The Phil Silvers Show, originally titled You’ll Never Get Rich, was a situation comedy which ran on CBS from 1955 to 1959 for 142 episodes, plus a 1959 special. The series starred Phil Silvers as Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko of the United States Army.
The series was created and largely written by Nat Hiken, and won three consecutive Emmy Awards for Best Comedy Series. The show is sometimes titled Sergeant Bilko or simply Bilko in reruns, and is very often referred to by these names, both on-screen and by viewers. The show’s success transformed Silvers from a journeyman comedian into a star, and writer-producer Hiken from a highly regarded behind-the-scenes comedy writer into a publicly recognized creator.
Talent Varieties is a country music talent show on American network television and radio in 1955 that featured performers hoping to achieve fame in the entertainment business.The weekly ABC-TV program was a live half-hour summer replacement series hosted by Slim Wilson. Wilson introduced the amateur and professional talent, including music and comedy acts (many from the Ozarks); and his Tall Timber Trio, composed of Speedy Haworth (guitar), Bob White (bass guitar) and Bryan “Doc” Martin (steel guitar) provided accompaniment. Auditions were handled by Bill Ring. The Westport Kids appeared July 12th, and Buck Griffin appeared August 2nd.The show aired on Tuesday nights from June 28th–November 1st. Its original time slot was 7:30–8 p.m. Eastern Time, replacing Cavalcade of America, but moved to 10–10:30 p.m. in September to briefly replace Break the Bank.ABC Radio simulcast the program under the name Talent Round-Up from 7:30 p.m., as well as carrying an additional half-hour until 8:30.The program originated from the Jewell Theatre in Springfield, Missouri, home to ABC’s Ozark Jubilee; and was produced and directed by the Jubilee’s Bryan Bisney, who took over from Ring in September.
You Asked for It was a popular human interest show created and hosted by Art Baker. Initially titled The Art Baker Show, the program originally aired on American television between 1950 and 1959.
On the show, viewers were asked to send in postcards describing something that they wanted to see on television, such as the reenactment of William Tell shooting an apple off his son’s head. In 1950, US national archery champion Stan Overby performed the feat, shooting an apple off his assistant’s head.
The show was originally broadcast live, so some of the riskier propositions took on added elements of danger and suspense. A segment where animal trainer and stuntman, Reed Parham wrestled a huge, deadly anaconda, for example, nearly became disastrous until assistants interceded with guns drawn, visibly unnerving host Art Baker.
In the Happy Days episode “Fearless Fonzarelli” (aired September 30th, 1975), Fonzie (Henry Winkler) jumps his motorcycle over fourteen garbage cans. The feat attracts the cameras of the fictional (though thinly-veiled) You Wanted To See It, with the real Jack Smith playing himself. You Wanted To See It shows up again in the Weezer video “Buddy Holly” which shows the band playing at Arnold’s Drive-In, a popular diner in the Happy Days sitcom.
A parody of the show called You’re Asking for It was featured in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Wideo Wabbit (1956).
Family Affair is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from September 12th, 1966 to September 9th, 1971. The series explored the trials of well-to-do civil engineer and bachelor Bill Davis (Brian Keith) as he attempted to raise his brother’s orphaned children in his luxury New York City apartment. Davis’ traditional English gentleman’s gentleman, Mr. Giles French (Sebastian Cabot), also had adjustments to make as he became saddled with the responsibility of caring for 15-year-old Cissy (Kathy Garver) and the 6-year-old twins, Jody (Johnny Whitaker) and Buffy (Anissa Jones). The show ran for 138 episodes. Family Affair was created and produced by Don Fedderson, also known for My Three Sons and The Millionaire.
William “Bill” Davis, originally of Terre Haute, Indiana, is a successful civil engineer who develops major projects all over the world. A wealthy bachelor often dating socialites, he lives in a large apartment at 600 E. 62nd Street in Manhattan, and has a quintessential gentleman’s gentleman, Giles French. However, his quiet lifestyle is turned upside-down when his two nieces and nephew move in.
Bill’s brother Bob and sister-in-law Mary had died in an automobile accident a year prior to the premiere episode. Their children, teen Cissy and her young twin siblings Buffy and Jody, had been dispersed among relatives in Terre Haute, but none wanted to continue raising the children, so they attempt to give the responsibility to Bill. “Uncle Bill” is not keen on the idea at first, but the children endear themselves to him. First Buffy comes along, followed by Jody, and finally Cissy. Initially mortified by the situation is Mr. French, who effectively becomes the children’s nanny, on top of his valet duties. However as time passes they all become a family, albeit an accidental one.
When Sebastian Cabot became ill, Giles’s brother, Nigel “Niles” French (John Williams) was introduced, working for the Davis family for nine episodes in 1967 while Giles is said to be in England visiting the Queen. In the last season, Bill hires a part-time housekeeper, Emily Turner (Nancy Walker) to assist Mr. French.
Various other characters were also seen regularly, including several acquaintances of Mr. French who are in service (most notably Miss Faversham (Heather Angel), colleagues of Bill, and friends of Cissy.
The Huntley-Brinkley Report (sometimes known as The Texaco Huntley-Brinkley Report, for one of its early sponsors) was the NBC television network’s flagship evening news program from October 29th, 1956, until July 31st, 1970. It was anchored by Chet Huntley in New York City, and David Brinkley in Washington, D.C. It succeeded the Camel News Caravan, anchored by John Cameron Swayze. The program ran for 15 minutes at its inception but expanded to 30 minutes on September 9th, 1963, exactly a week after CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite did so. It was developed and produced initially by Reuven Frank. Frank left the program in 1962 to produce documentaries (Eliot Frankel replaced him) but returned to the program the following year when it expanded to 30 minutes. He was succeeded as executive producer in 1965 by Robert “Shad” Northshield and in 1969 by Wallace Westfeldt.
By 1956, NBC executives had grown dissatisfied with Swayze in his role anchoring the network’s evening news program, which fell behind its main competition, CBS’s Douglas Edwards with the News, in 1955. Network executive Ben Park suggested replacing Swayze with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who had garnered favorable attention anchoring NBC’s coverage of the national political conventions that summer. Bill McAndrew, NBC’s director of news (later NBC News president), had seen a highly rated local news program on NBC affiliate WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia, with two anchors reporting from different cities. He replaced Camel News Caravan with the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which premiered on October 29th, 1956, with Huntley in New York and Brinkley in Washington. Producer Reuven Frank, who had advocated pairing Huntley and Brinkley for the convention coverage, thought using two anchors on a regular news program “was one of the dumber ideas I had ever heard.” Nonetheless, on the day of the new program’s first broadcast, Frank authored the program’s closing line, “Good night, Chet. Good night, David. And good night, for NBC News.” This exchange became one of television’s most famous catchphrases even though both Huntley and Brinkley initially disliked it.
Huntley handled the bulk of the news most nights, with Brinkley specializing in Washington-area news (i.e., the White House, U.S. Congress, the Pentagon). Having two anchors also helped during vacation periods; one could handle the full show if necessary, leaving viewers with a familiar anchor instead of a little-known substitute such as a field reporter. When only Huntley or Brinkley was on the program, that one would merely say “Good night for NBC News”. The closing credits music for the broadcast was the second movement (scherzo) of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from the 1952 studio recording with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Initially, the program lost audience from Swayze’s program, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower let it be known that he was displeased by the switch. In the summer of 1957, the program had no advertisers. As its content improved, though, it began attracting critical praise and a larger audience, and by 1958, it had pulled even with CBS’s program. The program received a big boost when, in June 1958, Texaco began purchasing all of its advertising, an arrangement that continued for three years.
Critics considered Huntley to possess one of the best broadcast voices ever heard, and Brinkley’s dry, often witty, newswriting presented viewers a contrast to the often sober output from CBS News. The program received a Peabody Award in 1958 for “Outstanding Achievement in News,” the awards committee noting that the anchors had “developed a mature and intelligent treatment of the news that has become a welcome and refreshing institution for millions of viewers.” The program received the award again two years later in the same category, the committee concluding that Huntley and Brinkley had “dominated the news division of television so completely in the past year that it would be unthinkable to present a Peabody Award in that category to anybody else.” By that time, the program had surpassed CBS’s evening news program, Douglas Edwards with the News, in ratings and maintained higher viewership levels for much of the 1960s, even after Walter Cronkite took over CBS’s competing program (initially named Walter Cronkite with the News in 1962 and renamed the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1963). It received eight Emmy Awards in its 14-year run.
Huntley and Brinkley conveyed a strong chemistry, and a survey for NBC later found that viewers liked that the anchors talked to each other. In fact, aside from their sign-off, Huntley and Brinkley’s only communication came when one anchor finished a story and handed off to the other by saying the other’s name, a signal to an AT&T technician to switch the long-distance transmission lines from New York to Washington or vice versa. The anchors gained great celebrity, and surveys showed them better known than John Wayne, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, or the Beatles. In 1961, Frank Sinatra and Milton Berle entertained a crowd in Washington by singing, to the tune of “Love and Marriage,” “Huntley,Brinkley/Huntley,Brinkley/One is glum, the other quite twinkly.”
Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. was shown in a 1964 photograph watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report on a television backstage in his dressing room in Life magazine, who quoted him saying, “My only contact with reality. Whatever I’m doing, I stop to watch these guys.”
The United States Steel Hour is an anthology series which brought hour-long dramas to television from 1953 to 1963. The television series and the radio program that preceded it were both sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation. The series originated on radio in the 1940s as Theatre Guild on the Air.
The television version aired from 1953 to 1955 on ABC, and from 1955 to 1963 on CBS. Like its radio predecessor, it was a live dramatic anthology series. During its first season on television, the program alternated bi-weekly with The Motorola Television Hour. By 1963, the year it went off the air, it was the last surviving live anthology series from the Golden Age of Television. It was still on the air during President John F. Kennedy’s famous April 11th, 1962 confrontation with steel companies over the hefty raising of their prices. The show featured a range of television acting talent, as its episodes explored a wide variety of contemporary social issues, from the mundane to the controversial.
Notable guest actors included Martin Balsam, Tallulah Bankhead, James Dean, Keir Dullea, Andy Griffith, Rex Harrison, Celeste Holm, Sally Ann Howes, Jack Klugman, Peter Lorre, Walter Matthau, Paul Newman, George Peppard, Suzanne Storrs, Albert Salmi, and Johnny Washbrook. Washbrook played Johnny Sullivan in The Roads Home in his first-ever screen role.
Griffith made his onscreen debut in the show’s production of No Time For Sergeants, and would reprise the lead role in the 1958 big screen adaptation. Child actor Darryl Richard, later of The Donna Reed Show, also made his acting debut on the Steel Hour as Tony in the episode “The Bogey Man,” which aired January 18th, 1955. In 1960 Johnny Carson starred with Anne Francis in the presentation Queen of the Orange Bowl.
Episodes were contributed by many notable writers, including Ira Levin, Richard Maibaum and Rod Serling. The program also telecast one-hour musical versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The United States Steel Hour telecast The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on November 20th, 1957 with a cast starring Jimmy Boyd, Earle Hyman, Basil Rathbone, Jack Carson and Florence Henderson. Boyd had previously played Huckleberry in the earlier telecast of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Get Smart is an American comedy television series created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry that satirizes the secret agent genre. It ran from September 18th, 1965, to May 15th, 1970.
The show stars Don Adams (as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86), Barbara Feldon (as Agent 99), and Edward Platt (as Chief). Henry said they created the show by request of Daniel Melnick, who was a partner, along with Leonard Stern and David Susskind, of the show’s production company, Talent Associates, to capitalize on “the two biggest things in the entertainment world today”—James Bond and Inspector Clouseau. Brooks said: “It’s an insane combination of James Bond and Mel Brooks comedy.
The series centers on bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, also known as Agent 86. His female partner is Agent 99, whose real name is never revealed in the series. Agents 86 and 99 work for CONTROL, a secret U.S. government counter-intelligence agency based in Washington, D.C. The pair investigates and thwarts various threats to the world, though Smart’s bumbling nature and demands to do things by-the-book invariably cause complications. However, Smart never fails to save the day. Looking on is the long-suffering head of CONTROL, who is addressed simply as “Chief.”
The nemesis of CONTROL is KAOS, described as “an international organization of evil.” KAOS was supposedly formed in Bucharest, Romania, in 1904. Neither CONTROL nor KAOS is actually an acronym. Many actors appeared as KAOS agents, including Tom Bosley, John Byner, Victor French, Alice Ghostley, Ted Knight, Pat Paulsen, Tom Poston, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Middleton, Barry Newman, Julie Newmar, Vincent Price, William Schallert (who also had a recurring role as The Admiral, the first Chief of Control), and Larry Storch. Conrad Siegfried, played by Bernie Kopell, is Smart’s KAOS archenemy. King Moody (originally appearing as a generic KAOS killer) portrays the dim-witted but burly Starker, Siegfried’s assistant.
The enemies, world-takeover plots and gadgets seen in Get Smart parody the James Bond movies. “Do what they did except just stretch it half an inch,” Mel Brooks said of the methods of this TV series. Devices such as a shoe phone, The Cone of Silence and inner apartment booby traps were a regular part of most episodes.
Max and 99 marry in season four and have twins in season five. Agent 99 became the first woman on an American hit sitcom to keep her job after marriage and motherhood.
The Jimmy Durante Show is a 51-episode half-hour comedy/variety television program presented live on NBC from October 2nd, 1954 to June 23rd, 1956.
Several guest stars on the program later developed successful show business careers of their own. Jimmy Durante’s long nose, piano, and broken vocabulary were the mainstays of the program, which aired at 9:30 p.m. Eastern on Saturdays. In the first 1954-1955 season, Durante alternated with The Donald O’Connor Show, both sponsored by Texaco.
After his starring role on the NBC situation comedy Dear Phoebe ended and before he garnered the lead in the NBC drama The Thin Man, Peter Lawford, a brother-in-law of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, was a Durante regular, having appeared in six episodes from 1955-1956. Dancer Eddie Jackson (1896–1980), a Durante partner along with Lou Clayton from their vaudeville days, appeared four times on the series. Pianist Jules Buffano and drummer Jack Roth, former Durante associates, also guest starred on the program. He also had singers known as the Durante Girls.
Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda appeared twice on the show with Durante. During the August 4th, 1955 broadcast, Miranda suffered a heart attack. Miranda fell to her knees while dancing with Durante, who instinctively told the band to “stop da music!” while helping her to get up. Miranda laughed “I’m all out of breath!”, Durante replied, “Dat’s OK, honey, I’ll take yer lines.” Miranda laughed again, quickly pulled herself together, and finished the show. However, the next morning, Miranda died at her home from heart failure.
Flamboyant pianist Liberace was a guest three times. Others who appeared with Durante were Pat Carroll (later a regular on CBS’s The Danny Thomas Show), Marilyn Maxwell (Grace Sherwood on ABC’s 1961-1962 drama Bus Stop), George Jessel, Barbara Whiting Smith, George Raft, and The Borden Twins. The series was filmed at RKO Studios in Hollywood.
The program was televised at Club Durant. Each episode usually ended with Durante’s catchphrase, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!”, an apparent reference to Durante’s deceased first wife.
The Adventures of Robin Hood is a British television series comprising 143 half-hour, black and white episodes broadcast weekly between 1955 and 1959 on ITV. It stars Richard Greene as the outlaw Robin Hood and Alan Wheatley as his nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham.
The show followed the legendary character Robin Hood and his band of merry men in Sherwood Forest and the surrounding vicinity. While some episodes dramatised the traditional Robin Hood tales, most episodes were original dramas created by the show’s writers and producers.
