A History of Television in 100 Programmes

Phil Norman

• Publisher: The Friday Project
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780008113322
• eBook ISBN: 9780007591404
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

CRUSADER RABBIT (1950–1)

NBC (Television Arts Productions)

TV’s first bespoke cartoon.

AMERICAN CARTOONS DOMINATED FORTIES cinema. The heart-on-sleeve perfectionism of Disney and the demolition ballets of Warner Brothers were known, loved and merchandised throughout the world. But when television began to look like a viable proposition, the animation giants kept their distance: too small the screen, too monochrome, and most important, too cheap the going rate. It might be good for the odd commercial or as a place to dump black-and-white shorts even the dankest fleapit would no longer touch, but cartoons made especially for TV? The idea might have seemed a joke to the main animation studios, but there was a gap in the media market waiting to be filled. This one snugly accommodated an adventurous animal.

Crusader Rabbit and his faithful sidekick Ragland T ‘Rags’ Tiger were a pairing in the short-smart/big-dumb cartoon tradition that had its origins in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Their creator was Alex Anderson, nephew of the self-styled Woolworth of cinema animation, Paul Terry. Anderson reduced his uncle’s cheap and cheerful formula even further, basing his methods on a sequence in Disney’s behind-the-scenes cartoon feature The Reluctant Dragon which showed an embryonic cartoon in animated storyboard form – simple cuts from one still drawing to the next, smartly timed to the soundtrack. Anderson took the idea and applied it to a finished series.21

Together with old friend Jay Ward handling production duties, Anderson formed Television Arts Productions. Equipped with an army surplus Kodak film camera and several veteran draughtsmen, TAP began production, leaving no corner uncut. Single poses lasted on screen for anything from one to fifteen seconds, and loops of motion were reused with shameless regularity. Verbal gags did most of the work, but mouth movements were minimal – in the pilot, a fast-talking radio announcer blatantly hides his behind a sheet of paper.

The pilot impressed NBC enough to commission a series, at $2,500 per episode – in the labour-intensive animation world, about as cheap as you could get. Crusader Rabbit rode out, sponsored by that great friend of early TV innovation, Carnation Evaporated Milk, at 6 p.m. on 1 August 1950. The show aired every weekday for the best part of a year, pitting the tenacious pair against adversaries Dudley Nightshade, Whetstone Whiplash and Achilles the Heel.

As production stepped up, Ward’s talent came to the fore. While Anderson supervised the visuals, Ward took charge of the dialogue recording sessions, coaching the voice talent and editing to keep things as snappy and fast-moving as possible. This was a practical necessity – with budgets this tight, editing in sound only made economic sense – but it gave a quickfire ebullience to the otherwise static show, emphasising verbal gags in a way which would shape Ward’s later output and TV animation in general.

It also instigated a less happy animation tradition. Jerry Fairbanks, Television Arts’ commercial partner in the Crusader Rabbit venture, turned out not to be as financially secure as he claimed. An uneasy NBC sequestered all 195 Crusader Rabbit cartoons as collateral.22 Ward and Anderson found themselves without a franchise, their stake in the original and rights to the characters having been legally spirited away. This sort of custody battle, with the creators forever on the losing side, would become a feature of TV cartooning, where the bottom line drags heavily. Crusader Rabbit would eventually be reborn, via other hands, in 1957.

Ward started afresh, in tandem with cartoon veteran Bill Scott, to create a plethora of wisecracking properties that took Crusader Rabbit’s chattering statue model and upped the wit, tempo and volume. This began with a blockbuster that aped its progenitor’s character template – The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Meanwhile William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, ex-MGM animators who brought Tom and Jerry to life and were briefly engaged by Ward for a legally embargoed Crusader Rabbit revival, borrowed the limited animation style for their own work. The Ruff and Reddy Show, in which a smart little cat and a big stupid dog engaged in pose-to-pose capers, was followed by Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and flatly coloured, ever-blinking cartoon versions of sitcoms like The Honeymooners (The Flintstones) and Bilko (Top Cat). Even Uncle Paul Terry was lured to the small screen for, among others, Deputy Dawg. Vast empires of severely restricted motion conquered television with phenomenal speed – sideways on, with feet reduced to a circular blur, passing the same three items of street furniture every five seconds.

THE BURNS AND ALLEN SHOW (1950–8)

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)

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...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Tele-Crime (1938–9)
• Cookery (1946–51)
• Cavalcade of Stars (1949–52)
• Crusader Rabbit (1950–1)
• The Burns and Allen Show (1950–8)
• The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–61)
• The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse: Marty (1953)
• Small Time (1955–66)
• The Phil Silvers Show (1955–9)
• A Show Called Fred (1956)
• My Wildest Dream (1956–7)
• Opportunity Knocks (1956–78)
• The Singing Ringing Tree (1957)
• Six-Five Special (1957–8)
• The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960)
• Armchair Theatre: A Night Out (1960)
• Hancock: The Bedsitter (1961)
• Kingsley Amis Goes Pop (1962)
• That Was the Week That Was (1962–3)
• The Sunday-Night Play: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962)
• The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–92)
• World in Action (1963–98)
• Play School (1964–88)
• Crossroads (1964–88)
• Le Manège Enchanté (1964–1971) The Magic Roundabout (1965–1977)
• World of Sport (1965–85)
• Talking to a Stranger (1966)
• The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–9)
• The Prisoner: Fall Out (1968)
• If There Weren’t Any Blacks, You’d Have to Invent Them (1968, 1973)
• Sesame Street (1969–)
• The Owl Service (1969)
• Nationwide (1969–83)
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–7)
• Miss World (1970)
• Columbo (1971–8/1989–2003)
• The Largest Theatre in the World: The Rainbirds (1971)
• Duel (1971)
• The Special London Bridge Special (1972)
• Un, Dos, Tres … (1972–2004)
• Inigo Pipkin/Pipkins (1973–81)
• The Indoor League (1973–8)
• Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–4)
• Thriller (1973–6)
• Tiswas (1974–82)
• Don’t Ask Me (1974–8)
• Supersonic (1975–7)
• The Thrilla in Manila (1974)
• The Norman Gunston Show (1975–9)
• Play for Today: Double Dare (1976)
• Pauline’s Quirkes (1976)
• I, Claudius (1976)
• The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–9)
• BBC Nine O’clock News (1976)
• Battle of the Network Stars (1976–88)Star Games (1978–80)
• Rock Follies (1976–7)
• Trans America Ultra Quiz (1977–92)Ultra Quiz (1983–5)
• Soap (1977–81)
• Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1977)
• Leapfrog (1978–9)
• The BBC Television Shakespeare (1978–85)
• Connections (1978)
• Blankety Blank (1979-90)
• Life on Earth (1979)
• Minder (1979–94)
• Now Get Out of That (1981–5)
• Artemis 81 (1981)
• Hill Street Blues (1981–7)
• The Oxford Road Show (1981–5)
• Jane (1982–4)
• Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)
• St Elsewhere (1982–8)
• The Tube (1982–7)
• M*A*S*H: ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’ (1983)
• Saturday Night Affairs (1984)
• Threads (1984)
• Ever Decreasing Circles (1984–9)
• Heimat: Eine Deutsche Chronik (1984)
• Moonlighting (1985–9)
• Pob’s Programme (1985–7)
• The Max Headroom Show (1985–7)
• A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–8)
• The Comic Strip Presents … Private Enterprise (1986)
• Night Network (1987–9)
• Mahabharat (1988–90)
• Def II (1988–94)
• Twin Peaks (1990–1)
• Abroad in Britain (1990)
• The Real World (1992–)
• Come on Down and Out (1993)
• Frasier (1993–2004)
• Our Friends in the North (1996)
• This Morning with Richard Not Judy (1998–9)
• The Sopranos (1999–2007)
• People Like Us (1999–2001)
• Battlestar Galactica (2004–9)
• Forbrydelsen (2007–12)
• Apple Action News (2009–)
• Louie (2010–)
• House of Cards (2013–)
• Endnotes
• About the Author
• Also by Phil Norman
• About the Publisher