Tom: The Spontaneity Shop presents All British Comedy Explained with Abigoliah Schamaun and Tom Salinsky. This episode: I Love Lucy.
Hello there, this is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where normally Abigoliah Schamaun learns all about British comedy from me, Tom Salinsky. But for this very special episode, we’re doing the old switcheroo.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So this is now All American Comedy Explained by Abigoliah Schamaun to me, Tom Salinsky. Hello. Hello, Abigoliah. How are you?
Abigoliah: I’m good. How are you?
Tom: I’m a little bit under the weather. You might be able to hear in my voice. I’m a little bit croaky, but I’m really looking forward to this because we’ve been talking about this kind of since we thought of doing this podcast.
So who is this?
Abigoliah: That is Lucille Ball herself. We are covering I Love Lucy. It’s one of my favourite shows since I was a kid. My mum got me this doll when I was, like, pretty much a little too old to play with Barbies. That’s why she’s in such good shape. I was a teenager by the time I got her, but my mum sent her to me a while ago. She sits above my desk and inspires me.
Tom: It’s amazing. And I’ll tell you what I basically know about I Love Lucy, which is not an awful amount.
Abigoliah: This is great.
Tom: So I’m kind of aware of the show’s landmark status. Like, Lucille Ball is essentially inventing the American sitcom. And I also know that Desilu is responsible for Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: But I don’t know if I’ve ever actually sat down and watched an entire episode of I Love Lucy.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: I’ve seen clips.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And I know there are some famous bits. And there was an episode of Will & Grace where they spoofed several famous episodes.
Abigoliah: I think they might have spoofed this one right here. It’s called “Job Switching”, this episode.
Tom: Oh, what, it’s called—?
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And not to give too much away for the end of this, but we will be watching this episode today.
Tom: And one of my comedy heroes makes a guest appearance in an episode of I Love Lucy, so I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that clip as well.
Abigoliah: Which one is that?
Tom: Harpo Marx?
Abigoliah: Oh, yes. I was thinking about showing you that one, but I have— Okay, so I used to love this show as a kid. Like I said, my parents— Nick at Nite, which was the Nickelodeon when they showed old TV shows, had an I Love Lucy marathon. My dad taped them all on VHS. For a long time, I Love Lucy was my personality. And after doing all this research, guess what? We’re going back, baby.
Tom: I used to hear it.
Abigoliah: I nearly dressed up as her, but I didn’t want to buy a costume. Yeah. So shall we dive straight in?
Tom: Let’s dive in.
Abigoliah: Okay, so this is I Love Lucy explained, part one.
Tom: Oh my God.
Abigoliah: Oh, oh. Oh, by the way, our resources for today — because this is my first time leading, so I want to just make sure everyone knows that I did not shirk the research — are Love, Lucy: An Autobiography by Lucille Ball; Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz; A Book by Desi Arnaz — this is his autobiography — and Laughing with Lucy, a book by Madelyn Pugh. And to be honest, I’ve only read half of it, but it still counts. It’s helped colour it.
Tom: Listen, if this podcast doesn’t work out, we can open a lending library.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. I was going to say I also brought them because I was like, maybe he’ll want to borrow them.
Tom: Yes. You never know.
Abigoliah: All right. The story of I Love Lucy is not just about a beloved sitcom. It is a love story between two people, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, two people who changed the way television was made for one simple reason: they wanted to be together.
Tom: Oh.
Abigoliah: Desiderio Alberto Arnaz III was born in Cuba. His father was the mayor of Santiago, and Desi was basically living this really rich, privileged life. At the age of 16, he already had his own boats, his own horses. But in 1933, the Cuban Revolution kicked off. And because his dad was mayor, a mob laid siege to their home and burned it down.
Tom: Oh, wow.
Abigoliah: Desi and his father fled to Miami. Like I said, Desi was 16 at the time. He spoke very little English and now they were penniless. Eventually, Desi got a job in a nightclub band where he was discovered by Xavier Cugat. Xavier Cugat is known as the king of Latin music. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of—
Tom: Yeah, I have. Yeah. He’s in a couple of Fred Astaire films.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah, he was a big deal. And he took Desi to New York, kind of showed him the ropes of being a bandleader.
Tom: And what instrument is Desi playing?
Abigoliah: So he’s most well known for playing the conga drum. He can play guitar as well. When he first got cast in his original band, he was a guitar player, but he basically made his name known as a conga player and a bandleader. Fun fact: he is the guy who brought the conga, the dance, to America.
Tom: Oh, wow.
Abigoliah: No one really did it. He did it in Miami, and then he brought it to New York, and it kind of became a whole sensation.
Tom: Now that’s the moonwalk of its day.
Abigoliah: The moonwalk of its day, the Macarena of its day, because everyone could do it.
Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York, and when she was four years old, her father died. Her mother would often have to leave her brother and her — her brother’s name was Fred — with their aunt as she went out of state to find work. And when she was 16, she enrolled in an acting course in New York City. She was soon kicked out because the acting school said she had no talent and there was no reason for her to stay, because they were basically taking her money.
Tom: Wow.
Abigoliah: She then tried auditioning as a showgirl around New York, and again everyone was like, “You don’t have what it takes, kid. This isn’t for you.” And she finally found some success as a model for high-end boutiques. And that is where she was discovered by Eddie Cantor. He asked her to come out to Hollywood to play a Goldwyn Girl in the film Roman Scandals.
So off she went to Hollywood, where she signed a contract to be a studio player for RKO. That’s where she came under the tutelage of RKO’s Little Theatre director, Lela Rogers. Do you know who Lela Rogers is?
Tom: Oh, I don’t.
Abigoliah: She’s Ginger Rogers’ mother.
Tom: Oh my God.
Abigoliah: And she basically ran an acting course at RKO for the studio players so they could learn how to be better and work their way up. And she’s the first person to really see promise in Lucille Ball. In fact, RKO at one point wanted to drop Lucy, and Lela went to bat for her and was like, “If you drop Lucy, I will leave and take Lucy to another studio with me, and I’ll take Ginger as well.” And they were like, “Okay, she can stay.”
And Lela was also the first person to recognise the comedic chops of Lucille Ball. She taught her how to be funny while also maintaining her femininity. That’s something that comes up a lot as I was reading it. Not only that she was funny, but she could maintain her feminine wiles while she did it, which sounds really archaic now.
Tom: But Ginger Rogers is a really interesting comparison, because we only think of her doing dance numbers with Fred Astaire, but she was in a lot of RKO and then later MGM movies. And actually, her personality jumps off the screen. And so I can really see why her mother would be drawn to Lucille Ball, who’s got many of the same qualities, just in different proportions.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And in Lucy’s autobiography, she talks about how Ginger couldn’t really dance, like how hard she worked to be able to keep up with Fred Astaire, and how her mother helped navigate Hollywood with her. And I think she saw the work ethic in Ginger and really took it on herself.
Lucy, eventually, she started to work her way up the ladder, and she started to get cast in films as a lead role, and she was known as the Queen of the Bs. So there were the A-list pictures and then the B-list pictures, and she was the one who was always in the B-list, but she never quite got above that.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: And then in 1940, the character of Robin was introduced to readers in the Batman comics—
Tom: Where is this going?
Abigoliah: Well, you always start our podcast with context. So this is the context.
Tom: Oh, I see. This is the context.
Abigoliah: See, I can maintain the structure of the show. I’ve been listening the last 23 episodes.
So in June of 1940, the character of Robin was introduced to readers in the Batman comics. Band Waggon was the number one comedy show in Britain on BBC radio, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech in the House of Commons.
Tom: Shall I tell you an interesting fact about that speech?
Abigoliah: Go ahead.
Tom: He was drunk.
Abigoliah: You can hear recordings of that speech.
Tom: Yeah, but you can’t hear recordings of that speech in the House of Commons, because they were not recorded. He went into a recording studio years later and recorded his famous speeches for release on a record album.
Abigoliah: No way. Because on Wikipedia they had it and I listened to it.
Tom: It’s not in the House of Commons.
Abigoliah: No wonder you didn’t hear people being like, “Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.” I was like, wow, they’re being real quiet. They’re never quiet in the House of Commons. Makes so much sense.
And in 1940, that is when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball met on a new RKO picture called Too Many Girls. It was being adapted from a hit Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical by the same name. Lucy was to play the romantic lead, and Desi had driven from New York to LA to revive his role from the Broadway play as the football-playing, conga-drum-pounding Cuban.
Tom: Yeah, he’s found his niche.
Abigoliah: He’s found his niche, yeah. During the first day of rehearsal, Desi was going over the music for the song “She Could Shake the Maracas”, and walked in a beautiful, then-blonde, blue-eyed woman in tight slacks and a yellow sweater. Desi Arnaz turned to the pianist and said, “That’s a hunk of woman.”
Tom: So is the blonde hair her natural colour? Is the red her natural colour? Are these all out of a bottle?
Abigoliah: She’s a brunette. She’s naturally a brunette. She dyed her hair sometime in the forties for a film called Du Barry Was a Lady, and it was a suggestion from a hairstylist at MGM at the time who was like, “Let’s go red.”
Tom: Rita Hayworth similarly. And it’s interesting because she’s New York-born, but she has this relationship with this Cuban guy. Rita Hayworth, it was suggested she dye her hair red to make her look less Latin, which she was, really. But there’s also, by renaming her Rita Hayworth, she erased all of her Latin identity and then became a star.
Abigoliah: That’s fascinating. I didn’t even know Rita Hayworth was— Do you know her real name?
Tom: I didn’t research Rita Hayworth for the purpose of this podcast, but this is left as an exercise to the listeners.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. You all have Google. Get to it.
Okay. She walked over to him and introduced herself and, already with a reputation as a Latin lothario with game to back it up, he said to her, “Do you know how to rumba?” That was his pick-up line to her.
Tom: And that reminds me of the exchange — I can’t remember which Marx Brothers film it’s in, A Day at the Races, I think. “Do you remember me?” “Do I? I’ll take a number from one to ten.”
Abigoliah: That’s pretty much exactly how it went down. They went out that night dancing. Had a great time. A couple of days later, there was a cast party for Too Many Girls on the beach, and Lucy and Desi sat together on the beach all night talking. That night, Lucy took Desi back to her apartment.
Tom: Ooh. Scandal.
Abigoliah: I know. And the following day she called her fiancé to break up with him.
Tom: Oh my God.
Abigoliah: And Desi essentially just ghosted his girlfriend.
Tom: They were both in relationships.
Abigoliah: They were both in relationships. They had, like, one night of long, intense conversation.
Tom: “Conversation.”
Abigoliah: One night of passionate love. It was a conversation on the beach, passionate love at night, and then left their partners. And that was the start of a torrid love affair and a partnership that would change the TV landscape forever.
And as soon as they got together, they were a hot topic of gossip for Hollywood because they were so full of passion and jealousy from the start. Desi said they fought and fucked like mad. And I bring this up because you watch the show and it’s so wholesome, and the two people behind it are just wildcats.
Tom: Fiery wildcats.
Abigoliah: Exactly, exactly. During their courtship, they were often apart. Lucy had to travel a lot to promote her shows, and Desi went back to the band. Lucy would call him and say stuff like, “You Cuban son of a bitch. Where were you last night? What were you trying to do? Lay every goddamn chorus girl?” And it went the other way as well. When Lucy was in Milwaukee promoting another film, Desi called her when her trip was extended and said, “I know why you’re staying in Milwaukee, you crumb bum. You’re screwing the mayor.”
And when she finally arrived in New York, Desi apologised. And the reason why he was so upset was because he’d arranged for them to elope the following day. And once she showed up, she agreed. They went to the Constitution State and they were married on November 30th of 1940, six months after they met. He was 23. She was 29.
Tom: Oh.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. She’s an older woman and also 29, Queen of the Bs. Like, she’s almost 30. She’s basically dead in Hollywood. I know this is ridiculous to say nowadays, but at 29, she’s an older woman. Lucy said of the matrimony, “My friends gave the marriage six months. I gave it six weeks.”
Now, Desi had signed a three-picture deal with RKO, and he did make three pictures. He made Too Many Girls, Four Jacks and a Jill, and another picture for MGM called Bataan, which actually got really good reviews. But Hollywood never really knew what to do with him. Honestly, I think part of it is because of his accent, because he’s not the first Latin person to show up in Hollywood, but he had a really thick Cuban accent.
And Lucille Ball was making enough money for them both to live comfortably, but he was a guy who couldn’t have idle hands, you know. And he didn’t want to be known as Mr Ball. So he went back on the road with his band, and he was eventually drafted into the Air Force and worked out of a hospital, entertaining the troops before they left for service, or the injured ones when they came back.
Tom: So he’s an American citizen by this stage?
Abigoliah: Yes. Yes, I think so. He said in order to enter the army, he had to retire his Cuban military service. So I’m not 100% sure. It would have been because he would have been in his twenties. So yeah, he would have been a citizen by then.
And because he’s travelling around so much, they never see each other. Most of their relationship is conducted by phone. At one point, they said their phone bill got up to, like, $29,000, which is insane.
Tom: Yeah. That’s nuts.
Abigoliah: And even when he was in California, they didn’t see each other much because she had to get up at 4am to be on set. He was performing till 2am with his band. So what they would do was they’d meet in the middle on Mulholland Drive and basically get out of their cars at 3am, have a chat, have, like, a quote-unquote little date, get back in their cars. He’d go home to sleep, she’d go off to work.
And with this separation, all of the jealousy was still going on. Lucy never thought that he was being faithful. To be honest, he wasn’t. He famously slept around. And in 1944 they actually sought a divorce. Later, Lucy said mostly because she thought that Desi was screwing all the nurses at the Birmingham hospital—
Tom: Where he was—
Abigoliah: —where he was stationed at the time.
California had this law that said after the divorce decree was granted, the couple must not cohabitate for a year. And one night Lucy and Desi got together. She said she wished she had been a better wife. He said he wished he had been a better husband. They talked all night. They went home together again. And after that, because they went home together, the divorce was null and void and never went through.
And basically, they wanted to be together. They really wanted a family. Like, they really wanted a family, but it just wasn’t working. And after they decided to stay together, Lucy said, “Both of us have been sickened and frustrated many times by conflicting careers. I lost him once. I got him back. I’ve had to plot, scratch, connive and hold a husband.” And connive she did.
At this point, Lucy wasn’t getting many film offers, so she turned her attention to radio, and she was cast as the wife in the CBS radio programme My Favorite Husband. Richard Denning played her husband. This was in 1947.
Tom: And this is like a radio sitcom?
Abigoliah: This is a radio sitcom. CBS pulled in two writers to write it, Bob Carroll Jr and Madelyn Pugh. For the producer-director, they got Gordon Hughes, but he couldn’t handle Lucy because she was, quote-unquote, troublesome. And Lucille Ball could be a really difficult pill to swallow. Her brother Fred Ball said of her, she wasn’t very tactful. She had a defensive way of getting things across. Maybe she was terrified of hurting someone’s feelings, so she’d just crash you over the head with it. Like, she was very blunt. She had no tact. She could be just downright hurtful. She didn’t really mean to be, but that was just kind of the way she was in real life.
And when Hughes wasn’t up for the task, they brought in a writer-producer who had successfully managed the formidable Fanny Brice, and his name was Jess Oppenheimer. My Favorite Husband turned out to be a hit, so much so that CBS wanted to turn it into a television sitcom. Lucy not only saw this as a great career move, but a chance to salvage her marriage again. And she was like, “Yeah, we can do a sitcom if Desi can play my husband on TV.” And CBS said no.
Now why? Why do you think CBS didn’t think that Desi Arnaz should play Lucille Ball’s husband on TV?
Tom: Is the word miscegenation marching in the direction of this conversation?
Abigoliah: It would, if I knew what miscegenation meant.
Tom: Mixing of races.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly it. They didn’t want to portray a—
Tom: Interracial marriage.
Abigoliah: —an interracial marriage.
Tom: And it is bizarre, especially when you’re watching black and white, because racism is so ridiculous anyway. But when you look at Lucy and Desi just as black-and-white photographs, you don’t think, “You are from one group and you are from another group,” in any way. It is nuts.
Abigoliah: I mean, even when you see him in colour, like, I know this sounds kind of weird to say, but he could have passed.
Tom: Yeah, he could have passed. And listen, just to be absolutely clear about this, if they had been totally different hues, it still would have been fine. But the point is, it’s hard to imagine what middle America was getting its panties in a bunch over.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, middle America wasn’t. CBS was. That’s the thing. The studio execs wanted the couple to be an All-American couple. And they didn’t believe that this — now she was red-headed, stunning redhead — would be married to a Latin conga-drumming bandleader. Which Lucy argued back, “What do you mean nobody will believe it? We are married.”
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And not only are they married, but people know who they are. Like, they make the society pages. There’s no secret that they’re together. Their marriage was splashed, especially because it happened, like, you know, they eloped and it was so quick. Everyone knew who they were. So Lucille Ball said, “If no one will give us a job together, we’re gonna make one.” So what do you think they did next?
Tom: Well, they can start a production company, but that doesn’t give them access to the airwaves.
Do they do it live?
Abigoliah: That’s exactly what they do.
Tom: I genuinely did not know that.
Abigoliah: I thought you were gonna say they wrote a pilot. And I’m like, no. They had to prove that America would accept them. And so what they did was they went on a vaudevillian tour around the US. It was an expensive tour. It was estimated to cost around $20,000 — $278,000 in today’s money.
They already had an independent production company that they created for Desi’s band tours. He was the president, Lucy was the vice president, and that company was called Desilu. It already existed. It was very small at the time.
Desi got his old friend, a famous Spanish clown called Pepito, to come help teach Lucy how to do some physical comedy. In fact, there’s a famous xylophone and cello act that Lucy does in the unaired pilot. It is also done in season one, episode six, “The Audition”. That’s what Pepito taught her.
And they asked Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr to write some sketches for them. Desi would do the musical numbers he was famous for, like “Cuban Pete” and “Babalú”. Side note: “Babalú” is the number he’s most famous for. And listeners, pause right now, go to YouTube, put in “Desi Arnaz Babalú”. Watch it. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. He is a heartthrob. I didn’t pick up on that as a child, but wow.
[Music clip: Desi Arnaz, “Babalú”]
Abigoliah: So the tour started off in Chicago in June of 1950. I couldn’t find exactly how many dates they did, but they did somewhere between eight to ten cities. And it was a hit.
Tom: And so is this just like I Love Lucy on stage, effectively?
Abigoliah: Sort of.
Tom: It’s sketches?
Abigoliah: Yeah. So what it was, was because he was already a bandleader, he had an act. So what they did was they basically built into it Lucille Ball. And the idea was she kept trying to be in the show, like she kept trying to audition.
Tom: That sounds really funny.
Abigoliah: They also had another bit where he’s singing “Cuban Pete” and she walks on. They wind up doing this in the show as well, where she sneaks on and does her own verse being like, “They call me Sally Sweet, I’m the queen of Delancey Street.” So, all in all, I think it was like 20 minutes of the whole show that they were in, but everyone loved them together. They thought it was so brilliant.
And then they got to New York, and Lucy started to feel tired all the time. And she wasn’t feeling that good. And she was thinking, “I might be pregnant,” which is all she ever wanted. She wanted a family. She wanted to be with her husband. So she goes to the doctor. But there was this gossip columnist named Walter Winchell who had spies everywhere. So when she went to the hospital, she gave a fake name. Red hair, fake name — no one would notice her. And they took her blood, and they told her they’d call her the next day, because this is before peeing on a stick. You had to wait 24 hours for the result.
And that night, they’re about to go on in New York. She has a radio on to Walter Winchell’s show, and on it, in the blind items, he says that a certain red-headed movie star is pregnant.
Tom: And that’s—
Abigoliah: That’s how she found out she was pregnant. She runs out, she screams to Desi. She’s like, “We’re pregnant. We’re pregnant.” And he’s like, “How do you know? We don’t get the results till tomorrow.” And she was like, “Walter Winchell just said so. And if Walter Winchell says it’s true, it’s true.”
Tom: This is like the 1940s version of Amazon making suggestions and anticipating the pregnancy you don’t yet know about.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And they were so excited about it. They had to rework the act a bit because at one point she’s flopping on her stomach like a seal, and they were like, well, she can’t do that anymore. But she continued to work and, very, very sadly, she had a miscarriage and they were bereft. They cancelled a big part of the tour so she could go home and convalesce. And they were so upset about it.
They went back, finished the tour the following November, and it did get back to CBS how popular the show was. And they were like, “Cool. Well, since we’ve proved to you that we work together as a couple, can we do the sitcom?” And CBS was still like, “I don’t know.”
And while they’re in these negotiations, Lucy starts to feel tired again and a little off. And guess what? She’s pregnant again. And this time it took. It was her first daughter, Lucie Arnaz. So her daughter’s named Lucie Arnaz. And they filmed this unaired pilot, which is, by the way, in all the episodes that we were given. We have the unaired pilot, if you want to see it.
Tom: Oh, cool.
Abigoliah: If you watch it, she’s wearing baggy clothes. That’s because she’s actually pregnant with Lucie Arnaz.
Tom: Right. I just saw there was one of those clips doing the rounds of Julia Louis-Dreyfus talking about being pregnant on Seinfeld. And she said, “Yeah, we just had me holding bags in front of me or on my lap or wearing big coats,” and so on. And she said, at one point, Jerry did come in and say, “Hey, we’ve been kicking this around in the writers’ room, and we think we might just do a storyline in which Elaine gets really fat.” And Julia Louis-Dreyfus just stared at him, and the subject was never mentioned again.
Abigoliah: Good for her. Yeah, fucking good for her.
So they filmed this pilot. It looks good. Everyone’s happy with it. CBS is still hemming and hawing about it. And then NBC started to show interest in the pilot and was like, “Well, we might take it.” And that’s when CBS was like, “It’s a great idea. We’ll do it.”
Tom: Yeah. Shades of BBC, Channel 4 and The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what happened. Because also, they didn’t want to lose Lucy. She was doing My Favorite Husband. She was a huge hit because she was a movie star, and they wanted her on the network. They desperately wanted to keep her. They didn’t know if they wanted them as a couple on the air.
Once CBS took on the show, they hired the old crew back from My Favorite Husband. So Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll were brought on as writers, and Jess Oppenheimer was brought on as a writer-producer. Nowadays, he would have been called a showrunner.
And Lucy and Desi had a very clear vision for what they wanted. The sitcom would depict an up-and-coming nightclub bandleader, Ricky Ricardo, played by Desi Arnaz, and his wife Lucy Ricardo, a housewife with no musical talents but desperate to be in the act. They insisted that the humour never be mean or unkind. Lucy’s character was to be impulsive, inquisitive and feminine. It keeps coming up.
Lucy Ricardo’s predicament came from a real desire to please. She would be honest but misguided, the kind of person that you’d look at and go, “Oh, I love that Lucy.” And so the show was named I Love Lucy.
They got a sponsor for the show, the cigarette company Philip Morris. Now, I’m going to back up here a bit because we’ve been covering British shows on the BBC. In the fifties, you needed a sponsor for your show because all American television had commercials. And now when you see commercials, it’ll be commercials for, like — not that anyone watches anything on actual television — but it’ll be commercials for a variety of things. Back in the day, you had one sponsor and your ad breaks were just for that.
Tom: Yeah. And it would be some guy in a suit going, “Buy the new Plymouth DeSoto.”
Abigoliah: Exactly. Sometimes it would be the actors themselves endorsing it. And in the case of Philip Morris, not only were there ads for it, but in the TV show you see Desi and Lucy smoking all the time.
Tom: And always Philip Morris cigarettes.
Abigoliah: It’s always Philip Morris cigarettes. They never, like, hold them up, but there are a couple of scenes where they’re in the drugstore counter, where they’re eating sandwiches, and behind them is a Philip Morris sign. Like, they’re all over it. But it’s so weird to just watch people smoking like that on TV.
So they get their sponsor. But there was a hitch because CBS wanted them to film in New York, and Lucy and Desi were like, “No, we did all this so we could be together at our home in California.” But CBS was like, “We have to film it in New York because most of our viewing audience is on the East Coast.” And what they used to do back then is they would film it and it’d go out live on the East Coast, and every other subsequent airing was a copy from kinescope, which you taught me about in—
Tom: Essentially pointing a movie camera at a television screen.
Abigoliah: Yes. And it was far— It just wasn’t as good quality.
Tom: Right. Okay, so the live broadcast is the highest quality. So that’s why they want to prioritise New York, and that’s why they want to film. Yes, yes, yes. Okay.
Abigoliah: Because you also have to remember the continental United States has four time zones, so they needed to be able to cover them all.
Tom: It’s 7pm in New York, it’s 11pm—
Abigoliah: Exactly.
Tom: —in Los Angeles.
Abigoliah: Exactly. And you can’t have it going out at 11pm. No one will freaking see it. So they’re like, “We have to film it in New York.” Lucy and Desi are like, “We really don’t want to do this.”
And this is when Desi Arnaz is like, “What if we shot the whole thing in front of a live studio audience on movie film?” And the TV execs were like, “No, it’s never been done before. How would you even do that?” And Desi Arnaz goes, “Let me get back to you.”
And so he sets about trying to figure out how to make it happen. And the first thing he does is he reaches out to a cinematographer named Karl Freund. He had already won Academy Awards. He was a big deal. Now, do you know who Karl Freund is?
Tom: I don’t.
Abigoliah: As a big movie buff, he was the cinematographer for the 1930s Dracula.
Tom: Oh, okay.
Abigoliah: And he also directed The Mummy.
Tom: Right.
Abigoliah: The 1930s Mummy. That’s who he is. He had already revolutionised filmmaking. He was the first guy to use cranes and dollies to move the cameras around, because zoom lenses didn’t show up until the late fifties. And before he started using cranes and dollies, what they’d do is they’d set the camera on a tripod, and then they’d have to pick it up and physically move it. So all of that smooth movement came from his mind.
He also invented the process shot. Do you know what the process shot is?
Tom: Yes, yes. Explain it for the—
Abigoliah: Two shots into one.
Tom: Yeah. So you have your actor in the foreground and your Tyrannosaurus rex in the background, or King Kong more appropriately. And the process shot is combining the two images together into one. It’s often used if you see in old movies where someone’s driving in a car and there’s scenery going past them. That’s the process shot. The alternative would be rear projection, where you do it all in camera. That’s more fiddly for shooting.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And he invented the light meter. So if anyone could figure out how to do this, it was Karl Freund.
So Desi calls him up and he says, “I want to do a stage show as a play. I want to film it in continuity in front of a live studio audience of about 300 people, using three 35mm cameras, and record the studio audience laughter simultaneously with our dialogue, all the cameras synchronised on one soundtrack, so we can cut from the master shot to the medium shot to the close-up shot when we edit the film.” And Freund replied, “It can’t be done.”
He goes on to explain that in order to do this, in order to shoot the wide shot, the medium and the close-up, those all require different lighting techniques. And he’s like, “If you shoot it all simultaneously with three cameras, you’re not going to get any good footage.” And, as Karl Freund says, “Lucy’s no spring chicken, and you want her to look good,” because by now she’s 40. She’s 40 and she’s had a baby. She’s dead. She’s dead.
And Desi Arnaz — we have to remember, Desi Arnaz is the son of a politician. So he has that sort of charisma and gift of the gab, but he also has the hustle of a penniless immigrant, because he’s been both.
Tom: And that determination, eyes on the prize. This is what I want. We’re going to make it happen.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s so important to remember that about him, because I think that’s kind of what drove him. And he’s just like, “Dude, you’ve made so many innovations in film. If anyone can pull this off, Karl Freund, it’s you.” Which, by the way, Karl Freund didn’t want to do fucking TV. He’s an MGM cinematographer. He’s already world-famous. This is beneath him.
And Karl goes, “Well, we’d have to design a completely new system of lighting.” And that’s when Desi knew he had him. And Karl Freund came on board. He did every season because he really wanted the challenge. And he designed a whole new lighting system to be able to do three cameras all at one time. It was like an overhead lighting system.
But then they still had more problems to solve. So Desi went about finding people who could solve them. They needed a director who would be up to the challenge of filming this new way of television. And they found that in Marc Daniels. And Marc Daniels brought on his camera coordinator, his wife Emily Daniels, which means Emily Daniels was the first female camera coordinator in Hollywood. Now, Marc Daniels — every once in a while, we have to stop and quiz you — what else did he direct?
Tom: Star Trek?
Abigoliah: Good job, good job.
Tom: Yes, I’ve seen that name on the credits of many Star Trek episodes.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I figured. I figured. Yeah, he was the director for the first season of I Love Lucy.
And for sound, they needed someone who could record and mix the sound of the dialogue, the audience, the music, because the band was there in the theatre with them.
Tom: A typical reel of 35mm film runs about ten minutes. So are they building in recording breaks every ten minutes to change reels?
Abigoliah: That is an excellent question and one I don’t know. But what I would think happened—
Tom: There are two act breaks in a half-hour at that time.
Abigoliah: Well, they change locations, so I think they’d change it over then, but I don’t actually have the answer to that because I didn’t read Marc Daniels’ autobiography. I failed. I only read four books. But yeah, you had such a good question. I think they did it when they changed sets.
Tom: Yeah, that would make sense.
Abigoliah: Because in the studio they had four sets. They had one for the living room, one for the kitchen, one for the bedroom. And then they had a fourth set that was whatever they needed it to be. If it was, like, the drugstore, the outside of the apartments, everything was done in the studio. Nothing — you know, we see the B-roll in Hancock’s Half Hour. They didn’t do any of that. It’s all in the studio.
Now, for the sound, they needed someone who could record and mix the sound of the dialogue, the audience, the music, the sound effects simultaneously in front of the studio audience. And films weren’t being made that way, so they had to turn to radio, and they found a radio guy who could do it named Cam McAuliffe. And they needed an editor who would be down to edit filming this way, and they found that in Dann Cahn.
Now, back then, the way you’d edit was you had what was called a Moviola. You know about this, right? A Moviola would feed the film through and you’d watch it. Now, they’d feed through the wide shot and then the medium shot and then the close-up, and it was just taking fucking forever. And Desi Arnaz was like, “Is there a way that we can, like, watch it all at once?” And they were like, “Yeah, we’ll put something together.”
So what they wound up doing was they built this contraption on a cast-iron platform with three Moviolas going at the same time, and a fourth arm for the sound, so they could watch it all simultaneously. It got known in Hollywood as Desilu’s four-headed monster. It was the only one that existed until it became so popular that Desilu Studios built a second one, and they owned the only two, which they would then rent out to other sitcoms.
All of this was ballooning the budget, and Philip Morris refused to give them more money than they’d already promised, which was about $20,000 a week, you know, per episode. So they suggested that it could all be affordable if Desi and Lucy took $1,000 a week each off their salaries. And Desi countered, “We’ll take the cut for the first 39 shows only if CBS agrees that Desilu Studios — or excuse me, Desilu Productions, because it was a production, it wasn’t a studio yet — will own 100% of all the shows for the first year, and any future years, if any.” It was agreed, and in that moment Desi Arnaz knowingly created the syndication and rerun market.
Tom: Wow.
Abigoliah: Because again, this whole filming it on kinescope — no one was doing reruns back then. So CBS just went, “Fucking sure, why not? We don’t care if you own the film.” No one did reruns, and now they own all the films.
Tom: Amazing.
Abigoliah: The show needed a couple next door. They decided it should be an older couple who would play Desi and Lucy’s best friends and landlords — which, by the way, landlords and friends? This is clearly fictional. The characters would be called Fred and Ethel Mertz.
For Fred, they cast William Frawley, an old vaudevillian and character actor who hadn’t worked in a while. And CBS didn’t want to hire him because he was an alcoholic and unreliable, and he promised if he got the part that his drinking would not interfere with the show. He gave them his word. He was never late. He never missed a day of work. He was a complete professional.
And for Ethel Mertz, Marc Daniels suggested Vivian Vance, a stage actress known for playing vampy roles like the other woman. And at first, Lucy did not warm to her at all.
Tom: Oh, interesting.
Abigoliah: Upon meeting Vivian at the first read-through, she looked Vivian up and down and was like, “I don’t know. You’re not very heavy.” And Vivian said, “Well, I’m round-shouldered, Miss Ball, and I do photograph dumpy.” And Lucille Ball was like, “Well, I don’t know.”
Vivian was a year younger than Lucy in real life, and when she signed on, she was contractually obligated to remain 20 pounds overweight for the seasons of filming. To quote Vivian, “Honey, if this show is a hit, it’ll be the biggest thing that’s ever happened in my career. So I made up my mind I am going to learn to love the bitch.”
And I don’t believe this happened, but I don’t know if you ever have this in your research. When you read a biography and you’re like, “Yeah, that didn’t happen. That didn’t happen.” But there’s a story of Lucy walking on set and plucking the false eyelashes off Vivian Vance’s face and going, “No one wears false eyelashes but me.” I believe she made that rule, but I don’t think she actually physically removed them.
They did eventually become friends, and they kind of had a sisterly relationship where sometimes they would really fight and go at each other. But I do think they learned to love each other in the end. Like, their relationship — all these relationships were very tricky, but I think there was true admiration and love for each other. However, Bill Frawley and Vivian Vance hated each other.
Tom: Oh, God.
Abigoliah: So Viv was put off that the man playing her husband was 20 years older than her, and she would complain that he was old enough to play her grandfather. And Bill would often refer to Vivian as a dried-up old cunt.
Tom: Oh my God.
Abigoliah: Yeah, they hated each other. Which, when you watch it, you’re like, I think that helps the show. But they had their cast: a stage actress, an old vaudevillian, a Cuban bandleader, and a B-list movie star.
Then, in 1951 — we started 11 years before — in 1951, Winston Churchill returned to power as prime minister. Lucille Ball was now 40 years old. And what was the number one comedy show in Britain in 1951? We’ve covered it.
Tom: Hancock.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: The Goon Show.
Abigoliah: The Goon Show. The Goon Show debuted in ’51 on radio, and it became a number one beloved— So radio is happening over here. They are making I Love Lucy.
The first episode aired Monday, 9pm, October 15th of 1951, going out on CBS, sponsored by Philip Morris and produced by Desilu Productions. And the first episode got warm, if tepid, reviews. Some people were like, “Lucille Ball is great. The writing could use some work.”
Tom: There would have been some anticipation for this because, as you say, Lucy and Desi are celebrities.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And people had followed them as a couple. But they showed up at, like, I think number seven, like the seventh show. I mean, there were probably eight on in 1951.
Tom: Three networks at this point.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And then it just took off. By February of 1952, it was the number one show on television. By May that same year, it made television history by getting 29 million viewers a week. That’s more than double the number of people who would see an A-list Hollywood film during its domestic run at that time. More people were watching I Love Lucy than anything else.
Tom: You can see why Hollywood thought TV was such a threat.
Abigoliah: Yeah. But funnily enough, at the same time, before they got Vivian, they reached out to a couple of people, but people were very hesitant to do television. Even Vivian Vance, she was a stage actor. She had a very good career. And when they asked her to do this TV show, she was like, “Why would I do TV?” Because it was so new, and it was just kind of, like, icky, you know?
And they were on top of the world. At the end of season one, they were unstoppable. Except Lucy started to feel a little tired again, a little weird, and they realised she’s pregnant again, which personally, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were so happy about. But for the show, they didn’t know what they were going to do.
And it was Jess Oppenheimer, the writer-producer, who said, “This is great. If Lucille Ball is having a baby, then Lucy Ricardo will have a baby as well.” And everyone was like, “That’s a great idea.” And they took the idea to CBS and Philip Morris, and they said, “Are you crazy? You can’t show a pregnant woman on television.”
Now, just to be clear, pregnant actresses had existed on television, but what they’d always do is, just like what they did with Elaine, they’d put them in a baggy outfit and put them behind a chair. But no woman had ever appeared as pregnant on television before.
But Desi Arnaz, ever the smooth-talker and the formidable businessman, said to Philip Morris and CBS, “We’ve given you the number one show in the country. Up until now, the creative decisions have been in our hands. Your people are telling us we cannot do this. Fine. But we will not accept you telling us what not to do unless you tell us what to do. We will cease to be responsible for the number one show. Instead, it will rely solely in your hands.”
So they caved and were like, “Okay, you can do it then.”
Tom: That’s a very good argument. There’s a story that, you know, Mel Brooks produced The Elephant Man—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —but kept his name off it because he didn’t want people to turn up to The Elephant Man thinking it was going to be Blazing Saddles.
Abigoliah: Smart man.
Tom: But he was very protective of David Lynch, really, because it was David Lynch’s second film and his first time working for a big studio. And so when they screened the film for the studio, the studio rang back the next day with notes. Mel Brooks answered the phone and said something to the effect of, “We are working together in a shared commercial enterprise. We have allowed you to see the work so far in the interests of that shared commercial enterprise. That does not mean we are soliciting the input of raging primitives,” and put the phone down.
Abigoliah: Wow. To be that confident, you know what I mean?
Tom: Yeah. Mel Brooks in 1980 was riding high.
Abigoliah: He was unstoppable. And so was Desi Arnaz. The thing that I really took away from learning this is how much he built the production company. And I even watched an interview of Lucille Ball later in life, and she’s with her second husband, and she was like, “He’s the one who did the building. I was the actress and got to be the mum, and he built it all up.” And no one’s ever acknowledged that about him, which I think is really interesting.
Tom: Yeah, it’s called I Love Lucy. It’s not called Lucy and Desi.
Abigoliah: And everyone kind of saw him as, again, this “Cuban Pete”, “Babalú” bandleader who was just riding the coattails of his famous Hollywood actress wife. And he was a freaking genius. There’s so much I could talk about him, but I won’t, because I’ve already written 19 pages about this show. So I was like, okay, we gotta pull it back.
So they caved. They were like, “Listen, you can do it.” They hired a three-man committee to oversee the scripts, to make sure that there was nothing too untoward and make sure it was wholesome enough for the public. The committee consisted of a priest, a minister and a rabbi.
Tom: Wow. I mean, that does seem like a good recipe for comedy.
Abigoliah: I mean, it is the start of an actual joke. CBS insisted they were not allowed to say the word “pregnant” on TV, and even the priest and the minister and the rabbi were like, “Why can’t they say pregnant? It’s what she is.” So they had to say, like, “expecting” and all these things. And Philip Morris only asked, “Please don’t show Lucy smoking while she’s pregnant.”
Tom: Brilliant. If only they’d found a washing powder sponsor instead.
Abigoliah: I know, I know. But what’s funny is I’ve been watching those episodes, and while she’s pregnant, she doesn’t smoke. But Desi Arnaz smokes in front of her.
Tom: Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Which is crazy. And she probably was smoking offscreen because it was— Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to assume anything, but I’m going to assume it.
So on September 15th, 1952, season two of I Love Lucy aired, with seven of the 31 episodes dedicated to a storyline about Lucy’s pregnancy. She was the first character ever to portray a pregnant woman on television. On Monday morning, the 19th of January 1953, Lucille Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz IV by caesarean section. That night at 9pm, Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on I Love Lucy. They happened on the same day. Over 44 million viewers tuned in. They got more viewers than Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day and Queen Elizabeth’s coronation that following June.
Tom: Wow.
Abigoliah: Lucille Ball won her first Emmy that February at the fifth Primetime Emmy Awards. And that’s where we’ll pick back up for part two of I Love Lucy, where we’ll get Tom’s reaction to the show. And we will be watching season one, episode 30, “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”, and season two, episode one, “Job Switching”, and hear what happens after Lucy and Desi Arnaz finally have everything they want. They are together, they are working together, they have two beautiful children.
So what are your predictions?
Tom: So like I said, I’m kind of familiar with this style of comedy. So yes, as we said, studio-bound, it’s about the rat-tat-tat dialogue back and forth. But there’s also physical comedy from both, I think, actually. Probably not just Lucy, but Desi as well. And there is a kind of a warmth and a charm to it, maybe something a little bit like all that kind of physical comedy with Hancock in the canteen, opening all those different hatches. That kind of thing feels quite similar.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. I think you’re on the right track.
Tom: And these presumably would have been— The process would be quite similar to those sitcoms that are rehearsed for a week, and then shoot it like a play, and then edit it with their three-camera footage. Was it only ever three cameras?
Abigoliah: The very first episode, they tried to do a fourth camera and it made things harder and was unnecessary. So it was always three cameras. And what they would do was they would do the read-through on Monday, rehearse all Tuesday. They would then have a team meeting with the actors and the writers and go over notes, rehearse again on Wednesday, dress rehearsal that night. Thursday nights, they would record it, and then it would go out on Monday. But they started filming them before the season would start.
Tom: Yes. Yeah. But you can’t edit them in three days.
Abigoliah: No, no, no, no, no.
Tom: But it’s a production line.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It starts—
Abigoliah: Yeah. Oh, by the way, another thing I left out was that back then most sitcoms were filmed in theatres.
Tom: Oh.
Abigoliah: And they had a real problem trying to figure out how to do this because they couldn’t have them in a theatre, the audience in a theatre, because the cameras would be in the way. So finally they figured, “Oh my God, we’ll just do it in a freaking studio.”
Tom: And they put bleachers—
Abigoliah: Yeah. They put in these huge bleachers. They put this laminate on the floor so they could roll around the dollies without any sound of the cameras rolling. So they were kind of the first people to do that as well. Before that, most of them were filmed in theatres or some version of a theatre.
Tom: Yeah. Or they didn’t have an audience.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And then they’d show it. Like, if it was filmed in a studio, they would then show the film to an audience. And that’s how they’d get the laugh track. They did it all simultaneously. The band was there, the audience was there, the actors were there. It was all happening at the same time.
Tom: But it’s very interesting that this is kind of why there’s this tradition of movie film, because that was never the way that British sitcoms were shot ever, ever, ever. But in America, something like MASH*, for example, was still being shot on film in the seventies. I think Cheers was shot on film, although by that stage it was being edited on videotape.
Abigoliah: Interesting.
Tom: So because videotape editing was just quicker and easier. And so what that meant was when we got Cheers over here, even though it had been shot on film and would have looked great when you saw it, it had to be converted from the American NTSC standard to the UK PAL standard and looked awful.
Abigoliah: Interesting.
Tom: Whereas MASH* looked fantastic because MASH* was all done on film.
Abigoliah: Well, I gotta tell you, when I sat down to watch I Love Lucy, my first thought was, God, this is gorgeous. Like, I love everything we’ve watched, but even when we get into Fawlty Towers and all that, their sets, that filming style is not nearly as crisp and as pretty as I Love Lucy, in my opinion. I’ll be very interested, as your huge film buff and obviously TV buff, I’m very curious to see what you think.
Tom: If the elements have been properly looked after, even if they don’t have the 35mm negatives, if they’ve got really good prints that have been well looked after, it should look like it was shot yesterday.
Abigoliah: Well, what they did was they filmed it on film, and then to each market, they’d do reprints. So every market would have the reprint, so it could go out at all the times it was supposed to. That’s one reason why they wanted to do it on film, because they could reprint it. It was expensive to do, and that’s why they took that huge salary cut in the beginning. It was because it was on film.
Tom: But it paid off.
Abigoliah: It paid off big time.
Tom: Let’s go watch it.
Abigoliah: All right, let’s go.
* * * * *
Abigoliah: Are you tired, run down? Do you poop out at parties? You should try I Love Lucy. It’ll put a pep in your step.
Okay. I’m dying to know what you think, because this is, like, my favouritest show in the world. What did you think of I Love Lucy?
Tom: So it’s obviously very primitive, and there’s so much kind of fulcruming in on Lucy’s talents. Like I think I said to you as we were watching it, when she’s messing around with the candy, what does the script say at that point? Because there are no jokes there. There’s nothing written for her to do, but she does it so brilliantly and that’s what makes the whole thing work.
Abigoliah: Well, Lucy was an incredibly detailed person with an incredibly strong work ethic. So as I pointed out as we were watching it, the girl sitting next to her is an actual candy dipper, right, who was supposed to have lines in the script, by the way, and they had to cut them because she didn’t know how to say them.
Tom: Right.
Abigoliah: And what Lucy would do is, if there was anything she had to physically do during the show, be it dip candy, toss pizza — there are episodes where she plays a ukulele or the saxophone — she’d go, “Give me a week,” and she’d go away and learn how to do it properly. So they brought in the See’s Candy girl to teach her how to dip candy properly. Because for Lucy, once she knew how to do it the right way, she could find a funny way to do it, and that would enhance it for her.
She was a real big believer in knowing your props, which is something she learned from her mentor, Buster Keaton.
Tom: Oh, really?
Abigoliah: Yeah. He’s one of the people who helped her learn how to do this.
Tom: Buster Keaton has an interesting history because he was doing a lot of TV around the same time.
Abigoliah: Yeah. She learned a lot from him. And also in this specific episode, “Job Switching”, they said that the candy dipper, when they were in rehearsal, when she has to slap Lucy, she never did it hard enough. She never really let her have it. And they kept trying to get her to do more.
Tom: And shades of Fawlty Towers.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, what happened is when they actually, on the night, they recorded, Lucy properly decks her. Like, and then that was just her reaction of, like, “I’ll get you back.” And that’s the only way they could get it out of her.
And if there was a bit of stage work, like a pratfall or a bit of physical comedy that she couldn’t quite nail, she would stay after rehearsal long after everyone left and just work and work and work and work. Like, she really took the business of comedy really seriously, and that’s why I think it’s so brilliant, you know?
Tom: And it is thin, you know, the job-swap episode, the kind of battle-of-the-sexes stuff. To our eyes now, 60, 70 years after that was made, it looks incredibly obvious and thin. But that’s not really a criticism because first of all, it’s still so winning. And secondly, that must have seemed much fresher in 1953.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And the episodes too. I was thinking when I was watching them at home, they’re only, like, 25 minutes long.
Tom: They really bat by.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Like, they’re really moving it along. What did you think of “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”? That’s the Vitameatavegamin one.
Tom: Yeah. So I’d seen that pastiched, but I’d never seen the original, and the technical calibration of that is so good. First of all, you have to have a certain amount of patience because we have to see the straight version a couple of times, both because we have to know what doing it right looks like in order to appreciate what doing it wrong looks like, but also because she can’t be completely pissed out of her mind on only two tablespoons. So she has to have several goes in order to slowly ramp it up, but it’s always entertaining. And yeah, she just calibrates the descent into chaos so accurately and at the same time gives the impression of everything falling apart.
That’s the other thing that struck me that again, maybe because I’ve got Fawlty Towers in my mind, it is striking to me that the Cuban guy is the smoothly competent straight man for most of it. Like, there are no funny foreigners here. Lucy is the funny one. Lucy is the force of chaos. Lucy is the one making bad decisions and screwing everything up. And when Ricky gets a chance to do that in the job switch, and he’s kind of messing around in the kitchen, I thought it’s not quite as funny because he’s not Lucy.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. I will say there’s other stuff where he has a lot more slapsticky things to do. When they first started the show, they didn’t know if Desi Arnaz could be funny. And the reason why I started counting the falls — they insisted everything be real, right? That’s real rice that comes out. But they didn’t rehearse with real rice. So when they’re doing it in front of the camera, it’s a lot slippier — slippery — than he thought it’d be. That first fall was an accident, right? And then he fell two more times on purpose.
Tom: This was him being funny.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And there’s another episode where he thinks he’s going bald. So Lucy, to try to put him off, gets all these tonics and massagers and stuff and kind of does it on him, and he’s making all these faces and she’s pouring all this stuff on his head. And what I found so delightful about it is what you can actually see is his real hair dye coming out. And in my head, I was like, as masculine as it was always very important for him to be portrayed, that is a level of vulnerability I think few actors would do.
But you do see him be funny and slapstick. And because he was a bandleader and worked at the Tropicana, as you said, often what they do is he would be in the Tropicana singing. And because Lucy’s always trying to get into the show, Lucy would come in and interrupt him. So we got to see him do “Babalú”, “Cuban Pete”, “Cuban Cabbie”. There’s a really sweet episode where he’s singing in the club because this is how he finds out that Lucy’s pregnant. She’s written a note saying someone in the audience is pregnant, could you sing to them? And he’s going around, and then he finally realises it’s Lucy. So you get to see his skill set as a musician.
And I think it’s a lot smoother than The Young Ones just having Motörhead in the living room, you know?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: But I will say the show did go on. It got nominated for Best Show for the Emmys four times, won twice. Lucy got nominated six times, won twice. Vivian four times, won once. Bill Frawley got nominated five times, zero wins.
Tom: Oh, that must have pissed him off, if Vivian won one.
Abigoliah: Yes. The writers: nominated twice, never won. Desi Arnaz was never nominated as Best Actor.
Tom: Wow.
Abigoliah: Or won, obviously, which to me is a travesty.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: But she is the driving force of the funny. And he is the straight man, which even now, when you see sitcoms and comedies, it’s always the man who’s the funny one, and there’s the straight wife who has to be the boring one. And they flipped it in the fifties. In the fifties. And people still today are being like, “Are women funny?” I’m like, we’ve been funny since the beginning of television.
Tom: Yes. And possibly before that.
Abigoliah: Yeah, exactly. I just, I love the show so much.
Tom: But that dynamic is great. And the fact that they’re a real married couple, I think can only add to that.
Abigoliah: You can really tell they love each other. I don’t know if you could see it in these two. In some of the episodes, you’re like, this is real. This is love. Could you see it?
Tom: I mean, it’s difficult to say because I know so much about the backstory now. There’s definitely a real warmth and affection. And you don’t see that with the next-door neighbours, who, by the way, seem to just walk into the Ricardos’ home whenever they feel like it.
Abigoliah: Oh yeah. I mean, but that’s just like an American sitcom.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: That’s how they do it. If you look at even much later on, Family Matters, which is something I grew up on in real time, with Steve Urkel just walks into the house. Full House, Kimmy Gibbler just walks into the house. There’s no knocking. There’s no texting to see if they can come over. You know, you just walk in.
So I have more to tell you about I Love Lucy, so much so that, as we were discussing this, this was supposed to be one episode and I was like, we’ll need two. And also, I have the Shelf of Fame. You, in these bonus episodes, are going to have the Must-See Three.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: So part two is going to happen on the Patreon. As listeners are listening to this, this is on the Patreon right now. And if you go, you will hear what happens next to Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy, and if Tom puts I Love Lucy on his Must-See Three.
Tom: All right. But in the meantime, if you’re not on Patreon, that’s absolutely fine. We’re still very, very happy to have you here. And the podcast will continue to be free, but we will just be keeping a few little things back for Patreon supporters. And if you’re a Patreon supporter, thank you so much. But in the meantime, we’re going to go off to our secret patron cave and record more material there.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I will say the Patreon episodes will be at £5 a month. We’re going to try to do these All American Comedy Explained once a month. And oh, by the way, they are audio only. We just want to make sure that you guys know that going in. If any of you are watching on YouTube, the patrons are audio until 3,000 of you sign up and demand video. But the people we have already now on Patreon were just like, “I listen to the audio,” so we’ll keep it audio for now.
Tom: Anyway, we’ll be back with another special episode very soon. And then season three is coming. We just need a little bit more time to prepare for that, but it is coming very soon.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
Tom: All right. Cheerio.
Abigoliah: Bye for now.