by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was a half-hour April
18, 1950 episode of The Alan Young Show, an odd little offering from CBS that lasted two years (1950-1951) and
seemed to follow the same format every time: an opening monologue (Charles has
noted that the format of TV variety shows seems to have hardened into orthodoxy
in the earliest years — including a comedian/host who delivered an opening
monologue), a dance number, a featured singer (at least in all the surviving
episodes the featured singer always seems to have been a woman) and a couple of
comedy sketches. Young was a British-born comedian (“Young” was the last name
on his birth certificate but the original first name was “Angus”!) but he comes
off here as a cross between Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis, and it’s not too
surprising that the writers, David R. Schwartz and Leo Solomon, were Jewish.
The monologue made fun of TV stars using various cheats to avoid having to
memorize lines — Young has his speech written on various parts of his shirt and
nearly has to undress on camera to read them all (and the punch line, when he
finally finds it on his shirttail, hardly seems worth it) — and the sketches
were about a reading of a will that’s sabotaged by a leaking cylinder of
nitrous oxide, better known as “laughing gas,” which causes the would-be heirs
to crack up hysterically over being disinherited; and another in which Young is
a nebbish seeking to date the young
daughter of a middle-aged married couple. What made this interesting is that
her father was played by William Frawley a year before he debuted on I Love
Lucy, and as jarring as it is
to see him with someone other than Vivian Vance playing his wife, it’s a lot of fun and he’s as
lovably acerbic as ever.
Charles and I had downloaded this after another
archive.org download, a May 22, 1955 episode of a show called Masquerade
Party, had piqued our curiosity
about singer Monica Lewis, who was one of the contestants on that — the show
featured celebrities in really thick disguises (including one segment in which
Black boxer Archie Moore was made to look white) and a panel that had to guess
who they really were. We’d already seen Monica Lewis in the 1952 film The
Strip (starring Mickey Rooney as
a wanna-be jazz drummer who gets to sit in with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars,
featuring Barney Bigard, Jack Teagarden and Earl “Fatha” Hines — almost
certainly the greatest band Armstrong ever had and the real reason I wanted to see that film) doing a faux-Latin number, and here Lewis performed a version
of “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” which was quite nicely sung
(though there were plenty of other singers around in 1950 who could have done
it better) but undone by a bad, overly gimmicky arrangement by music director
Lud Gluskin or whoever was doing his vocal charts: it starts out as a rhumba, slows
down and then speeds up again. Still, Lewis was attractive, personable and had
a nice voice, and one could see why she became at least something of a star —
and probably would have had more of a career if she’d been about a decade older
before the rock ’n’ roll revolution would severely weaken, though not
completely destroy, the popular appeal of her kind of music. Young himself was
best known from the Mister Ed TV series of the early 1960’s, in which he was the human interlocutor
of the talking horse (originally called “Francis” in the film series from the
1950’s and voiced on both film and TV by Chill Wills) but had a rather
interesting career even though he wasn’t a distinctive enough performer to make
it as a major star.
