Abigoliah: Welcome to All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I, a stand-up comedian, finally learn about all the British comedy I’ve been missing out on. And we have a very special episode for you today, another crossover episode, where of course we are with Tom Salinsky–
Tom: Hello there.
Abigoliah: – the explainer of British comedy, and the lovely people from The Comedy Bureau, Laura Lexx and Olly Double.
Olly: Hello.
Laura: Hiya.
Abigoliah: Hello, guys. Thank you so much for being on the show. Okay, so if you’re coming to us from the All British Comedy Explained feed, what is happening is part one is actually on The Comedy Bureau podcast feed. So go listen to that, come back, check in.
So what we’re doing is we’ve watched two shows. On The Comedy Bureau, we were talking about Hancock. We have since watched Hancock’s Half Hour. And in this episode we will be talking more about I Love Lucy, because it is a podcast about British comedy, so naturally we’re doing our third episode on I Love Lucy. There is only one show I will ever read about.
Tom: Tell us a bit more about The Comedy Bureau. How did it come to be? How did you guys come into each other’s orbits? Why this podcast?
Laura: So we came into each other’s orbits in 2005 when I started university. And Olly was my professor doing a drama degree.
Tom: So this is a whole Educating Rita thing we got going on here. Yeah, yeah, fine.
Olly: Yeah, I’ll go with that.
Laura: And I did an undergraduate degree in drama and theatre studies and then did an undergraduate master’s degree in stand-up comedy and studied with Olly. And that kind of, like, created my career in stand-up. That’s how I started doing it practically, was part of the–
Olly: Because we used to do a thing where we used to run a weekly comedy night in student bars, and they had to come and do new stuff every time. And that’s asking quite a lot. But Laura was amazing, actually, partly because – I don’t know if this picks up on themes that we’ve talked about before – but you didn’t stick to one thing. It was like trying something different. Not just different material, but different kind of material.
Laura: I think because I never thought I would become a comedian. I think we had to do – There were, like, ten a term at Monkeyshine Comedy Club on campus, and we did six of them or something like that.
Olly: Yes.
Tom: And so were you, like, a hard-hitting satirical comic one week and a prop comic the next week?
Laura: Because I had no interest – I didn’t think I would do this as a career. So I was just like, well, let’s experiment then. I’ll tell a story this week. I remember doing one where I had written five full minutes of sleeping-bag puns.
Olly: Oh yeah.
Laura: And I performed the set stood in a sleeping bag.
Tom: That is a commitment.
Laura: Yeah. Next week would be political or whatever.
Tom: Do any of those look like the kind of proto-comedian that we would see today?
Laura: You know, there’s one set of jokes from that run that I do really remember, which was, oh, what’s a sleeping bag’s favourite musical instrument?
Tom: Bagpipes?
Laura: What’s a sleeping bag’s favourite TV show?
Tom: Bagpuss.
Laura: Yes. What’s a sleeping bag’s favourite film? Titanic. They love the luxurious liner. You know, like, stupid. But yeah, there was that. And then we had to hand in a portfolio where we’d done ten gigs.
Olly: Yeah. So they had to do a minimum of ten gigs where they’d set up that performance opportunity themselves. So they had to go and do an open spot, or they had to set up a little night, or whatever. They had to do ten. That was the minimum. Laura did 43.
Tom: Wow.
Laura: I really loved it. I mean, I sort of did things that, like, if I’d known I was going to do it as a career, I wouldn’t do it. I entered So You Think You’re Funny?, just, you know, having done six gigs, but just because I was like, oh, I’ll do a competition and see how that goes. But yeah, I just sort of fell in love with it because Olly taught popular performance, which was a module about – Well, we did music hall and we put on a music-hall show.
Olly: You did a magic–
Laura: We did a mind-reading act, my friend David and I.
So yeah, fast-forward 15 years or whatever it was, and I really love The Rest Is History podcast. And I don’t listen to a lot of comedy podcasts. I like informative podcasts. And what I wanted to do was – I think there’s, like, a million podcasts where a comedian gets a comedian guest on and they shoot the shit about what comedy is and their own process. Not to say that Jack Whitehall’s new TV show is reheated garbage, but I wanted to make one that was researched and was, like, actually about the history and the techniques of it.
Because one of the things we studied for my degree was the philosophy of humour and the biology of laughter, like how the respiratory system creates laughter and the neurons that fire to make laughter and sort of anthropology of laughter. And so I think I was in the middle of a different project, and I did a classic Laura thing and just fired off a quick email to Olly going, “I’m sure you’re up to your neck in academia and a million life projects, but would you have any interest?” Because I can’t do this – This doesn’t exist without Olly.
Olly: And luckily, Olly–
Laura: Yeah.
Olly: It got to me just the right time, really. Because, I mean, I think I’d have said yes anyway because it would be fun. It’s a good excuse to get together and do something. But I think, you know, university is not – It’s not telling tales out of school to say that universities are going through a weird time at the moment. So many universities are in crisis and so on. And actually what you want is something that is positive in the world, that’s putting positivity out there into the world, and something that can kind of engage people.
So the idea of doing something kind of nerdy around comedy with somebody that we have this sort of story – Yeah. It just struck me as being a really good idea, and I’ve really enjoyed doing it.
Laura: It’s been fabulous, hasn’t it? And I think comedy is so underappreciated. Like, it’s the age-old thing of the comedy actress never wins the Oscar because people think it’s easy. But when I end up, like, I’ve had a glass of wine at a party and somebody asks me about this, and I end up on tangent after tangent talking about how being bipedal is the reason we laugh, and if we were still on all fours, we wouldn’t laugh because our front limbs would hit into our respiratory system.
And it’s only the dexterity. And actually, archaeologists have found the point in our evolution where we went upright, and we were talking before that. And you can tell that from the size of the spinal column and all of this stuff. And how laughter actually occurs in the world is so different to how we think it does, that, like, 90% of laughter is done by the speaker, not the receiver, because it’s nothing to do with humour. It’s all linguistic colouring.
People go, “Oh God, I’ve never thought about any of it.” And you kind of go, yeah, because unless you sat and read all the books that Olly has in his office or that I got to study at university, you wouldn’t. And so a podcast felt like a really nice way to start maybe filtering that out into the world.
Abigoliah: Man, I’m gonna steal all that.
Laura: So listen to the podcast.
Abigoliah: I do listen to the podcast and I love it. But the thing is, whenever someone corners me after a few glasses of wine and asks me about comedy, I just want to avoid the conversation because I’ve had the conversation so many times. What’s it like to bomb? How do you get up there? All that stuff that I’m like, “I was busy.” But–
Laura: Well, that’s when I end up going, “Well, they did studies and people don’t laugh up the class status. In a workplace, a boss would very rarely laugh. Only in 2% of scenarios would a male superior laugh at a female underling and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And women do 80% of the laughter in most conversations.” See, just bore them away.
Abigoliah: This is what I need to do. I need to start taking notes when I listen to your podcast to be like, okay, bipedal. First of all, Google what that means. And I know that means standing on two feet, right?
Laura: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Cool. Awesome.
Laura: You wait till people go, “But don’t gorillas laugh?” And then I do my impression of gorillas’ ability to do an outbreath and how that can’t be laughter, because laughter is characterised by the breaking up of an outbreath. No one else – And then I’m stood there going “Haah, haah, haah” in front of people and the whole party’s over.
Olly: It’s a bit When Harry Met Sally.
Laura: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Amazing. So in part one, we talked about Hancock’s Half Hour, and since then we’ve watched an episode. And in this part two, we will be talking about I Love Lucy again.
Now, I want listeners to know that if you want a full, comprehensive backstory of I Love Lucy, we have here already on All British Comedy Explained done part one and part two. In this episode, we will be focusing specifically on America’s first girl writer, Madelyn Pugh. But we did also watch an episode of I Love Lucy. So I wanted kind of everyone’s opinion of the two: Hancock’s Half Hour, I Love Lucy. What did you think and why did you like I Love Lucy more?
Tom: Go.
Laura: Well, I’ll start because I’d never seen either of them.
Abigoliah: So you’re the me in this one?
Laura: Yeah. And I don’t know if I’ll get kicked out of Britain for saying it, but Hancock’s Half Hour left me a bit cold, to be honest. I didn’t warm to him. Whereas Lucille Ball, you just warm to straight away. There’s something, for me, off-putting in the monologuing to yourself or the audience. Like, what is that in Hancock’s Half Hour? Because it’s a one-man play essentially for most of it, and he does a lot of monologuing to himself. And that just grates on me a bit, because I just think there must be cleverer devices to get this out.
Tom: And this is partly his writers taking revenge on him.
Laura: So interesting.
Tom: He said he didn’t want to be in a double act with Sid James anymore. And they were like, okay, well then we’ll stick you on a set on your own. So that isn’t typical of the whole run. There are a couple of episodes in the latest – in that last series, which are like that.
Abigoliah: And we should say, for Hancock’s Half Hour, we watched the episode entitled–
Tom: “The Radio Ham”.
Abigoliah: “The Radio Ham”. And for I Love Lucy we watched “The Kleptomaniac”, which is in season one, episode 20-something.
Tom: Yeah. But the other thing I think they typify – and it’s amazing to me that this gets, if not codified, then certainly you can see the trend starting so early – it’s often said that the difference between British and American sitcoms in terms of structure is that American sitcoms start with a problem and end with a solution. And British sitcoms begin with aspiration and end with dashed hopes.
Laura: Oh, yeah.
Tom: And you can see that so clearly here. Like, all Hancock wants to be is the hero of the hour, and his own pride and incompetence just sabotages that until eventually he gives up and says, “I’m not even going to bother trying.”
Laura: I think this was a slight issue with my version of this, with that episode, and maybe I need to have seen more just to establish a character. But I think because I came at it and his pride in himself gets popped, but I never saw him being a winner to have it popped. Like, with Basil Fawlty or whatever, he’s so unlikeable that you don’t mind having it punctured, whereas this guy was a loser on his own in Loserville from the start. So when they continued to punch down on him, I just was like, oh, I’m not feeling vindicated by his failure.
Olly: I mean, I think one of the things that’s interesting about Hancock is, you know, it starts in the fifties on radio. And I think one of the things that’s interesting is it’s really about the kind of dourness of British culture post-Second World War. I mean, rationing continued to 1954. Things went on the ration after the war that had never been rationed in the war. It was a grim time where everything shut on Sunday.
And I think to some extent, people who’d have watched it at the time would have identified with Hancock, and that’s why it’s not punching down, because they’re kind of like, well, he’s sort of like me. I feel annoyed that everything’s boring on a Sunday, or that I can’t get ahead. And I suppose we’re all capable of being sort of stupidly aspirational and unrealistically aspirational. And so you kind of go on his journey with him, I suppose.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, in “The Radio Ham”, he is really like the modern-day equivalent would be someone who’s chronically online. Like someone who’s always, always on social media or something like that.
I will say something that kind of stood out to me in this episode, which we watched compared to the other two that Tom and I watched that did have a cast with him – like a cast in person, like a big cast helping move it – is I felt like it took a long time to get to what the plot was. There was just a lot of setting up to a point where I was like, does this one have a plot, or are we just gonna watch him be a goofball on radio for a long time?
Tom: I mean, these early shows are all kind of like that to a greater or lesser extent. There’s virtually no plot in this episode of I Love Lucy. It’s just an excuse to get to the point where she and her husband think she’s a kleptomaniac. And that is the end of the plot. I mean, it is interesting–
Olly: When it stops, I’m like, is there a whole other section of this? Because they’ve just dressed up as gangsters and then nothing is resolved.
Tom: Yeah. John Cleese says on those Fawlty Towers audio commentaries, for example, the end of “The Kipper and the Corpse”, which is him in the laundry hamper being driven away. So that’s a bit silly, but you can get a bit silly 30 seconds before the fade-out because you never have to confront the reality.
Laura: Yeah, yeah. I’m so glad there was no cut to them sat on the sofa going, “Oh, wasn’t that crazy? We had to get the elephant back to the – ” It just leaves.
Tom: Leaves you on a high. Yeah, yeah. It’s much more concentrated. It’s much more focused. It also looks better. I think we said this on camera, but those Hancock episodes are being recorded onto 405-line videotape, so the resolution is terrible.
Laura: Right.
Tom: But I Love Lucy, for syndication and even for showing in different time zones, was being shot on 35mm movie film. So it still looks fantastic. They would be sending fresh prints to different television stations and then shipping them all over the world.
Olly: Fresh prints, you’re saying. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Tom: Yes. Fresh, fresh prints of Bel-Air.
* * * * *
Abigoliah: Well, do you guys want to learn about Madelyn Pugh?
Laura: I definitely do.
Abigoliah: Okay, so our main source for today is Laughing with Lucy, a book by Madelyn Pugh with Bob Carroll Jr. And I will say, because we’re recording this before our part one and part two come out, if you have any questions about I Love Lucy, the show, or Desilu Productions, I do know all the answers now.
So just to kick it off, Madelyn Pugh was an American sitcom writer and she got her start, I guess, in 1951 with I Love Lucy. That’s when I Love Lucy aired. To give you context, in 1951, The Goon Show was the most popular comedy here in Britain on radio, and Hancock’s Half Hour didn’t make it to TV until 1956. So it’s kind of like the space race where America’s always winning.
Laura: But was – 1951, did you say?
Abigoliah: That’s when I Love Lucy aired.
Laura: This is crazy from a British perspective, isn’t it? Like, we just have nothing in the space of female performers and writers for maybe another 30 years.
Tom: Well, there’s a few knocking around.
Laura: Yeah.
Tom: When was Joyce Grenfell doing her stuff?
Olly: Yeah, mid-20th century and right through to the end of her life, which I guess was maybe late seventies or something like that.
Abigoliah: Was she getting 29 million viewers?
Olly: No. I mean, that’s the difference. And I also think that, you know, we have to remember that – Well, two things, really. One is the scale of production in America is always going to dwarf anything that came over here, because much bigger population, much bigger money, much bigger pot of money to make things.
And I think the other thing is, you know, UK – I mean, to pick up on the point I made before, the UK was kicked to the ground in the war, you know, and its economy was – That’s the amazing thing about the Attlee government bringing the NHS in in 1948, was that the country was broke and they still managed to do it.
Laura: Have you ever heard of the Shoreham Fort?
Olly: No.
Laura: Down in Shoreham, near where I live in Brighton, there’s an unused wartime fort that was going to be Britain’s answer to LA and Sunset Studios and all that. They were going to have a whole filming-studios thing there. And then the war came and it was repurposed, I think, to be a fort. And it never happened. But there’s really interesting plaques there about their plans.
Olly: That’s fascinating.
Laura: To be a recording studio.
Olly: Wow.
Tom: Yeah. I think it is useful to bear in mind that the Second World War bankrupted Britain.
Olly: Yes.
Tom: And supercharged the Americans.
Abigoliah: We were high on the hog after that. We had a lot of money. And, well, I’ll get into it.
So just to catch you up, Madelyn Pugh was born in 1921 in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she attended Shortridge High School, and she was the co-editor of her school newspaper. Shortridge High School is very hard to say. It was a great school that really encouraged writers. Another one of her classmates who also served on the school paper was a little writer named Kurt Vonnegut.
Laura: Wow.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So Kurt was a couple of years younger and they were both on the school newspaper together. She then attended Indiana University, which is also where my parents went to school, so go Hoosiers. And she majored in journalism. She actually wanted to be a war correspondent. And after she graduated in–
Laura: Oh, but America doesn’t have many wars, so–
Abigoliah: But we like coming in late and taking pretty pictures.
Laura: Starting them.
Abigoliah: Oh boy, don’t we?
And when she graduated in 1942, she was really looking to get her foot in the door any way she could. And this medical student she was dating suggested she reach out to a friend of a friend at a local radio station. And she landed her first job at WIRE, which was a local NBC station. And there she wrote a little bit of everything. So back then, you would also write the commercials and she’d write the patter for the disc jockeys, like, “And next up, you’re gonna hear from…” And that’s kind of when she started to shift her interest from being a war correspondent into more entertainment.
And after working in Indiana, she got the bug to, you know, do more and be bigger. So she headed out to Los Angeles with some references from her bosses, and she pretty much immediately landed a job at NBC network radio out in LA. And she was there for six months and she was like, I don’t know about this. I think I’ll go to CBS. And she did. She kind of, like, walked in and talked her way into it.
She was the second female writer they hired. This was in 1944. The first female writer CBS hired was Kathleen Hite. Kathleen was more of a drama writer. She would go on to write Gunsmoke and The Waltons. But Madelyn was their first female comedy writer. And there is a reason why she says she got her job in Indiana in 1942 and her job at CBS in 1944. Can you guys guess what it was?
Tom: Other male writers being shipped off to war?
Abigoliah: That’s right. That’s the war. It was the war.
Olly: So like women making munitions over here and being land girls and things. It’s like, the men are off. So that’s brilliant.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, and we’ve said this a little bit in part one and we talked about it a lot off mic, but how you guys were saying after the war, women weren’t as dominant in comedy anymore because it all shifted to these working men’s clubs. In America, the war helped move women’s liberation forward. Because what happened was people like Madelyn got their door into CBS radio. And as she says, she’s like, “I think everyone thought that when the men came back, the women would just go back to work.” And she’s like, “Surprise! We didn’t.”
But that was women in America. It was when women could first get their foot in the door. So, you know, World War Two, there was a lot of good that came out of it. And one of it was more women in the workforce in the States. Apparently over here, it all fell apart. Sorry.
Olly: I mean, I think in the UK it wasn’t necessarily straight after the war, because variety kept going. It was still going fairly strong early fifties, and it was only really by about 1960 that it’s all properly falling apart. But that’s when the dominance of working men’s clubs, where women could be members but not full members – I think even well into living memory that was the case.
And so if you’ve got a situation where there might be some strippers on or something, and it’s very male, it’s a structurally male-dominated environment, you could have Black comedians more easily than you could have female comedians. I’m talking about levels of – I mean, there were also working men’s clubs that had formal colour bars. I mean, it’s a pretty grim world if you look at it.
Tom: Also, the pipeline has changed, hasn’t it? So you’ve got men who are in the forces who have been entertaining the troops and cutting their teeth there, while the women, as you say, have been sewing parachutes and working munitions factories, and they don’t have the same opportunities to learn how to be entertainers.
Olly: Well, you know, The Goons and also Hancock and people like Frankie Howerd as well, they’d all done some performing in the war, you know, as part of either ENSA–
Tom: Or something.
Olly: – or if they didn’t get past the audition for ENSA, then just entertaining their local camp or whatever, like Frankie Howerd. So in fact, that group of comedians was noted at the time as being this rising generation, you know, coming out of the forces and hitting the variety circuit or whatever.
Abigoliah: That’s interesting, because in America, from what I know – and I could have this wrong because I don’t have a complete comprehensive knowledge of it – but in America, who went over to entertain the troops? We just got Bob Hope to do it. Like, they just called in Hollywood. Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky Ricardo, was enlisted and did entertain the troops at the base he was stationed at. That’s what he did during the war.
Olly: So Gracie Fields, who was a singer and comedian, probably the biggest star of her generation, she entertained the troops even while recovering from serious illness. She was very, very big on the war effort. And weirdly, the right-wing press hated her.
Laura: Oh, really?
Olly: Yeah, absolutely.
Abigoliah: Interesting. Well, they’ll always find a reason to hate a woman.
Olly: A woman. Exactly.
Abigoliah: Back to Madelyn Pugh. So back then, to be a CBS radio staff writer, what they would do is CBS would basically have a load of shows, and they’d pull writers from the writing pool to be like, you go write on this one, you go write on this one. And at the time, this is where Madelyn Pugh met her writing partner, Bob Carroll Jr.
One day, Bob and Madelyn went to lunch and made a list of network shows they would like to be on together. And at the top of that list was a radio programme called My Favorite Husband, starring Lucille Ball.
Tom: Yes. And are they a romantic couple or are they just a professional couple?
Abigoliah: No, they are a professional couple. And when they first got together as writing partners, Bob said he didn’t really want to get tied down in terms of, like, a long-term writing partner. And he told Madelyn, “I’ll give it a year.” They would go on to work together for over 50 years, making 300 radio shows, 400 TV shows, and having 250 producer credits.
Laura: Wow.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Laura: That’s a hell of a career.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So they got the job working on My Favorite Husband, and the first director didn’t really gel with Lucille Ball. Lucille Ball could be a tough pill to swallow. She was very exacting and she was very, very blunt. She didn’t have a lot of tact. They brought in a writer-producer, who essentially becomes the showrunner, called Jess Oppenheimer. And the way Madelyn says it is, she says, “We were as green as grass. Oppenheimer came on, and from then it just worked.”
I don’t think Lucy was a mean person. I don’t think she was a bad person, but sometimes she just would get frustrated and her communication skills were lacking. So at one point, she didn’t like the writing on My Favorite Husband and made it very well known to a point of being unprofessional and cruel. But she kind of always knows when she does this. And she went to Jess Oppenheimer and apologised, and he was like, “You gotta go apologise to Madelyn and Bob.” And sure enough, Lucy went to Madelyn and Bob and gave them big hugs and was like, “I’m sorry, I’ve been a real shit.” So this is, like, something that she does a lot where–
Laura: Okay.
Abigoliah: Because, you know, she’s the face of it. So she wants that control and she’s just a bit – She needs to work on her communication.
Laura: I think sometimes panic in those situations makes you more of an arsehole than you mean to be.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Laura: And when you’re the one that’s got to say it, and most people assume she’s written it or she’s thought of it–
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Laura: – like, they don’t think that deeply about writers. There’s that level of panic of, how are we going to fix this? And I’m the one that fronts it.
Olly: Yeah. I also think, you know, to get somewhere – You know, the other side of having a big entertainment industry is it’s really hard to make it to the top, because you need some fairly killer instincts to get there. And also, I feel like a woman, that’s going to be more remarked upon than if a man behaved in exactly the same way.
Abigoliah: Well, and you have to know that Lucille Ball was known as the Queen of the Bs. She was a B-list movie star who had a wonderful career, and then it started to tail off and she went to radio. But she needed this radio thing to work because her Hollywood career was dwindling at the time. Around the time My Favorite Husband was being made, she was about 38, so, you know, she was dead as far as show business was concerned.
So they started on My Favorite Husband, and it worked so well that CBS thought it should be turned into a sitcom. But Lucille Ball had a stipulation. If she was going to do a sitcom for CBS, she wanted Desi Arnaz to play her husband. And CBS was like, no.
Laura: Why did they not want him?
Abigoliah: Why do you think, in 1951?
Laura: Because he’s–
Abigoliah: Because he’s Cuban.
Laura: Cuban. Okay.
Abigoliah: Because he’s Cuban. This show is credited as the first show to have an interracial couple on it.
Laura: I was surprised by that. I have no concept of I Love Lucy.
Abigoliah: Oh, you didn’t even know this?
Laura: Oh, I didn’t know he was–
Tom: They’re a married couple.
Laura: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Abigoliah: Didn’t know they’re married in real life. Okay, okay. Oh my God, we should have sent her part one. We should have. Oh my God.
Laura: Because he’s brilliant. He’s so funny.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So he was a bandleader. That’s what he did. He was kind of like music hall sort of stuff. He would lead bands and then turn around and sing a song and tell a joke and bring on the girl and bring on the comedian. That’s what he did. He was a live performer. And in fact, when CBS was like, “No, you can’t do this,” they were like, “We’ll prove to you that the American public will go for this.” They went on a live tour.
Laura: Oh, wow.
Abigoliah: And they put together a comedy sketch act and it worked. But even then CBS was like, “I don’t know about this. I’m not sure if it’s going to work.” But they really needed to keep Lucille Ball in CBS. My Favorite Husband was still going on. She was a Hollywood movie star. They wanted to keep her. So to placate the couple, what they did was they gave Desi Arnaz a radio quiz show to host called Your Tropical Trip on CBS radio, because they were like, “See, now he’s home. And now you don’t have to worry about it, because you guys are working for the same company.”
Now, in order to do this, they had to ask the current host to step aside. But this was, like, this up-and-coming comedian that had no clout in the game. His name was Johnny Carson.
Laura: Oh.
Abigoliah: It really has nothing to do with the story, but I’ve been like, I gotta put in the Carson connection. But I just love the fact that Johnny Carson got bumped so Desi Arnaz could host a radio show so they could keep Lucille Ball on the network.
Eventually, CBS picked up the pilot and – By the way, when they went on their tour, they hired Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh to write the sketches for the live tour.
Laura: Okay.
Abigoliah: So when I Love Lucy got picked up, the idea was that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz would play a couple, the Ricardos. Ricky Ricardo was going to be a bandleader, and Lucille Ball was going to be her – his husband – her, his husband–
Olly: His–
Laura: Wife.
Abigoliah: Wife. But we know who wore the pants in that family, right?
Laura: Yes.
Abigoliah: Wife. And a housewife who’s just desperate to be in the show.
Tom: Write what you know.
Abigoliah: A lot of I Love Lucy is her being like, “Ricky, put me in the show.” And they brought in Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr to write it with Jess Oppenheimer as the writer-producer who was overseeing it all.
Now, at the time when they made the pilot, the pilot basically just featured Ricky Ricardo and Lucille Ball as a double act. And when they were trying to find a sponsor for the show, they went to Philip Morris, and someone at the Milton Biow advertising company who looked after Philip Morris asked their friend Oscar Hammerstein II what he thought of it. Now, who’s Oscar Hammerstein II?
Laura: Hammerstein.
Abigoliah: Rodgers and Hammerstein. Yeah. So his thought on the pilot was, “It’s okay, but they should have neighbours.” And Madelyn Pugh says, as it turns out, Oscar was absolutely right. Any man who can write The Sound of Music should be listened to.
Laura: Yes.
Olly: Yes. Very good.
Abigoliah: And so the writing team set off to write season one, and they added in the characters of their best friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz, who also were their landlord-slash-best-friends. The actress playing Ethel Mertz was a stage actress named Vivian Vance, and Fred Mertz was played by vaudevillian actor William Frawley.
The team went off to write season one, and nowadays, when we think of an American network sitcom, we think of it being, like, 24 episodes, and we think of that writer’s room, right? This is the thing that the British comedies don’t have: a room of, like, ten, 15 writers–
Tom: Everybody pitching jokes.
Abigoliah: Pitching jokes. One person kind of overseeing, like, this is what the theme of this show will be. For I Love Lucy, the first season, they wrote 39 scripts.
Laura: What?
Abigoliah: And it was just Jess Oppenheimer, Bob Carroll Jr and Madelyn Pugh. 39 scripts, three people. Bob and Madelyn doing most of the work.
Laura: Wow.
Tom: Taking nothing away from them, I’m thinking about the episode that we just watched. It’s not quite as simple as “think of a reason why Lucille Ball should pretend to be a gangster and then watch her do that”. But part of the artistry is understanding who you’re writing for and creating those opportunities. But that doesn’t mean, as we said, these are not Fawlty Towers-style plots that take 11 weeks just to create the storyline.
Abigoliah: Right.
Laura: Right. But I think what’s fun and what must be interesting as a modern sitcom writer is the rules of society they have to play up against back here. Like, I was watching the beginning of this episode we’ve just watched and he’s like, “Why have you got $200?” And I just thought, well, you couldn’t start a plot from there now, because if my husband asks me why I’ve got $200, like, why the fuck are you asking me? So having a rigid society really gives you something to play off.
Abigoliah: Yeah, and there are a lot of episodes where you see a duality between the men and the women, especially with Ethel and Lucy being housewives. Some of it I was like, there’s one episode that I thought was really funny, but I was like, I’m not going to show you because as a modern woman and a feminist, it does make me mad. But it’s a very funny plot.
Madelyn said of their work schedule, “We didn’t know any better. We were making it up as we went along. Actually, early television was a little like going through the Donner Pass in a covered wagon in the middle of the winter. There were no maps because nobody had ever been there before. And if you froze to death or didn’t write a funny enough script, they might draw lots and eat you.”
The writing schedule went like this. On Monday, they would do a read-through of the script with the cast. While the cast rehearsed, Madelyn and Bob would go to work on the next script that had already been plotted out with Jess the week before. They would attend the run-through on Tuesday night and the dress rehearsal on Wednesday night. After the dress rehearsal, they’d all sit around with the cast and the writers and give notes and see if there were any problems or changes that needed to happen. The cast would rehearse on Thursday and film the show in front of a live studio audience on Thursday night.
On Friday, Jess and Bob and Madelyn would get an idea for the episode for the week after next, and the whole process would begin again on that same Friday. Bob and Madelyn also had to submit that week’s script to Jess for him to look over and give notes. So they would sometimes stay up till midnight to plot out the upcoming script, and then finish the script they were writing and drop it off at Jess’s in the middle of the night. Like, at 3am they’d put it in his mailbox.
Tom: My God. It’s like Sisyphus. I mean, it doesn’t end.
Abigoliah: It doesn’t end. They talk about the fact that they would go in so early to write in their offices that the studio wasn’t open yet, so they found a box that they could stand on to climb over the studio wall to get into their office. Like, they lived there. At one point, Bob Carroll brought in a bunch of plastic numbers on a hook and would take one off each time they finished a script, so it’d be like, 27 more to go.
Tom: Like a convict scratching–
Laura: Yeah, yeah.
Olly: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Madelyn says, “I’ll admit it was something of a grind, but we were both young and single and worked all the time. The long hours cut down on our social life, but we sometimes dated each other, so it worked out.” Which I think is, by the way, a classy way to say you used to fuck my writing partner. Madelyn Pugh is a classy, classy woman.
They would often get ideas for scripts pulled from their own lives. So there’s an episode where Ricky wants the window closed as they sleep because he gets too cold, where Lucy wants it open. So these sort of marital issues that are very relatable. And sometimes they’d look for universal themes, like greed and jealousy. And other times they’d just ask, like, what does Lucy want? What is Lucy’s motivation in this?
They had, like, several ways. Sometimes they’d come up with a great physical bit and just work back from there and figure out, okay, how do we get there?
Olly: So, in the episode we watched, one of the bits that I particularly enjoyed was where she’s got the cuckoo clock under her coat and it goes off, and she has to pretend that she does bird noises. One of the things I loved about that was it’s like commedia dell’arte or something, you know, where you’d have these stock characters who you know how they’re going to – And they’d hash out the scenario before the show and then they would just perform that, improvising it, but they would have a load of set pieces that they could go to. And it struck me as being like one of those, a lazzo from commedia dell’arte. It’s like, okay, here’s the bit where Lucy imitates a bird to hide nicking a cuckoo clock. I just thought it was brilliant.
Abigoliah: One thing that they kind of struggled with was how to handle Desi Arnaz slash Ricky Ricardo’s accent, because they play a lot in the show with his accent. Like, he’ll be like, “Lucy, please explain.” And she’ll be like, “Okay, I explain,” and she’ll mock his accent. So at one point, Bob and Madelyn started to write his lines phonetically, and if ever they did that, all of a sudden he could speak perfect English. But if they didn’t do it, he’d speak in his actual accent. And that’s how they found that.
Olly: I find the politics – to pick up on Laura’s point from before – the politics of it are really interesting because on the one hand, it’s very, very kind of male-female, gender-roles conforming, right? You know, in a way, she’s like a child, isn’t she? She’s always getting into scrapes with the authority figure who’s her husband.
At the same time, he’s a Cuban. And that is, like, it’s hard to think how different attitudes would have been. Obviously, there’s still a lot of prejudice, but that’s a wild fact, right?
Tom: He’s the funny foreigner, but he’s also the straight man.
Olly: Yeah, absolutely. But also, in addition to that, she’s clearly the powerful person on the show because she’s the star and she’s the one you want to watch. She’s the one you like the most. So there’s all these weird contradictions in power and things. Yeah, it’s really good.
Abigoliah: And another thing that they were heavily influenced by – and you kind of picked up on this immediately in this episode – was, all of a sudden, they’re hiding behind something in order to move the plot forward. They were heavily influenced by French farce. There’s a lot of, like, someone walks out of a room and someone walks in a room and hide something here. And then it’s like, he’s under the bed. No, he’s not under the bed. It’s all over the show.
Olly: There are scenes in Shakespeare where somebody observes somebody talking from behind a wall or something.
Abigoliah: Oh, yeah.
Laura: Also, the ease with which they will just – I can’t remember which bit it is, but she will just leave the room mid-difficult bit of conversation and it’s like, as long as you’ve come up with a witty enough reason to leave, you just go.
Abigoliah: You just go.
Laura: Ricky is high status, but he also has very low power. Even though he is that high status, they all know that cuckoo clock’s there, but there’s no ability to just call them out on it.
Olly: Yeah, yeah.
Laura: So you can introduce the comedy.
Abigoliah: And because Bob and Madelyn worked with Lucy on My Favorite Husband, already as they’re entering I Love Lucy, they’ve worked together for four years. So in the script, there are certain actions and facial expressions they wanted her to do that are, like, shorthand that only Lucille Ball would know.
When they were doing My Favorite Husband, she had to do an advert in it where a spider came down beside her. So if they wanted her to make a specific noise, they’d just put in the action of the script “spiders”, and that’s how she knew to go–
Olly: Her noises are great.
Abigoliah: Oh, and she’s so good at voices. It always kind of throws me when she goes into a different voice because I’m like, why? She can do everything.
If they wanted her to look like she was about to cry, they wrote “puddles up”. In the pilot episode, there is a bit where Ricky says, “Let me see your credentials,” and she misunderstands that and covers her chest, like, “Excuse me.” So if they wanted her to give this look of shock, they’d just write “credentials”.
The action in the script was what Lucille Ball called the black stuff. And I always thought, and I think people always think – and you asked when we first watched this – what is in the script to say, how does she do this? The action of the script was something like, “with Lucy making chocolate”. You think, oh, she’s just improvised a funny way to do that. But no, they wrote it all out in detail, even giving notes to set designers to make sure that the set designers had set everything right to get the best laugh.
So in the episode called “Ricky Thinks He’s Getting Bald”, the stage direction reads, “Ricky enters the kitchen. He is wearing a hat pulled down around his ears. Note: we must screen the living room so the audience doesn’t see him until he enters the kitchen to avoid an unexplained laugh like we had last week.”
Tom: There’s a story that during the filming of Red Dwarf – this is the episode “Kryten” from the first episode of series two. The big reveal halfway through the episode, because the boys think that they’ve found a crashed spaceship where a robot is looking after three beautiful women. What they don’t realise is that the ship crashed hundreds of years ago, so the women are long since dead and now just skeletons and the robot’s gone crazy. He doesn’t realise this. And they have this set with these three skeletons sitting around a table. And the producer, Paul Jackson, made it very clear that this black cloth was to be hung in front of that set so it wasn’t going to be revealed to the audience until the last moment. And then halfway through recording the first half of the episode, one of the stagehands pulled it down.
Olly: No.
Laura: Really?
Tom: And Paul Jackson’s temper is pretty legendary, and that poor stagehand got the full force of it on that occasion. To be fair, when you watch the episode, it’s still a wonderful moment, but it’s a wonderful moment because, like all good comedy, it’s not the thing, it’s the reaction to the thing. So what makes us laugh at home, and what probably made the audience laugh, is cutting to the boys’ faces when they realise what it is they’ve actually come into.
Laura: Yeah, they are–
Olly: I once saw a taping of a Harry Hill show and there was, I forget who it was now, some sports person, so I didn’t really know who they were, but they were hiding behind his desk for the whole bit. And then they came out and nobody had seen them, so they’d been there for ages.
Tom: Yeah, something similar on that SNL with Jimmy Fallon. And he talked about appearing on the British SNL on his show, and he said, “I had to crawl into place and hide there. And I was so excited, I crawled into place two items too early.” So I was hiding down there for no reason for five minutes.
Abigoliah: I will say of the black stuff, Madelyn Pugh is really quick to point out that the black stuff was a blueprint, and they would write out, like, she shakes hands and then all the silverware falls out. But she was like, they found stuff in rehearsal. Lucille Ball found stuff herself. As much as Lucille Ball credits her writers, Madelyn Pugh always throws it back because Lucille Ball just had this, I mean, sparkle, you know, that other people don’t have.
And I’m just gonna remind everyone this happened in 1951. Lead female comedian. One of the head writers is a woman. And what Madelyn said about being a girl writer – by the way, I keep calling her a girl writer because that’s what her chair says on I Love Lucy. She had a chair that said “Madelyn Pugh, girl writer.” But she said, “I was determined to be some kind of writer and have a career back in the days when it was considered weird. Was there discrimination against women? Well, yeah. I think I didn’t exactly fight it. I just acted like I didn’t know it was there. As soon as I teamed up with a male partner, I seemed to have become more acceptable. Also Lucille Ball was a woman. It didn’t make much sense to say they didn’t want female writers on the show.”
So yeah, I think it’s interesting that it’s when she teamed up with Bob. And her and Bob had a long, long career together. Like, they clearly worked well together. But she even says that on sets, people would come up and talk to Bob and have questions for him. He also, by the way, was a ginger as well and had a beard. He almost looks like a ginger Anton LaVey, if you know who that is.
Olly: I do. The Satanist guy.
Abigoliah: Yeah. He’s a very strange-looking man. He had a very distinctive look. But people would come up and ask him questions. And unless she was standing right next to Bob, people didn’t know who she was or why she was there. She was always like, I just kind of blended into the background.
But they really needed Madelyn Pugh because she was the test dummy. Sometimes in the black stuff, when they wrote a bit of really physical comedy, they’d write, “We tried this,” so they knew it would be safe. If Lucy got rolled up into a carpet, Madelyn got rolled up into a carpet first to make sure it was safe. If Lucy did judo, Madelyn did it first. And testing it out often made them find other funny things about it or how it would work. You know, it was more than just an idea in their head. It’d be like, okay, if we roll her up into a carpet, we can’t roll her out this way because the carpet’s too long. We’re going to have to tilt her this way.
There’s an episode called “Lucy Does the Tango”, which I almost showed you, where Lucy shoves, like, 24 eggs down her blouse and then is trying, of course, to hide them from Ricky, and then they need to practise a tango. Just go with me on this. And what happens at the end is he pulls her in for the big finish and they all crush.
Laura: Yeah.
Abigoliah: They did that in the writing office first. Like, Madelyn Pugh tested it all out. Fun fact, and the reason why I almost showed you that, that bit where the eggs crush got the longest laugh in I Love Lucy history of 65 seconds.
Laura: Wow.
Abigoliah: I watched it and timed it. They might have cut it because I timed it at 55, but–
Olly: They couldn’t have done that gag in the UK because eggs would have been rationed.
Tom: Yeah.
Olly: Fair enough.
Tom: Doesn’t work as well with powdered egg.
Olly: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Abigoliah: To be fair, this was season five, so it would have been 1956.
Olly: Oh yeah. Rationing finished two years earlier.
Abigoliah: Okay. Cool. Cool, cool. So you had Hancock over here talking to no one and she’s just–
Olly: Just feasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Laura: Did they ever – Do they ever do corpsing in this? Because there was none in this episode. Like, in the cuckoo bit, I was like, we’re waiting to see a glimmer of one of them being unable to hold it. But no.
Abigoliah: Lucille Ball would never have such a thing.
Tom: Early Hancock episodes went out live, and there’s not any corpsing in some. There’s one episode in particular called “The Airfield at the Bottom of My Garden”, where there’s a table that’s supposed to fall apart that has started to fall apart too soon, and Hancock is having to hold on to it to hold it together. And everybody is corpsing. Everybody is falling apart because it went out live. You had one chance to do it.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And these didn’t. They were filmed on film.
Tom: Yeah, 35mm.
Abigoliah: And so they could do reshoots. They tried not to because film is so expensive. But you can see very small things. I don’t know if you noticed, she brings in the box, you can see she kind of almost drops the box.
Laura: Two slight line fluffs in this episode and you see a boom mic.
Abigoliah: Yes, which I didn’t notice.
Laura: A tiny bit.
Olly: I just–
Laura: Just as they’re going into the cupboard, it just grazes the top of the screen.
Tom: And to be fair, it’s probably clearly visible at the top of the piece of 35mm movie film. I probably wouldn’t have been visible because TVs would be cropped a little bit more.
Laura: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Madelyn says of doing the stunts, “If a stunt was something that Lucy was going to do by herself, I used to try it first because we wanted to see if it was physically possible for a woman to do it, and we also wanted to be sure Lucy wouldn’t get hurt. It was okay if I got hurt because I was replaceable. But Lucille Ball wasn’t.”
Tom: Yes. The fungibility of the writer. Yeah, it’s a true thing.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Madelyn Pugh was a really good sport about trying things out. And like I said, sometimes they’d try something, realise it didn’t work, so they’d pivot, try something else. But also, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were both great at never going, “We can’t do that. We don’t have the money.” Like, it’s like, you want a baby elephant at the end of your show? We’ll get you a baby elephant.
Laura: Yeah.
Laura: So I remember Googling pictures of her, by the way. I’d like to have a sense of who I’m talking about.
Abigoliah: Madelyn. Yeah, there’s some in here if you just want to flip through the book itself.
Olly: So I remember when I started finding out about, you know, getting seriously nerdy about comedy, finding out that Desilu is because it’s Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. But I’d seen that at the end of Star Trek episodes. I thought it was like the name of an alien or something. I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was the name of the company, but I thought maybe they’d just created this crazy-sounding word.
Tom: And there’s a province in California or something like that.
Olly: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Desilu.
Abigoliah: Desilu is obviously, as you now know, a combination of their names. The production company grew and grew and grew until it was one of the largest production companies in the world. And it was eventually sold to Paramount, and the water tower – the famous water tower in what was RKO and then became Desilu and is now Paramount – used to say Desilu Productions on it.
Olly: Oh, I love it. RKO – did you know that that was named after a vaudeville circuit?
Abigoliah: No.
Olly: Yeah. Radio-Keith-Orpheum. And the Keith and Orpheum circuits merged, and then it was Radio-Keith-Orpheum.
Abigoliah: So, do you know, at the height of their power, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball bought RKO Productions, and that is also the film studio that gave both of them their first film contracts.
Olly: Oh.
Abigoliah: And then later on, they bought it.
Olly: That’s pretty successful, isn’t it?
Abigoliah: That is like, fuck you, I win.
Olly: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Also, I just want to say it has to be said that Madelyn Pugh Davis wasn’t just a girl writer. She was also a mother trying to have it all. She married her first husband, Martin Quinn, in 1955. They had one child together and then divorced in 1960. In 1964, she married her second husband, Dr Richard Davis, a widower who she dated in Indiana, who had a friend of a friend who suggested that she get in touch with WIRE, her first job in radio. Why don’t you guys care about this? I mentioned it five pages ago. It’s all coming back together. She wound up marrying her college sweetheart. And he was a widower, so she wound up inheriting four children, ages six to 15.
Tom: The Partridge Family or something.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. Well, at one point, she even moved to Indiana to do the mum thing, but was still writing for Desilu Productions because she kept trying to leave Desilu Productions, but they kept pulling her back in.
And when she talks about balancing her work life as a writer for television and film and being a mother, she says, “When people discuss today’s women who try to hold down a job, be a good wife and a responsible, caring mother, they don’t talk too much about the G factor, as in guilt. I saw Jamie Lee Curtis on a talk show once, and she spoke about how she tells her child, ‘Mommy has to go to work.’ She explained that it would be more honest to say, ‘Mommy wants to go to work.’ What she was admitting is that it is more fun to hang from a helicopter with Arnold Schwarzenegger or watch Lucille Ball stamp grapes than to be a driver in the mommy car pool or the den mother for the Cub Scouts. So you have this little voice in your head that is nattering away and saying, ‘You’re not a good mother.’”
And I just want to bring this up because she started in the fifties, she became a mum in the sixties, and the problems she was having as a working mum in show business still exist today. Like, I feel like so much has changed. And when I read that, I was like, oh, nothing’s changed.
Laura: Nothing’s changed on that.
Abigoliah: But I Love Lucy went on to become the biggest sitcom in America. At its height, the highest-viewed episode was called “Lucy Has a Baby”. Lucille Ball was the first woman to ever appear pregnant on television as, like, a pregnant woman. And when she did, when she had her baby – when Lucy Ricardo had her baby – 44 million people tuned in to watch it.
Laura: Wow.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And Madelyn Pugh says–
Tom: There were only 45 million people in the United States at this time.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So it was everyone. Madelyn Pugh is like, when people ask what it was like, it was like, we didn’t think about it because if we did, we couldn’t do our job. Like, we just couldn’t.
The I Love Lucy show was nominated for Best Written Comedy Material in 1955 and 1956. It never won. The show did win Best Situation Comedy in 1953 and 1954.
After this show ended in 1956, Madelyn Pugh would continue to write for Lucille Ball. Lucille Ball went on to make other sitcoms called The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, there’s The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, and in ‘86 they did Life with Lucy. And all of these shows are basically the character of Lucy, but in different scenarios. So eventually, she’s no longer Lucy Ricardo, she’s Lucy someone else, but it’s the same character. The way I can equate it is, you know, Jim Carrey in the nineties was always Jim Carrey in the – You know what I mean? You weren’t hiring him to be, like, a different person.
Olly: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because although I think in many, many ways, Hancock and I Love Lucy are really different, they’re both situation comedies built around somebody’s particular talent, where there’s also an ambiguity about how that relates to the actual offstage person.
Tom: Yeah. I know that there are differences. Aloysius Hancock is his middle name.
Olly: Yes.
Tom: Anthony John Hancock is the name of the real person, and Anthony Aloysius is the name of the character.
Olly: But the names are quite similar.
Tom: Yes, it’s remarkably similar. Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Lucy Ricardo’s hometown is Jamestown, New York. Lucille Ball’s hometown is Jamestown, New York, right?
Olly: Yeah. And they’re married.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And they’re married.
Olly: And it was important that they had to fight to have that marriage represented within the show.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Laura: I was watching The Office bloopers the other day, and they often call Ellie Kemper’s character the wrong name because she’s the only one that has a different name in it. Like, everybody’s–
Abigoliah: Interesting.
Laura: They’re all – She’s called Angela, and – But Erin is Ellie. Ellie is Erin. And so, yeah, I was watching that blooper reel the other day.
Abigoliah: Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr went on to work on other shows like The Jane Wyman Show, The Paul Lynde Show – Wyman? Wyman? Is that how you say that?
Tom: Wyman, yes.
Abigoliah: I don’t want to brag, but I know nothing about that one. Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr went on to work on other shows such as The Jane Wyman Show. Wyman. Wyman. I said that, right? Okay.
Tom: Wyman.
Abigoliah: Wyman.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Madelyn Pugh. Madelyn Pugh.
Laura: Jane Wyman. She did. That’s incredible. You do want to leave it in. I’ve heard of that one.
Abigoliah: Leave it in, leave it in. I’m a messy queen who can’t read.
Laura: Leave it in the Lucille – I Love Lucy.
Abigoliah: We don’t have the film. We have to go with what we have.
Laura: You don’t think these mics are going to show up on the camera, do you?
Abigoliah: But she also wrote some films. Forever, Darling, which was a film that starred Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Same dynamic, different names, but, you know, same idea as I Love Lucy. And she also went on to work for seven years as an executive producer of a long-running television series called Alice.
Laura: Oh, yeah. “Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?”
Tom: It was a kind of comedy.
Laura: Thanks, Olly. “Alice? Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?” Nothing?
Olly: “Go ask Alice.” It’s a Roy Chubby Brown reference.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Olly: A novelty record that he did. It was a band, Smokie, I think. It was a seventies band. And then they did a version where he just shouts that over the original lyrics. It was a simpler time.
Abigoliah: I feel like this is how our podcasts are different.
Laura: We’re like–
Abigoliah: No, we don’t do vinyl.
Laura: Yeah.
Olly: Well, we don’t do Roy Chubby Brown. That would be an excellent–
Laura: Yeah, it would be very, very rad. My dad used to have a beanie cap with that on it.
Tom: Yeah?
Laura: When I was a kid. Yeah.
Olly: Was he a big Roy Chubby–
Laura: I don’t think so. No, I’ve never heard it come up. I just remember he had a hat with that on it.
Tom: I do remember watching Alice on Channel 4 in the eighties. It was an American sitcom about three waitresses. I think it might have been a riff on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. A comedy riff on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Laura: Oh, wow.
Olly: Yeah, that sounds good.
Tom: Yeah. Yeah, it was good.
Abigoliah: I was thinking when that came up, I was like, well, I’ll put that in the list of shows to do on the Patreon.
But, you know, Madelyn Pugh, she started with America’s first sitcom as America’s first girl writer. She never won an Emmy for any of her work, but she lived till 2011, dying at age 90. She outlived all of them. She outlived Lucy. She outlived Desi. She outlived Bob Carroll Jr.
Olly: By the way, every time you say Bob Carroll Jr, you know where I’m going with this.
Tom: Yes, absolutely. I keep thinking you’re going to say Bob Carolgees.
Olly: Who was the guy who used to have a puppet dog? Spit the Dog?
Abigoliah: Fun fact: in season five of I Love Lucy, to freshen things up, because I think poor Bob and Madelyn were tired, they brought in two other writers. So it was Madelyn Pugh, Bob Carroll Jr, Bob Weiskopf and Bob Schiller. So it was Madelyn and the Three Bobs, which right there, that’s a sitcom. That’s a sitcom.
She’ll be forever known as the woman who pioneered the American sitcom with I Love Lucy. Of Lucy, she said interviewers often ask her what she thought was the secret of her popularity and the amazing longevity of her shows, and she always said the same thing: “My writers.” Now, who wouldn’t stick around for that?
Laura: Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: So that’s Madelyn Pugh, and she’s someone I didn’t really talk about over our last few episodes, but I just found her to be so interesting. And she’s very funny. Like, I mean, obviously she’s a comedy writer, but in her memoir, she talks about at the very beginning how people call her a pioneer. She was at an event and someone called her a pioneer. And she’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t often think of myself as a pioneer, but as I was home that night, churning butter and quilting, I thought about it some more,” and she never turned it off.
And I will say too, she wrote this book after her writing partner Bob died. In the afterword, she mentions that he passed in 2007, or at least this came out after he passed. And in the afterword, she was like, you’ll notice it says “with Bob Carroll Jr”. And she was like, I wrote everything with him, and this counts too. And so it was important for her that his name was on her biography.
Olly: That’s really sweet. One thing I want to pick up on–
Abigoliah: I also don’t think a male writer would do that, by the way. I just want to point that out.
Olly: You’re probably right. You talked about the pregnancy, giving birth episode. This is mind-blowing now, but you didn’t used to be able to say “pregnant” on stage.
Abigoliah: Oh, right.
Olly: Even Max Miller would say “she was carrying a bit of weight”. He wouldn’t say she was pregnant. And I think in the BBC Green Book, possibly it specifically bans people mentioning it. It was an obscenity, really.
Abigoliah: They weren’t allowed to say it on television. She was always “expecting” or “bun in the oven” or something. Which, “bun in the oven” sounds so gross.
They hired a committee to oversee the scripts about Lucy’s pregnancy that consisted of a rabbi, a priest and a minister to make sure that they weren’t–
Tom: People who would definitely give birth.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: All people who definitely understand comedy. Yes.
Laura: Yeah, yeah. I mean, they are the constituent parts of a joke. Apart from that.
Abigoliah: But I mean, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball said, and Madelyn Pugh said, that the committee were lovely to work with. Like, they were totally on board with the idea. It was CBS who was like, don’t say pregnant. And even the religious committee was like, but she is pregnant.
Tom: It’s just a crazy–
Olly: Sign of a societal ill, really, that the most fundamental thing you know about people, animals reproduce. That’s the thing that animals do. The fact you can’t mention that is so weird.
Tom: I don’t know if you know anything about this, but I remember that some episodes of Star Trek, they had an issue about portraying hypnosis. This would have been, like, ten years after I Love Lucy, maybe even more. And the fear was if you depicted hypnosis on television, that viewers at home would be hypnotised. And I couldn’t help noticing that you can never see the doctor’s face while he’s hypnotising Lucy. Now, to be fair, Lucy’s face is funnier, but you think the way to shoot that would be to cut between them. You only ever see the back of his head. So I wondered if that same regulation was still in force in the early fifties, as it was in the mid-sixties.
Abigoliah: I wonder. I mean, part of me is like, well, no, because Lucy doesn’t get hypnotised because she looks at Ethel, and that fabulous wink that she does.
Tom: At some point – this has come up a few times – I’m going to show you a wonderful obscure Channel 4 sitcom called Nightingales, which has got one of, I think, the funniest depictions of hypnosis, because the plot requires that four different people get hypnotised at different points, including at the end, the psychiatrist hypnotising himself. And so because they don’t have the time for this to be depicted, he has an extremely brisk method of hypnosis, which consists of picking up a pocket watch and just going, “You’re tired. Very tired. Sleepy, very sleepy. You’re asleep.”
Laura: I think what stands out for me from today, of having watched these two back to back and not knowing either of them before coming into it, is I think you can see the hallmarks of each nation’s approach to sitcom in them. I Love Lucy is very warm and very big and busy, and it’s cosy. And Hancock’s Half Hour is awkward and luxury – awkward and luxury? And I think that’s something that even in our warmer sitcoms, like Gavin & Stacey that people think of as being really cosy, it’s still awkward. And when the US remakes our biggest and best, like The Office remake, they cosy it up. They cut the awkward. And I think you can see that in these really early examples of sitcoms.
Abigoliah: Well, too, Madelyn talks about how sometimes they would write a script that ended on a bit more of a down note or a sour note, and Lucille Ball was like, “No, no, no, no, no. We end on a happy moment. We always end on either a big laugh or a happy moment.” And Madelyn does say, she was like, I think she was right about that. I think that’s how it needed to end.
Laura: I think even our cosy, like, you know, you mentioned off air earlier, The Royle Family. That’s awkward. And the choice of music, like, I think for US Office or UK Office or for The Royle Family, the music in the credits – We go offbeat. We are not so comfortable with making something that’s as cutesy-perfect as the US is with sitcom.
Olly: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Are you tempted to watch any more of either of these?
Laura: Yes. Genuinely, I will be pleased to have series one from you of Hancock’s Half Hour. I’d be interested to watch the cast ones. I’d be really interested to watch him bouncing off other people and have the raucousness of Sid James in there, and to see that.
Because one thing I thought was really interesting in learning with Madelyn Pugh here is, I suppose, the longevity of this show. They had to get on well, but the writers, you know, give acclaim to Lucille. Lucille gives it back to the writers. And then you saying that was the writers taking revenge on him for being an arsehole? You can’t go – Oh, that’s too late.
Abigoliah: And Lucy was, like, hard to work with. At one point she yelled at them so badly – and this was after I Love Lucy, this would have been probably when she was doing Here’s Lucy – she yelled at Madelyn and Bob so ferociously that they were like, okay, we gotta let her cool off. And they kind of went somewhere else. They didn’t go back to their office. They went somewhere else to chill out. Lucille Ball saw they weren’t in their office, assumed they quit. And so when they walked back, all of their stuff was packed and they were fired.
So this is – I never know where to put all of Lucy being Lucy, the real Lucille Ball. But Madelyn Pugh was in and out of Lucy’s life. Like I said, she kind of tried to get away from Desilu Productions, but they kept pulling her back in. And at the same time, Lucy was incredibly gracious and she knew when she fucked up. So, but front-facing big happy family.
Madelyn even says in this book, she’s like, I’m not going to talk bad about her. She was dead by the time that Madelyn wrote this book. And she’s like, I think it lacks class to talk poorly about someone when they’re not alive to defend themselves. So this is not going to be a gossipy book. But we do know that her and Bob used to fuck, and I think that’s fun.
Olly: It’s really fun as well because the classic sort of Lucy in the show is getting into a scrape and finding a way out of it, which is a very funny thing anyway. I mean, that’s a brilliant engine for comedy, but particularly when you’ve got such a brilliant face and voice to express all the different noises and faces that come with that. And then off – You know, the real Lucille is able to kind of fire people like that. So it’s the opposite.
Laura: Yeah. I think watching the two of them together, it made me think I like what I like about a group sitcom is having a foil to come up against. Whereas in Hancock’s Half Hour, he’s coming up against himself. And you can’t have that moment of, okay, it all went to shit, but I’m happy at the end of it. There is something for me – He pulls on my heartstrings a little bit. I wonder how I’d get on with the radio version, whether I’d feel less, “I am sorry for him.”
Abigoliah: I just want to say I found that when I first watched it too, because we watched one where he’s just trying to get lunch at a lunch counter and he keeps screwing it up through his own inadequacy. But I’m like, poor guy. Just wants a sandwich.
Laura: Someone feed him. Just let the sad man play with his radio. Yeah, maybe I’m too woke-modern or like that, but yeah, it’s–
Olly: Interesting you said about the sandwich because my dad came from a working-class background in Ipswich. He was the only child of a guy who worked for the railways and stuff. And he went to Cambridge. So he had some good breaks, my dad. And he said that when he went for his interview, he walked up and down Cambridge High Street, unable to build up the courage to go in anywhere and get something to eat.
But I suppose what I’m trying to say is people of that era – Maybe now people are used to going on social media saying, “Hi guys, look at my crazy life that I’ve been doing,” and people are very good at self-presentation. That hasn’t always necessarily been the case, especially if there’s a kind of class anxiety. And one of the things about the Hancock character is that he’s very aware of his precarity within – He’s always wanting to be a bit swankier than he actually is.
You know, a bit like Galton and Simpson – Oh, by the way, on the writers thing, I couldn’t help noticing their photos are in the credits. You can see Hancock’s photo and then you see Galton and Simpson’s photo. It’s quite interesting because I don’t think you would get that now.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: Hancock was very dependent on them. And what happened after he fired them is noteworthy, right? I mean, that’s sort of Hancock’s tragic story, really. He had this gang of characters on the radio, including Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Bill Kerr, Hattie Jacques. He fired all of them when he moved to television, then fired Sid James for the last series. Then, after one failed movie, fired Galton and Simpson. At the same time, he fired his agent. At this point, there was nobody left to fire. So he took his own life. Yeah.
Abigoliah: Lucy did hire Bob and Madelyn back, I just want to say.
Laura: That was a classic sitcom ending. The British guy tried to end it on a downbeat, and the American went, “I’ve got something positive.”
Tom: Don’t worry, guys. Thank you so much for coming and joining us.
Laura: Thanks for inviting us.
Tom: If people want to hear more from The Comedy Bureau, where should they go?
Laura: Well, we are on any podcast player, The Comedy Bureau podcast. We are also on Instagram. And let’s just say Instagram because I can’t remember where we are. The Comedy Bureau.
Abigoliah: I have one final question about your podcast, specifically. If ABCE listeners are going to come over and listen to The Comedy Bureau, what is your favourite episode that you would like them to maybe start with? Obviously, you could start from the beginning or pick the one you like, but which one stands out to you guys as, like, oh, that was fun?
Laura: Well, it’s a pair of episodes, but the ones that really stand out to me because it’s Olly’s favourite character, and for me it sums up the meaning of the podcast. We have a double episode about Little Tich, who is a music-hall performer, and we have a whole episode that Olly did all about this performer and how good they were. But the episode before it is about the Tichborne claimant, a Victorian true-crime saga.
Abigoliah: I listened to that one. I really enjoyed it.
Laura: That created Little Tich, the character. And it’s fascinating, like, how you go from a man who dies in a boat off Australia to the creation of the word “titch” and a dance with massive shoes. It’s just fantastic.
Olly: Yeah, I agree. And what I liked about that was because it was really good to be the one who was listening for a bit.
Laura: Yeah.
Olly: You know, because you did the research on the Tichborne claimant.
Laura: I love those. I mean, I’m also a big fan – If you want the basics, we’ve done three episodes about the different comic theories, the leading comic theories.
Olly: Yeah. The big three, as they’re called.
Laura: But for me, the Little Tich, that picking one tiny person on a playbill’s name and, you know, spanning continents and genres with the story behind it is exactly what I wanted the podcast to be. And Olly makes it happen.
Abigoliah: Beautiful. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, guys.
Olly: You could ask us if we have any comedies to recommend you look at.
Tom: Oh, yes. That’s a really good idea.
Abigoliah: Yeah. No, it’s just because I listen to the podcast. I don’t know what the format is.
Tom: Is there – Yeah.
Abigoliah: Any show, actually.
Olly: The World of Gurney Slade.
Tom: He’s an easy person to interview because he asks the questions and he answers–
Olly: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You see what I did there? I just put the spotlight on myself.
Abigoliah: Wait, wait, wait. Ask it, ask it like – properly for the edit. I’m the one who gets to fuck up. You have to do it all real.
Tom: And one last question, which we like to ask everybody who comes on the podcast. Are there any shows that you think we might have overlooked, which we should include in future editions of All British Comedy Explained? Laura?
Laura: Oh no. Olly has an answer. That’s not fair.
Olly: What shall I do?
Laura: My answer then. Yeah, I’m racking my brains. I’m thinking.
Olly: I’ve got a couple. So Girls on Top–
Tom: Oh, yes.
Olly: Which was like a sort of female-driven Young Ones. I think unfairly forgotten. But also there’s an amazing show from 1960 called The Strange World of Gurney Slade. Do you know that one?
Tom: Yeah, I’ve heard of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen–
Olly: Oh, watch it, watch it. It’s so weird.
Tom: It’s fascinating.
Olly: It’s so weird. Apparently Bowie was a fan when he was growing up. And I think – I can’t even remember the name of the guy now. Anthony Newley, who plays the lead in it. I didn’t really know – I knew of him, but I didn’t really know his work.
Tom: Also a songwriter.
Olly: Yeah. Also a songwriter. Absolutely. A pop star for a little while. But he’s so brilliant in it. And it’s so much about the internal life of somebody. Some of the gags are still very old-fashioned, but the frame is weird, and there’s the occasional person you will recognise from Doctor Who.
Tom: Excellent. Laura, what about – What were the shows that you were watching when you were growing up?
Laura: Well, did you just Google British sitcom? I just wanted to have a look for one that I was like, I remember this being on on a Saturday night, and you’ll have to double-check with me if this is the right one. But The Russ Abbot Show.
Tom: Oh, yes.
Laura: Where the credits were like bubbles coming up of the sketches and there would be different images. And that is a big one that I remember being on in that time where you didn’t choose what you were watching. You just watched what was on next. And that I remember being on in prime time, along with–
Tom: Russ Abbot’s Madhouse.
Laura: Yeah. The Generation Game and Anneka Rice and all of that.
If you’re going really far back, have you done Last of the Summer Wine?
Tom: No.
Laura: I would put that one on.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Have you heard of Last of the Summer Wine?
Abigoliah: I think it’s come up in the YouTube comments and the social media.
Tom: Hundreds of episodes.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: Literally, I think it might have gone over 300 episodes. I mean, it’s an enormous number.
Abigoliah: Oh, so we’re talking like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue level of–
Laura: What about 2point4 Children?
Tom: Oh yeah.
Olly: That’s quite an interesting–
Laura: That’s so, like, late nineties, I think into early noughties. Like, a real–
Tom: And that was part of this feeling around that time that the Americans were doing sitcom right, or we were doing sitcoms wrong and we had to copy the American model. We had to have writers’ rooms, we had to have longer runs, and we had to have warm family sitcoms, not these brutal sitcoms that we’d been doing up until now. And I don’t know if that trend was altogether positive, but some very good shows came out of that.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Laura: Do you do kids’ shows?
Tom: No, no. Explicitly off the table. Okay, but I have broken at least one of my self-imposed rules every season so far. So we’ll see.
Olly: Yeah. The Goodies.
Tom: Yes, The Goodies we’ll definitely want to get to at one point. I mean, one of the weird things about The Goodies is Australians love The Goodies, because in Australia it was shown year-round, endlessly repeated. But what happened here is that they were cranking them out, and there’s no point showing old ones when you’ve got new ones coming. So they tended not to be repeated.
Then after literally about seven or eight series, The Goodies did the unthinkable and they moved from BBC to ITV. So now, of course, the BBC isn’t going to repeat them at all because they’d effectively been promoting a show on the other channel. But they weren’t as successful on ITV and ITV cancelled after one year. And so then ITV weren’t going to show them because they were a failure, and so nobody showed them. And so they just kind of got forgotten about. So in Australia, people can’t believe British people have never heard of The Goodies.
Laura: Yeah. I’ve never watched The Goodies.
Tom: There you go.
Olly: There’s bits that don’t stand the test of time. I’ll just say that.
Laura: I’d like to hear you do an episode on how 2point4 Children and My Family overlapped or bled into each other, or basically a very similar, if not the same, concept for a show, and what was the space between those and how did both of those become commissioned.
Tom: Interesting. Interesting.
Abigoliah: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, guys. Thank you. And yeah, everyone go check out The Comedy Bureau and we will see you next time. Till then, I’m Abigoliah Schamaun.
Tom: I’m Tom Salinsky. Cheerio.
Laura: Bye.
Tom: Thanks, guys.
Olly: Bye.