A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
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for the popularity of this good-for-nothing snake, but it was simpler than that. The double-crossing, dissembling, greedy slacker had the American dream down pat – his country was the one serving him.
Though it was, like all sitcoms, an ensemble effort, Bilko had two major creative forces. The fast-talking vaudeville comic Phil Silvers had steadily built up a solid but unspectacular profile since the war, specialising in sketches that showcased his knack for speedy patter and swift ad-libs, usually playing against a taciturn and bewildered stooge. He was paired by CBS executive Hubbell Robinson with writer Nat Hiken, who had moved from local radio comedies to TV variety sketch shows. Steeped in the desperately inventive chicanery of the Broadway milieu, especially its notoriously disingenuous press agents, Hiken saw Silvers in a similarly underhand role. After considering set-ups ranging from baseball team manager to stockbroker to Turkish bath attendant, they settled on the immortal master sergeant.32
Initially titled You’ll Never Get Rich after the lyric from the song ‘You’re In the Army Now’, Hiken’s creation was to its rival sitcoms what Bilko was to his rival sergeants. Previously, one plot reversal had been considered quite enough for the average sitcom’s twenty-four minutes. Hiken put in at least one more, sometimes two or three. Hitherto simple plots of swindling and misapprehension doubled and quadrupled before the viewer’s eyes, finally to be snapped shut again by some spectacularly deft sewing up of strands in the closing seconds. At script meetings, Hiken had a compulsive habit of creating little origami animals as he outlined a plot.33 Whether it was incidents at an army post or scrap paper, the skill was the same – artfully precise manipulation.
The cast ranged in experience from seasoned actor Paul Ford as Bilko’s just-dumb-enough colonel, to complete non-professionals – filthy nightclub comic Joe E. Ross played childlike Mess Sergeant Rupert Ritzik, and hopeless slob Maurice Gosfield played hopeless slob Private Duane Doberman. The bulk of the lines inevitably went to Silvers, but there was a fine balance at work here: Bilko’s corporals Henshaw and Barbella oscillated between willing henchmen and disapproving moralists; the excitable Private Paparelli could often out-talk his sergeant; the chorus of rival sergeants occasionally got one over on their nemesis. The scenes when Bilko and Colonel Hall were alone together remain among the best in sitcom, a perspicacious fox inexorably pulling the wool over the eyes of a sappy bloodhound.
Hiken assembled a crack team of writers around him, including a young Neil Simon, but his obsessive nature meant he could never leave a script alone, often rewriting it into a completely new show. The Writers Guild, suspicious of the prevalence of Hiken’s name on the credits, tried to lobby for the other writers, only to be told by those writers that he really did have significant input to almost every programme.34 Hiken also made regular appearances on the studio floor to fiddle with minuscule details of staging. With so much depending on one man, it was inevitable that later seasons began to slip from the early stratospheric heights.
The decline showed in the increasing use of guest stars. Where previously celebrities would be satirical inventions like inane comedian Buddy Bickford or rock ’n’ roll sensation Elvin Pelvin, now the real-life likes of Ed Sullivan, Mickey Rooney and Kay Kendall would turn up. Setting the pattern for countless comedies hence, it began as a display of the show’s popularity and became a sign of flagging inspiration. The quality level remained high, but the platoon’s move for its final season from Fort Baxter, Kansas to the Californian heat of Camp Fremont held a sad irony.
US television’s big east-to-west move would affect sitcom as much as drama. Though set in Kansas, Bilko was really a New York show, drawn from the Broadway melting pot, infused with Jewish humour and recorded at the old DuMont studios. Over the next few years sitcoms would become slower, simpler and sillier. The dialogue was less snappy and the characters less smart as network bosses sought to woo Middle America. The Phil Silvers Show merely opened with a cartoon; shows like Gilligan’s Island and Mr Ed (the latter backed by George Burns) were cartoons themselves, often not particularly good ones. Add a plethora of Hollywood-produced ‘adult’ western shows and the cosy croon of Perry Como to the evening schedules, and the televisual tide was decisively turning from Hiken’s satirical high water mark. Those critical jeers began to look less precious and more prophetic with each new season. Bilko could outsmart anyone, but he couldn’t cope with being out-dumbed.
ITV (Associated-Rediffusion)
Television comedy explodes.
TV isn’t like films, radio or the stage. It has bits of all three in it, of course. But it is something demanding a new approach.
Terry-Thomas, Answers, 6 October 1951
COMIC GENIUS HAS THE habit of springing up in several places at once. About the time Ernie Kovacs was conducting his early Pennsylvanian experiments, Terry-Thomas, the gentleman’s gentleman comic, was regaling BBC audiences with How Do You View? Written by Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell, this loose assemblage of sketches and monologues pioneered countless bits of televisual business: the deadpan nonsense interview (conducted by linkmen Leslie Mitchell and Brian Johnston); mock home movies; the constantly-interrupted speech; and the random foray off the set and around the cameras, booths and assorted detritus of the studio, just for the hell of it. Its success in those sparse early days was considerable, although critics were snooty. ‘I should not care to say,’ ventured a confused C. A. Lejeune, ‘whether the presentation is more formless or the material more inept.’35
While ‘T-T’ was in his pomp on TV, the BBC Home Service was plagued by an infestation of nits. The Goon Show didn’t so much break the rules of radio comedy as blithely caper on to the air in complete ignorance that any existed in the first place. With its cast of vocal grotesques and relaxed approach to the laws of cause and effect, it became an unhinged institution to a nation still recovering from the similarly lunatic privations of war. Two Goons – writer Spike Milligan and voice-of-them-all Peter Sellers – joined forces with young American director Richard Lester to translate their formula to independent television, in the form of The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d.
The fusty periodical of the title, inspired by the florid world of Daily Express humorist Beachcomber, provided an extremely tenuous jumping-off point for a bewildering array of skits, with Sellers playing Edwardian schoolmasters and gentleman boxers, ‘Footo, the Wonderboot explorer’ and even much-loved Goon character Bluebottle. Blackout gags included an expectant audience sat before a curtain, which was raised to reveal another audience, facing them. Singers like Patti Lewis got a custard pie in the face. This time, the critics had caught up with the viewers: even the Daily Mail dug this ‘bubble of nonsense which stayed miles above the surface of reality.’36
A few months later the same gang made A Show Called Fred, which scrapped the magazine trappings and intensified the lunacy. As the Daily Mail noted, The Idiot Weekly ‘made a few grudging concessions to the audience, in as much as it was possible to follow the jokes by the ordinary, accepted sense of humour. Fred makes no concessions at all.’37
A typical edition of Fred began with Spike, dressed in rags, mooching around the Associated-Rediffusion studio corridors: a parody of the Rank Films gong (which Terry-Thomas also lampooned) and credits for ‘the well-known Thespian actors’ Kenneth Connor and Valentine Dyall (usually clad in bow tie, dinner jacket and no shirt). There would be mock interviews with insane individuals, often called Hugh Jampton, commercials for ‘Muc, the wonder deterrent’, and viewer query slot ‘Idiots’ Postbag’, presented in front of a projected backdrop of open sea, or a burning building. (‘Dear sir, do you know what horse won the Derby in 1936?’ ‘Yes, Mr Smith, I do.’)
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