron looking around. "Hey, are you on the air?" he asks and walks out. Now clearly in shock the newscaster barely gets the show done. It wasn't until the next day that he learned that the entire broadcast was never heard over the air because it was pre-empted at the last minute by another special broadcast. It was only enjoyed by the people working in the studio.
