She's a Grand Young Flagg

It was set in Arizona and Hope Lange was in it and...

Well, that’s about all I can recall about The New Dick Van Dyke Show, other than it was really bland. It lasted three seasons—probably on Van Dyke’s name—but I gave up on it long before that. (If you really want to know, it ran from 1971 to 1974).

One of the cast members was Fannie Flagg. She started out in stand-up in New York in the early ‘60s. Her act landed her a gig on a 1964 summer show called Repertoire Workshop that aired on CBS-owned stations. Variety wasn’t impressed. Its review: “Comedienne Fannie Flagg, who femceed the session, also turned in a routine as Dixie tv hostess going through her pre-air warmup. Bit had its moments, but overall lacked invention and was sagging well before the windup.”

After the new Van Dyke show petered out, Flagg was better known for being one of the rotating “sixth seaters” on The Match Game. She later became a respected author and was applauded by critics for her role in the film Fried Green Tomatoes.

Anyway, let’s go back to just before Van Dyke 2.0 debuted. This story was syndicated by the National Enterprise Association on August 6, 1971.

Fannie Flagg Joins New Fall Dick Van Dyke Series
By JOAN CROSBY
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (NEA)—Fannie Flagg, who is red-haired, blue-eyed, curvy and pretty, thinks this may be hurting her possibilities of becoming a major comic attraction in show business, but she still won't fall into the comedienne trap of doing "I'm so ugly that" jokes.
"I've been watching the comedy series on TV," she says, her Southern drawl apparent when she's not working, "and every one has one of the 'uglys.' The Mary Tyler Moore Show has Rhoda. Bob Cummings had Schultzy. Doris Day and Dick Van Dyke both had Rose Marie and the Beverly Hillbillies had Nancy Kulp."
Fannie wants to make it clear that she's not criticizing any of these actresses, but it's just that she doesn't want to play another of the man-hungry female second bananas on TV.
So, in her role as Dick Van Dyke's sister on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, premiering on CBS-TV in September, Fannie is a normal, pretty woman.

"The main problem with women comics," she says, "is that they try to compete with men. My idea is to go the other way and do comedy that men can't do."
She's an Alabama girl, a seven-time loser in the Miss Alabama Pageant for the state representative of Miss America (not a reflection on her looks, but rather on her humor which often prompted her into less than perfect-Southern-lady humor), a veteran of her own local talk show, a member of the cast of Candid Camera, a talk show perennial and star of the hit record album, "Rally 'Round the Flagg."
She just recently finished another album in which she plays Martha Mitchell. Her earlier impersonation of Lady Bird Johnson brought her much acclaim.
Fannie, who names Bea Lillie, Kay Kendall, Claudette Colbert, and Irene Dunne as the funny ladies she liked most, has been in two films, "Five Easy Pieces" and "The Bar." "I played white trash and I loved it," she smiles.
She wasn't born Fannie Flagg. She doesn't like to publicize her real name, because another lovely lady gained stardom with it first (Patricia Neal). She chose Fannie because "a grand old vaudevillian I knew said Fannie was a very lucky name for a comedienne. But I couldn't think of a last name. Then one night, a friend called me and said she had met a real old lady who would give up her name to me her name was Fannie Flagg. Well, it was silly and it stuck."
When they were casting for an actress to play Dick's sister, Fannie, not knowing why she was there, was sitting in her agent's office when a man walked in, slowly walked around her and finally said, "I don't believe it." He was Byron Paul, Van Dyke's partner, and he cast Fannie because she looks enough like Dick to be his sister.
"We do," she insists. "We both have blue eyes and big noses."
And large doses of niceness.