Ethel and Albert

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Ethel and Albert (aka The Private Lives of Ethel and Albert) was a comedy radio/TV series about a married couple, Ethel and Albert Arbuckle, living in the small town of Sandy Harbor. Created by Peg Lynch (b. 1918), who scripted and portrayed Ethel, the series first aired on local Minnesota radio in the early 1940s, followed by a run on ABC from May 29, 1944 to August 28, 1950.

Radio historian Gerald Nachman (in Raised on Radio) called the show "insightful and realistic . . . a real leap forward in domestic comedy---a lighthearted, clever, well-observed, daily fifteen-minute show about the amiable travails of a recognisable suburban couple . . . bridg(ing) the domestic comedy of a vaudeville-based era with a keen modern sensibility. Lynch made her comic points without stooping to female stereotypes, insults, running gags, funny voices, or goofy plots."

The show began as three-minute filler between a pair of Minnesota KATE station programs, then expanded to fifteen minutes, and finally became a half-hour show in the last couple of years of its radio life. Like Easy Aces, the humour on Ethel and Albert was low-key; like Vic and Sade, it was constructed around such simple, often mundane household situations as efforts to open a pickle jar. Often Ethel or Albert would attempt to prove the other wrong over some inconsequential matter. For example, one entire script centered around Ethel disputing Albert's claim that he could see her using only his peripheral vision. "I realised that I didn't have to sit down and knock myself out every minute to try to think of something funny," Lynch told critic Leonard Maltin many years later. "All I had to do was look around me."

Two film stars had a presence in the show: Richard Widmark, who portrayed Albert in 1944, left after six months and was replaced by Alan Bunce (1902-1965); and, Margaret Hamilton---most famed as The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West---played Aunt Eva. Ethel and Albert's daughter Suzy (Madeleine Pierce), born in 1946, was the only other voice heard on the original series.

Peg Lynch brought her series to television in the early 1950s as a continuing 15-minute segment on The Kate Smith Hour during the 1952-1953 season. Lynch admitted many years later that she wasn't happy with the move. "[Ethel and Albert] was a quiet show," she told Nachman, "and I was not a stage person who was accustomed to performing in front of an audience, as comedians are. And I always felt it spoiled my timing. I would have to hold up for the laugh."

That didn't stop her from giving television another try, however. An Ethel and Albert television series was launched on NBC (April 25, 1953-December 25, 1954), moved to CBS (June 20, 1955-September 26, 1955) as a summer replacement for December Bride, and ended its television life on ABC (October 14, 1955-July 6, 1956).

The Couple Next Door was a similar Peg Lynch series which began in 1953-57 on Chicago's WGN, moving to the Mutual Broadcasting System in the summer of 1957. The married couple was played by Olan Soule and Elinor Harriot. It was revived on CBS Radio (December 30, 1957-November 25, 1960) with Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce as the unnamed married couple---essentially, it reprised Ethel and Albert but the new name was necessitated because Lynch had long since lost the rights to the original title.

That still wasn't the end of the show---Lynch and Bunce brought the show to NBC's legendary weekend programming block Monitor in 1963, performing three- to four-minute vignettes not unlike the original fifteen-minute shows. Their presence continued a kind-of Monitor tradition of offering new material from classic radio favourites (including James and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, until Marian Jordan's death). Even more, it returned yet again in the 1970s, as a syndicated radio feature known as The Little Things in Life.

Very few of the original Ethel and Albert radio shows are known to have survived, but a considerable number of the later Couple Next Door shows have. And, a few years ago, Peg Lynch herself authorised the compact disc release of twelve of the Ethel and Albert vignettes from the Monitor years.

[edit] References

  • Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio (New York: Pantheon, 1998)
  • Arthur Frank Wertheim, Radio Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
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