‘Let’s Talk to Lucy’: How Lucille Ball invented the podcast in 1964
Everyone loved Lucille Ball. The TV legend was way ahead of her time, as one of the first female TV stars to parley her onscreen success into a successful career behind the scenes.
Of course, Ball was the first ever sole female head of a Hollywood production company after she divorced Desi Arnaz, the man she co-founded Desilu Productions alongside. It was progressive enough that the couple co-ran the company as equals, but Ball taking the reins of the company while still working as one of the most recognisable stars in America at the time was unheard of.
Without her, it’s entirely likely that the likes of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible wouldn’t be the cultural juggernauts they are today.
Yet, it turns out that’s not the only way she was ahead of her time. It’s one thing to be ahead of your time in the film and TV industry of the 1960s. It’s quite another thing to be so far ahead of your time that you create forms of media that wouldn’t take off until four decades afterwards.
You see, Ball was part of an old school media culture where the radio was just as major a medium as film and television. Thus, a number of her breakout roles came on the radio. It was a medium she had a lot of love for, so when the opportunity came up to go back on the radio in 1964, it wasn’t seen as a step backwards.
Especially when the opportunity was to show something that only those close to her knew. That part of the reason for Ball’s success was how the charming persona she had on I Love Lucy was only a slightly heightened version of her real-life personality. She really was like that in real life, and the fact that this new programme would be an interview format where she asked the questions was a key part of the appeal for her.
So, she was given a ten-minute slot on CBS Radio called Let’s Talk To Lucy. Ball’s announcement really does read the way any number of Hollywood stars would announce their podcast in 2026, saying, “Gary [Morton] will produce the series, and I’ll have my sister Cleo Smith on with me frequently. We’ll be talking to Hollywood personalities or anyone we run into who seems interesting.” The show began airing on weekdays in September 1964 and was a ratings hit for the next year.
Which checks out, because Ball’s star power and charm made several of the biggest names in Hollywood of the time join her for a chat. Everyone from Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke, Dean Martin and Doris Day went on the show, which stayed on the air until August 1965. However, the show fully went full circle in 2022, after the film Being the Ricardos was released the year before.
The film was a biopic depicting the relationship between Ball (played by Nicole Kidman) and Arnaz (played by Javier Bardem), and as a way of celebrating its release, Let’s Talk To Lucy was revived as a real-life podcast, where using audio editing techniques, Ball interviewed the stars of today like Amy Pohler, Ron Howard, Sean Astin and, of course, the stars of Being The Ricardos, Kidman and Bardem.
Thank Christ this idea wasn’t put forward any later, because you can bet your bottom dollar that if it was, the revitalised, podcast version of Ball would have been made by AI. Nothing that I can find about this version of the show says that this version of the TV legend was made with anything other than creative audio, so it’s not quite the smear on her legacy that it could have been.
Still, at least she got a version of the flowers she deserves for being the mother of podcasts.