The Bickersons
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The Bickersons, was an American radio comedy (1946-1951). Born on The Chase and Sanborn Hour and refined on the lesser-remembered Drene Time it stood the already-typical domestic presentation of radio and its infant offspring, television, so squarely on its head that there were those who feared the show. The show's married protagonists spent nearly all their time together in relentless verbal war, and many people believed that the show was more than merely detrimental to the nation's post-World War II health. (The same kind of charges of "detrimental" were later leveled against programs such as Married... with Children and The Simpsons.)
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[edit] The Creation
The Bickersons was created by Philip Rapp, the one-time Eddie Cantor writer who had also created the Fanny Brice skits (for Ziegfeld Follies of the Air and Maxwell House Coffee Time) that grew into radio's Baby Snooks. Several years after the latter established itself a long-running favourite, Rapp developed and presented John and Blanche Bickerson, first as a short sketch on The Old Gold Show and The Chase and Sanborn Hour (the show that made stars of Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy), and then as a fifteen-minute situational sketch as part of a variety show starring Don Ameche and singer-actress Frances Langford, airing on NBC and sponsored by Drene Shampoo. (When a television version was developed, it aired on CBS and was sponsored by Philip Morris cigarettes, the sponsors of I Love Lucy.) Announcing the show---and later familiar to television viewers as The Millionaire's presenter and executive secretary, Michael Anthony---was Marvin Miller.
Drene Time typically opened with Langford singing a big band-style arrangement before Ameche and Langford would slip into routine comedy, often aided by co-star (and future Make Room for Daddy star) Danny Thomas, in routines that often hooked around Ameche's frustration that Thomas seemed more interested in modern technology and discoveries than in women. After another musical number and a commercial spot for Drene Shampoo, Miller would announce Ameche and Langford as the Bickersons, "in 'The Honeymoon's Over'," for the final fifteen minutes of the show.
[edit] "Matrimony Is Not A Word. It's A Sentence."
The typical Miller introduction went, The Bickersons---have retired. Three o'clock in the morning finds Mrs. Bickerson wide awake and anxious, as poor husband John, victim of contagious insomnia, or Schmoe's Disease, broadcasts the telltale signs of the dreaded affliction. Listen----, before the listener heard a chorus of low-roaring snoring, punctuated occasionally with something that sounded like laughing that he might not weep in his sleep. Then Blanche would awaken John from his sleep, even at three in the morning, and the feuding would continue.
In fact, the couple would snap almost on a dime into their trademark arguments, whether about John's job, Blanche's domestic abilities, John's alleged eye for neighbour Gloria Gooseby, Blanche's shiftless but loving brother, John's taste for bourbon---which was as constant, it sometimes seemed, as his snoring---and Blanche's maddening habit of suggesting her husband perform this or that activity at that very hour . . . never mind that it was about three in the morning. ("You say it but you won't do it---do it now, John!") Rounding out the cast was future children's television favourite Pinky Lee and, especially, Thomas as shiftless, scheming, freeloading brother Amos.
About the only thing that wasn't funny about the show was the couple's apparent attitude toward each other. As New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby (media critic) described them, in the 25 May 1948 column which gave the couple their nickname, "The Bickering Bickersons": Blanche . . . is one of the monstrous shrews of all time. She makes her husband . . . take two jobs, a total of sixteen working hours, in order to bring in more money which she squanders on minks and the stock market. Meanwhile he can't afford a new pair of shoes and goes around with his feet painted black. In the few hours he has to sleep, she heckles him all night with the accusation that he doesn't love her. Her aim appears to be to drive her husband crazy and she succeeds very nicely. The harassed John's only weapon is insult, at which he's pretty good.
[edit] "I'm The Sorriest Man Who Was Ever Born"
As transcribed by John Crosby, this was a typical Bickersons exchange:
B: You used to be so considerate. Since you got married to me you haven't got any sympathy at all.
J: I have, too. I've got everybody's sympathy.
B: Believe me, there's better fish in the ocean than the one I caught.
J: There's better bait, too.
B: I don't see how you can go to bed without kissing me good night.
J: I can do it.
B: You'd better say you're sorry for that, John.
J: Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
B: You are not.
J: I am too. I'm the sorriest man that was ever born.
B: Is there any milk for breakfast?
J: No.
B: Then you'll have to eat out.
J: I don't care, I've been doing it all week.
B: What for? I left you enough food for six days. I cooked a whole bathtub full of rice. What happened to it?
J: I took a bath in it.
B: Why didn't you eat it?
J: I've told you a million times I can't stand the sight of rice.
B: Why not?
J: Because it's connected to the saddest mistake of my life.
[edit] How not to do it
At the time The Bickersons bowed, the typical radio marriage conveyed almost exclusively sweetness and light, no matter what ephemeral disaster might befall. The idea of a lower middle-class marriage whose partners spent what little time together they had at each other's throats was jarring, and even threatening. Audiences were accustomed to broadcasting life with couples as in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or the protagonists of The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show; or, such earthily loving couples as Chester A. Riley and wife Peg in The Life of Riley. Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead may have sent up the more saccharine of the pre-Bickersons family shows in a skit (the legendary "Mr. and Mrs. Breakfast Show"), and Goodman and Jane Ace (in Easy Aces) may have been a gently tart union of wry exasperation and effortless, brain-bending malaprops, but forging a regular series around a couple as highly combustible as John and Blanche was probably as daring as old-time radio comedy got when dealing with marriage.
The Bickersons told their listeners that they had no business being married, and were prouder than hell of it. They were the prototype for such battling comic couples as Ralph and Alice Kramden of The Honeymooners (surely, Jackie Gleason, who admired the show, owed a debt to The Bickersons as a partial model for blustery Ralph and acid Alice), Nels and Harriet Oleson of Little House on the Prairie, and---much later, and perhaps the closest of them all to the Blanche-and-John prototype---Al and Peg Bundy of Married... with Children.
The Kramdens, Olesons, Bundys, and others who followed may have made them seem tame, in turn. But perhaps The Bickersons may have helped more than hindered the cause of marriage...by showing, too vividly, what not to do and how not to do it.
[edit] The Flip Side
Though they spent their allotted time together at each other's throats, assuming always that the shrewish Blanche could awaken John from his snoring, there were moments when the Bickersons showed an uncommon tenderness to each other. This may have been demonstrated nowhere better than a memorable Christmas episode. (It should have been hinted at the outset by Marvin Miller's atypical introduction: "The Bickersons---have not retired.") After arguing over whether John had sent Blanche a Christmas card (he had---it was buried in a stack of newspapers), they exchanged their gifts to each other . . . with a twist. Tight in the pocketbook this Christmas season, Blanche swapped a fur coat to buy her bourbon-loving husband a portable bar, while John---bourbon lover though he is---swapped his stock to buy Blanche a matching fur muffler, before confessing that for all that they're each other's biggest pain in the rump, there really is a love between them.
Jackie Gleason probably knew that Christmas exchange---drawing as did the Bickersons episode on O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," a "classic 39" Christmas episode of The Honeymooners involved blustery bus driver Ralph hocking his brand-new bowling ball in a mad dash to get Alice a last-minute Christmas gift . . . only to learn the hard way that Alice bought him a stylish new bowling ball bag.
[edit] Not Ready For Prime Time Television
When The Bickersons was re-developed for a short run on series television (CBS), Lew Parker (later familiar as That Girl's harried, slightly overbearing father Lew Marie) took the role of John Bickerson---but it didn't work as well as the original. Parker and Langford just didn't have the seamless anti-chemistry of Ameche and Langford. Premiering as a summer season replacement in May 1951, the television version of The Bickersons lasted only thirteen episodes.
[edit] Beyond The Bickersons
Philip Rapp's work didn't stop with The Bickersons or with the demise of radio as America's main electronic entertainment medium. Early television viewers were treated to one of his best works, his adaptation (and work as head writer and director) of a popular film series into a television series starring Leo G. Carroll as a banker bedeviled by fun-loving, husband-and-wife ghosts John and Marian Kirby---Topper.
Ameche and Langford's work together didn't end with The Bickersons, however. They co-hosted a variety series, The Frances Langford-Don Ameche Show, in 1951-52, and featured among the few regular performers a very young Jack Lemmon, as a newlywed in a sketch series known as "The Couple Next Door." And, when Langford hosted a variety special in 1960, there was Ameche to join in the fun---with The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Joe DeRita at the time), Bob Cummings, and Johnny Mathis.
Frances Langford---a beautiful woman with a honey voice who used sheer talent to turn herself into the venomous Blanche Bickerson---enjoyed a fine career as a singer and actress in film (including a memorable cameo in the otherwise deplorably stylised The Glenn Miller Story) and television, as well as radio; she died July 11, 2005. Don Ameche, whose name sometimes became synonymous (and a kind of running gag) with the telephone (thanks to his film portrayal of Alexander Graham Bell), became a familiar television face as well as a well-respected film actor, enjoying a late-life popular revival through his roles in the 1983 film Trading Places and the 1985 film Cocoon. He died in 1993.
[edit] Trivia
In the movie M*A*S*H, when Radar O'Reilly bugs Margaret Houlihan's tent as she and Frank Burns have a sexual encounter, Father Mulcahy mistakes their conversation (and noises) for an episode of The Bickersons, until he realizes otherwise.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast 1920-1950 (New York: Flare/Avon Books, 1971)
- John Crosby, Out of the Blue: A Book About Radio and Television (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952)
