A History of Television in 100 Programmes

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CBS

Still in its infancy, the sitcom goes postmodern.

You know, if you saw a plot like this on television you’d never believe it. But here it is happening in real life.

George Burns

THE COMEDIAN WILL ALWAYS beat the philosopher in a race – he’s the one who knows all the short cuts. In the case of postmodernism, that enigmatic doctrine of shifting symbols and authorless texts, the race was over before half the field reached the stadium.

George Burns and Gracie Allen were a dedicated vaudevillian couple. In 1929, the year before father of deconstruction Jacques Derrida was born, they were making short films that began by looking for the audience in cupboards and ended by admitting they’d run out of material too soon. While Roland Barthes was studying at the Sorbonne, Gracie Allen was enlisting the people of America to help look for her non-existent missing brother. A decade before John Cage’s notorious silent composition 4’33”, Gracie performed her Piano Concerto for Index Finger. And a few years after the word postmodernism first appeared in print, Burns and Allen were on America’s television screens embodying it.

The Burns and Allen Show began on CBS four years after the BBC inaugurated the sitcom with Pinwright’s Progress. In that time very little progress had been made. Performances were live and studio-bound. Gag followed gag followed some business with a hat, and the settings were drawing rooms straight from the funny papers. Burns and Allen’s set looked more like a technical cross section: the front doors of their house and that of neighbours the Mortons led into rooms visible from outside due to gaping holes in the brickwork. The fourth wall literally broken, George (and only George) could pop through the hole at will to confer with the audience. If anyone else left via the void they were swiftly reminded to use the front door. ‘You see,’ George explained to the viewers, ‘we’ve got to keep this believable.’

While Burns muttered asides from the edge of the stage, Allen stalked the set like a wide-eyed Wittgenstein, challenging anyone in her path to a fragmented war of words. From basic malapropisms to logical inversions some of the audience had to unpick on the bus going home, Gracie would innocently get everything wrong in exactly the right way. She sent her mother an empty envelope to cheer her up, on the grounds that ‘no news is good news’. She engaged hapless visitors in conversation with her own, unique, logic (‘Are you Mrs Burns?’ ‘Oh, yes. Mr Burns is much taller!’). Gracie was, admittedly, a Ditzy Woman, but this was the style in comedy at the time – Lucille Ball played a Ditzy Woman, and she co-owned the production company. Besides, Gracie’s vacuity could be perversely powerful – she was frequently the only one who seemed sure of herself. In her eyes she ranked with the great women of history (‘They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it!’).

While Gracie defied logic, George, in his mid-fifties but already the butt of endless old man gags, defied time and space. With a word and a gesture, he could halt the action and fill the audience in on the finer points of the story while Allen and company gamely froze like statues behind him. During Burns’s front-of-cloth confabs the viewer’s opinion was solicited, bets on the action were taken, and backstage reality elbowed its way up front. The story’s authorship was debated mid-show: ‘George S. Kaufman is responsible for tonight’s plot. I asked him to write it and he said no, so I had to do it.’ When a new actor was cast as Harry Morton, Burns introduced him on screen to Bea Benaderet (who played his wife Blanche), pronounced them man and wife, and the show carried on as usual. On another occasion, George broached the curtain to apologetically admit that the writers simply hadn’t come up with an ending for tonight’s programme, so goodnight folks.

Even the obligatory ‘word from the sponsor’ entered the fun. The show’s announcer was made a regular character: a TV announcer pathologically obsessed with Carnation Evaporated Milk, ‘the milk from contented cows’. These interludes, knocked out by an ad rep but fitting snugly within the framework provided by the show’s regular writers, exposed the strangeness of the integrated sponsor spot by embracing it. The show kept on top of the sponsor, and the sponsor became a star of the show – a very sophisticated symbiosis.

In October 1956, Burns gained a TV set which enabled him to watch the show – the one which, to him, was real life (the Burns and Allen played by Burns and Allen in The Burns and Allen Show were the stars of a show of their own, the content of which remained a mystery). He could sow mischief, retire to the set, and watch trouble unfold at his leisure. When he tired of that, he could switch channels and spy on Jack Benny. Burns’s fluctuating relationship to audience and plot (of which, he said, there was more than in a variety show, but less than in a wrestling match) was a deconstructionist triumph.

Ken Dodd questioned Freud’s theories of comedy, noting the great psychoanalyst ‘never had to play second house at the Glasgow Empire’. Burns and Allen, graduates of vaudeville, would have agreed. The self-awareness that high art lauds as sophisticated was part of the DNA of popular entertainment from the year dot – that is, about a day after George Burns was born.

THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW (1952–61) (#ulink_3b30d9a5-0036-5ecc-aa49-45bbbf6f766e)

DuMont/NBC/ABC

TV’s visual gag pioneer.

MOST MODERN COMEDIANS APPEAR on TV. Very few use it. In Britain there have been Spike Milligan, the Pythons, Kenny Everett and Chris Morris. America boasted George Burns, the Laugh-In crowd, David Letterman and Garry Shandling. But most of all it had the quintessential TV comedian: the cigar-sucking, second generation Hungarian Ernie Kovacs.

Like many TV comics, Kovacs began as a nonconformist local radio DJ, before becoming a continuity announcer on Pennsylvania’s regional NBC affiliate station. His first on-screen stint came in 1950 as eleventh hour stand-in on cookery show Deadline for Dinner, where a talent for off-the-cuff wisecracks impressed management enough to give him the blank canvas of a ninety-minute morning programme. In 1950, the 7.30-to-9.00 a.m. weekday slot was uncharted terrain, so Kovacs had free rein to improvise as he wished. He goofed around to music, toyed with random props and chatted calmly to the viewers, seemingly unaware of a live panther squatting on his back. At a time when comedy was ruled by repetition and ritual, Kovacs insisted on constant innovation.

The Ernie Kovacs Show proper first appeared on the DuMont network, in front of an audience of ‘twenty-three passing strangers’. Kovacs preferred to work without a full studio audience for one very good reason – he was determined to use the medium in every way possible, so a lot of his gags only worked on the screen. Atmosphere came from the camera crew, who could laugh (and heckle) as heartily as anyone.

He exploited the basic video effects of the day – wipes, superimpositions and picture flips – to make characters fly off screen, expose the contents of his head or superimpose it onto a small dog. He would walk off the edge of the set and give viewers an impromptu guided tour of the studio paraphernalia. With his technicians he made an inverting lens from mirrors and soup cans, built a cheap upside-down set and walked on the ceiling. Or he simply stuck a child’s kaleidoscope in front of the camera, accompanied by some music. In an unexplored medium he broke ground with every step – usually accompanied by a discordant sound effect. His work is most often compared to Kenny Everett’s, but he pre-empted others. His interest in the personalities of puppet animals is reminiscent of early Vic Reeves (sample stage direction: ‘Trevor the stuffed deer is vacuumed – laughs.’23)

After the DuMont network collapsed, Kovacs returned to NBC to occupy a variety of slots, culminating in his first prime-time gig, an 8 p.m. Monday night spectacular from a real theatre, with a real audience. The show also came with a real budget that Kovacs didn’t hesitate to spend with alarming profligacy: huge song-and-dance numbers were choreographed, incorporating giant flights of collapsible stairs; Boris Karloff was paid top dollar to recite the alphabet. The transition from backroom ‘improv’ to gargantuan showcase came surprisingly easily to him.

One sketch from these shows was far ahead of its time. To the thunderous accompaniment of drum rolls and the clatter of teleprinters, Kovacs appeared as a self-important newsreader, employing primitive in-camera effects to lampoon the already excessive presentation of TV news decades before the likes of Chris Morris. One sketch, ‘News Analyst’, is uncannily modern in its approach:

KOVACS: Good morning. This is Leroy L. Bascombe McFinister …

[Picture is wiped inward, leaving tiny vertical slit in middle through which we glimpse Ernie.]

KOVACS:… with the news.

[Wipe widens to full set.]

KOVACS: Behind the news.

[Picture tilts right.]

KOVACS: News flashes and news highlights.

[Tilts upside down.]

KOVACS: Events of the day and events of the night.

[Picture spins 360 degrees to left.]

KOVACS: Brought to you …

[Picture spins to right, ends upside down.]

KOVACS:… as they happen …

[Picture spins upright.]

KOVACS:… when they happen.

[Tilts to right, then back.]

KOVACS: News!

[Tilts to left, then back.]

KOVACS: From all over!

[Shot of spinning world globe – hand reaches in and stops globe.] 24

(This complex, frenetic high-tech skit was, astoundingly, performed live.) The final NBC Kovacs show climaxed with a dance number that had close to 100 people and animals on stage, ending with the destruction of the set as the credits rolled, while perspiring executives picked up the tab.

Kovacs simultaneously subbed for Steve Allen, hosting the Monday and Tuesday editions of Tonight. His effects-heavy fantasies didn’t sit well in a show built around talk and the expense of the more elaborate gags made his tenure brief. But it did incubate two of his most famous routines: Eugene, a featherweight tenderfoot whose every action caused loud, incongruous sound effects; and the tilted room, a set built on a slant which a prism lens restored to the vertical, rendering everything from olives to milk prone to hare off in bizarre directions as the hapless Eugene looked askance.

In January 1957 Kovacs was parachuted into a prime-time slot following a much-publicised Jerry Lewis special. Spotting a potential big break, he put everything into devising a speech-free showcase of his very best material. The ‘No Dialogue’ show was meticulously executed, including a perfected and expanded tilted room sketch. This was crafted comedy in the fullest sense, and won plaudits galore. Another equally precise special, Kovacs on Music, featured the comedy debut of André Previn. Kovacs had finally made the big time, but his pinnacle was precarious. The early experimental spirit of US TV was being rapidly eroded as big money entered the equation, and ratings became the only thing that mattered.

Kovacs was obliged to switch again, to ABC, for a series of specials and a quiz show, Take a Good Look. The quiz show featured his most expensive gag of all – as a used car salesman slaps a car on the bonnet, it falls through a hole in the ground, creating a bill of thousands of dollars for a thirty-second quickie. The specials were recorded with a dedicated crew in marathon all-weekend studio lock-ins. Alongside familiar routines, he created elaborate and rather elegant musical ballets of office equipment and other inanimate objects. His disdain for network top brass made itself felt in satirically amended end credits.(‘Associate Producer (That’s like STEALING money!)’)

These shows won Kovacs his only Emmy, for ‘outstanding achievement in electronic camerawork’. He died in a car accident shortly after recording the eighth, which was shown in tribute a fortnight later. Like the experimenters who followed him, Kovacs remained on the fringes of television, distrustful of its grandees and eager to undermine and mock them at every opportunity, finding door after door slammed in his face as a result. As a career model for fame-hungry comics, he was as lousy as they came. As a master craftsman, he was among the greatest.

THE PHILCO-GOODYEAR TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE: MARTY (1953) (#ulink_b96d9a5d-8d49-54bf-ba76-96acfdf8acc9)

NBC (Showcase)

TV drama mines the mundane.

I am just now becoming aware of this marvellous world of the ordinary. This is an age of savage introspection, and television is the dramatic medium through which to expose our new insights into ourselves.

Paddy Chayefsky, 1956

AS TELEVISION BEGAN COLONISING the lounges of urban America, Hollywood started to panic. Playing to their strengths, the big studios began turning out product that emphasised the things TV couldn’t provide: colour, star power, and most of all, size. The big screen was filled with big names in big adventures; pageants, epics and melodramas in which the safety of lives, societies, even the world hung in the balance. The challenge was made: fit that lot into your ten inches of bulbous glass.

Many programmes valiantly, if foolishly, tried to compete. Wiser heads moved in the opposite direction. Paddy Chayefsky, scion of a Russian Jewish family in the Bronx, was one of the first and best writers to size up what the small screen could and couldn’t show. A moderately successful playwright, he moved into television in 1952 when the US government lifted restrictions on new TV stations, causing audiences to rocket. As Chayefsky saw it, ‘television, the scorned stepchild of drama, may well be the basic theatre of our century.’25

TV imitations of cinema condemned themselves to a lazy, second rate status, the lack of resources perpetually showing them up. ‘You cannot handle comfortably more than four people on the screen at the same time,’ he wrote. ‘The efforts of enterprising directors to capture the effect of five thousand people by using ten actors are pathetic.’26 From his very first TV efforts, Chayefsky took a clear look at how life could convincingly be crammed into that tiny box.

It was during the rehearsals for The Reluctant Citizen, a play about an elderly Jewish immigrant, that Chayefsky found the scenario for his greatest TV work. Due to the cost of Manhattan real estate, NBC augmented their rehearsal studios at 30 Rock with any spare bit of space going in the city. Hotel ballrooms in daylight hours were a prime source. While mooching around one of these during a break, Chayefsky’s eye fell on a sign put up for a singles night: ‘Girls, please dance with the man who asks you. Remember, men have feelings too.’ This intimation of painful male shyness caught Chayefsky’s imagination, and he soon began writing ‘the most ordinary love story in the world.’27

Rod Steiger played the title role, a good-natured but reticent Italian-American butcher in the Bronx shamed by friends, family and customers for his enduring single status at thirty-six. (‘I’m a fat, ugly little guy and the girls don’t go for me, that’s all.’) One night he’s all but forced into going to a singles dance by his domineering mother. (‘Why don’t you go to the Waverley Ballroom? It’s loaded with tomatoes!’) The evening looks like being yet another slog of rejection and heartache, until a lairy guy offers him five bucks to take ‘a real dog’ off his hands. Marty is disgusted by the idea, but finds the girl in question, Clara. He asks her, genuinely, for a dance and they bond over their shared misfortunes. (‘You don’t get to be good-hearted by accident. You gotta be kicked around long enough and hard enough, then you get to be like a real … a professor of pain, you know?’)

The rough, natural dialogue with its repetitive, drowsy poetry was a revelation. The final scene, in which Marty finally plucks up courage to spurn his deadbeat pals, phone Clara and ask her out, was partly improvised by Steiger when the real dialogue slipped out of his head on the night. It fitted in seamlessly. His performance impressed director Elia Kazan enough to land him a part on On the Waterfront, and a star was born. Cinema may have had TV looking over its shoulder, but ‘movie star’ remained the top job.

‘The basic limitation of television is time,’ thought Chayefsky. ‘Television cannot take a thick, fully woven fabric of drama. It can only handle simple lines of movement and consequently smaller amounts of crisis.’28 That said, Marty packed a great deal into well under an hour. Its wonderfully minimal effects included an exterior shot of the ballroom made from cardboard and light bulbs. When Marty followed the distraught Clara out onto the ballroom fire escape and asked her to dance, the tender moment was undercut by some incidental laughter from elsewhere in the building. Marty was a basic affair, but basic didn’t mean simple.

Two years later Marty became the first TV drama to be remade for the big screen. With Ernest Borgnine in the lead, real Bronx locations and an expansion of the ‘cantankerous aunt’ subplot, it was a mighty success and took several Oscars, including Best Picture and Screenplay. Chayefsky had achieved that rarest of fames: the TV writer as household name. In a Nat Hiken comedy sketch, Phil Silvers played one half of a pretentious theatregoing couple who mistake the apartment of a dysfunctional, blue collar family for an off-off-Broadway venue. As they settle on the sofa, the nonplussed residents start squabbling at top volume. Silvers knowingly remarks to his wife, ‘obviously by Paddy Chayefsky’.

The TV networks moved their centres of production across country to Hollywood, and Chayefsky fell out of love with the medium he’d championed. The easy, trusting commissions he’d had in the early years gave way to the business-driven pseudo-science of corporation men, with whose ideas the writer was expected to compromise willingly. Many of Chayefsky’s pitches got no further than the pilot stage, including a 1965 sitcom version of Marty starring Tom Bosley.

Another grounded project was The Man Who Beat Ed Sullivan, about a hick Ohio entertainer whose marathon variety show becomes a national sensation. (Chayefsky didn’t help his case by insisting that the variety show within the play should actually be a full-on, three-hour spectacular in itself.) It wasn’t until 1974 that Chayefsky arranged his televisual disaffection into a film script about a suicidal newsreader, a power-crazed producer and a corporate conspiracy: his valedictory masterpiece, the cellar-dark satire Network. It was a damning testimony against the medium’s worst excesses by one of its pre-eminent craftsmen; television’s finest humane miniaturist denouncing its increasingly inhuman gigantism. Promoting the film, Chayefsky had three sad words for his alma mater: ‘Television? Forget it.’29

SMALL TIME (1955–66) (#ulink_05595b47-ee27-55ea-9bc9-65d99a42f444)

ITV (Associated-Rediffusion)

Giants of children’s television assemble.

CHILDREN HAVE ENJOYED A special relationship with television since the very first transmissions. The BBC gave them their own playground in the schedules with Watch with Mother, in 1950, where they could enjoy the company of clattering puppet mules, unintelligible folk assembled from garden implements and the very biggest spotty dog you ever did see – all chaperoned by jolly matriarchs dispensing orotund vowels through shatterproof smiles. With its sailor suits and spinning tops and crumpets on the trolley, it was childhood as the Edwardians would have recognised it: the childhood, more or less, of the programme makers, handed down like a careworn teddy bear. When ITV arrived a few years later, its TV crèche was decorated in unmistakeably bolder, more modern style.

Beginning as a fifteen minute segment in Associated-Rediffusion’s weekday Morning Magazine line-up, Small Time soon gravitated towards its natural teatime home, and grew into a proving ground for a vast swathe of children’s TV talent. Many of the segments – Booty Mole, Snoozy the Sea Lion, Gorki the Straw Goat to name a few – would live on only in a few very keen baby-boomer memories. A few, though, added up to as great a legacy as one TV slot could hope to spawn.

The Adventures of Twizzle starred a Pinocchio-esque boy puppet who could extend his limbs at will. The stories, from the pen of Roberta Leigh, were brought to life by puppeteer Joy Laurey, but of more historic note was the show’s producer, future ‘Supermarionation’ chief Gerry Anderson. Another artificial lad, Torchy the Battery Boy, arrived a few years later courtesy of the same team. The results could only be described as ‘sub-marionation’: strings were thick as mooring cables, movements spasmodic. But this was the style, or lack of style, of the times. ‘Production values’ existed neither as jargon, nor as values. The job was done with the means to hand: nothing more and nothing less.

Puppets of the glove variety formed the second line of teatime attack. These were several degrees sprightlier, and occasionally wittier, than their dangling cohorts. Pussycat Willum, a doe-eyed kitten, became Small Time’s eager, if slightly mawkish, figurehead. But the strand’s undoubted star turns were Ollie Beak and Fred Barker. This portly owl and calcified dish mop of a cockney dog were the creations of Peter Firmin, operated by Wally Whyton and Ivan Owen respectively. Their main human foil was Muriel Young, announcer on Rediffusion’s opening night and a primly tolerant foil for the duo’s impromptu shenanigans. More raucous yet were The Three Scampis: Bert Scampi (operator Howard Williams) and his animal pals, hedgehog Spike McPike (Wally Whyton) and aristocratic fox Basil Brush (Ivan Owen). Again, Firmin was the man behind the sewing machine.

Firmin had been introduced to television by Rediffusion’s young stage manager and part-time prop maker, Oliver Postgate. In 1958 Postgate, tiring of organising other people’s programmes, created one of his own. Alexander the Mouse was a whimsical tale of a rodent with royal aspirations, set behind the skirting board of an old house, the first of what would be a long line of wistfully remote Postgate worlds. Firmin painted the characters and sets, which were stuck to metal strips and ‘animated’ live on air by dragging magnets about under the table. This attempt to undercut even the ultra-cheap Crusader Rabbit production technique had the catch that, according to Postgate, ‘hardly a programme went out without … a hand coming into shot or a mouse coming adrift.’30

Postgate’s next attempt, the Willow Patterned Journey of Master Ho, took a more conventional approach to movement. Cut-out figures were manipulated in stop motion in a makeshift studio in Postgate’s North Finchley back bedroom, shot and edited on a 16mm film rig made of Meccano and string for £175 per ten minute episode. In 1959 he reunited with Firmin to create their first classic story. Ivor the Engine was a gloriously melancholy tale of the sole locomotive of the idyllic Merionethand Llantisilly Rail TractionCompany Limited. Firmin’s watercolour evocations of the Welsh mountains were exquisite, but the tone Postgate’s narration took, hitting a plaintive, nostalgic note halfway between John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas, was the greatest innovation. Moving away from the stiff-backed, once-upon-a-time scene-setting of previous children’s programmes, Postgate injected poetry and personality, trusting small children to engage with something more than a bland narrative of mild peril that ended in time for supper.

As the sixties ran on, Small Time’s big talents slowly dispersed to the four corners of television: Anderson and company to forge a puppet dynasty, Postgate and Firmin to carve a homely niche in animation, Brush to Saturday night ubiquity, and Young to produce acres of glam rock television. The strand’s last significant signing was Pippy the Tellyphant, a pantomime elephant operated by husband-and-wife team Jimmy and June Kidd, which cost an unprecedented £300 to construct. Pippy provokes few nostalgic reveries these days, while her cheaper, humbler companions, strapped for cash but bursting with ideas, have taken their place in the TV annals. The hearts and minds of millions were won over with cardboard and felt.

THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW (1955–9) (#ulink_57e69bae-91f8-5639-9ac6-52f144a7dd31)

CBS

Sitcom comes of age.

‘Andrew Armstrong, Tree Surgeon’? That’s a television idea? Well, who knows. Look what they did with a fat bus driver.

Bilko’s Television Idea, 12 February 1957

BY THE MID-1950S, SITCOM was already being dismissed by critics as a fad on the wane. It had come a long way in the few short years since its simple beginnings, from the down-to-Earth compactness of The Honeymooners to George Burns hurdling the fourth wall and Lucille Ball’s international stardom with I Love Lucy. Despite this tide of invention, or perhaps because of it, when inspiration began to flag for so much as a season, critics sprang up to predict the death of the American sitcom. The trouble was, as John Crosby observed when hailing The Phil Silvers Show, ‘every time you start to count out situation comedy as a dead duck, something comes along.’31

Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko was a new kind of sitcom hero, eight times smarter than the average viewer could hope to be, and a thousandth as honest and hardworking as they claimed to be. Bilko’s essential good nature, fatherly love of his reprobate army platoon, and Phil Silvers’ winning smile were all trotted out as redemptive justifications 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.