Being Served, the English Way

Television comedy from England has run the gamut from broad (the bust-chasing Benny Hill) to surreal (the brilliant Monty Python) to the somewhat satiric (the clever The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). We Canadians, being part of the Commonwealth, may have been exposed to more of it than Americans, who had to rely mainly on PBS importing the shows.

I could name quite a number of them I have enjoyed viewing over the years, but I will pick only one at random to bring up today—the multi-seasoned Are You Being Served?

The characters are archetypes of the English, whose class system and formality at work are foreign to us in North America. The actors couldn’t have been better cast. David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd (the latter spending a season as a writer/performer on Laugh-In) filled scripts with cleverness, silliness and, as you would expect on an English programme, “naughty” double-entendres. It debuted in 1972 and enjoyed life as a feature film and continued life as an inferior sequel.

The cast members were interviewed over the years, especially John Inman. You’ll have to indulge the length of the post as I transcribe three of them. First is from the Liverpool Echo of Oct. 20, 1979.

THE VERSATILE CAPTAIN
By SYD GILLINGHAM
IF there’s a more fascinating exercise for box-watchers than to accompany Frank Thornton when he pops into a department store to do some shopping, then I'd like to hear about it. Fascinating? That's probably putting it mildly. For “Are You Being Served?”, the continuing saga of the Grace Brothers emporium, returned to our screens last night and once again Captain Peacock—Frank Thornton, of course—was laying down the law from his lofty position as floorwalker. Not that Londoner Frank—he was born in Dulwich 58 years ago—makes a habit of popping into department stores. “It's a chore,” he says, he could well do without.
But just what does happen when he goes to buy, say, a pair of socks? “Well, assistants might come up and ask: ‘Are you being served?’ Then they say: ‘Oh dear, dear, dear,’ as they catch themselves coming out with the phrase for real.
"Because the odd thing is that, because of the series, hardly any shop assistant uses that phrase now.
“And they always recognise one of the characters from the series. They tell me, for example: ‘We've got a Mr. Humphries downstairs you know!’
Captain Peacock, Mr. Humphries, Mrs. Slocombe and the rest of the Grace Brothers stalwarts are the result of inspired casting by production (and co-writer) David Croft. He laid precisely the same magic on "Dad's Army," of which he was also producer comedy and co-writer.
"You can't imagine any other bunch of actors doing ‘Dad's Army’ as well as the bunch he got together," says Frank.
"I worked for him first about 1962—I did a couple of things in ‘Hugh and I’—and then again in 1965. And it was seven years before worked for him again in ‘Are You Being Served?’
"I’m not complaining. What I'm saying is that he had nothing which suited me. But when he had the idea of ‘Are You Being Served?’ and wanted to cast the toffee-nosed floorwalker, he thought of me.
"Obviously, from then on there's development of the characters as a result of mutual inspiration between the writers and the actors.
"He casts you because he knows the role will fit you—although I hope I'm not such a pompous twit production (and co-writer), as Captain Peacock!"
Does Frank Thornton, who has an impressive touch of theatrical track record behind him (notably Michael Bentine’s “It’s a Quare World" as far at TV comedy series are concerned), want to escape from the shadow of Captain Peacock and similar roles to take on more serious, dramatic parts?
"Well I love the old boy," he says, "but every actor likes to move around. And, in fact, we moved around more than some people notice, perhaps.
"We normally do six or seven or eight weeks work at BBC-TV for ‘Are You Being Served?’ and that doesn't keep you going, so you have to go off and do something else, whether it's in the theatre, or making television commercials, or whatever.
"We exercise our versatility in moving from job to job. Look at Donald Sinden. From ‘Two’s Company’ to ‘King Lear’ and now ‘Othello’ at Stratford.
About five years ago, for instance, I was at Stratford for a season and played Duncan in ‘Macbeth’—which is a very different cup of tea to Captain Peacock, isn't it?
"Now I am about to appear In Tom Stoppard's play, ‘Jumpers’—a serious play with a lot of comedy in it. And it's quite a challenge for me because it's a very long part.
"The thing is, people can see that most actors are a little more versatile than often they are given credit for."
Frank Thornton was all of five-years-old when he decided he wanted to be an actor. “I suppose I knew I was incompetent at anything else," he laughs. But the need to earn a living saw him working first of all as an insurance clerk.
"At the same time I took evening classes in drama at the London School of Dramatic Art," he says, "and got my first jab on the stage on April Fool's Day, 1940.
"I joined the R.A.F. in 1943, came out in 1947—and started my career in the theatre all over again.”
Home for Frank and his wife, Beryl—they have a married daughter, Jane, and two grandsons—is a house in south-west London.
Working harder
"My wife and I seem to be working harder now than ever before," he says. "We have absolutely no help at all, and there's the house and the garden to look after.
"My wife is a keen gardener, and I've decorated the whole house. I'm a very good paperhanger, you know, if anybody needs me! I've got all the tools, and I restore the odd bit of furniture too."
It seems that in the new series of "Are You Being Served?" Captain Peacock has more than his share of problems.
There's a vacancy in the menswear department and so the management advertise for a junior but the only suitable applicant is Mr. Goldberg (played by Alfie Bass), who until recently owned a small tailoring business.
The fly in Captain Peacock's particular ointment is that Mr. Goldberg happened to be in the Army with him—and his memory of events is a little different to that of the gallant captain!

The series didn’t get off to an auspicious start, as we learn in this interview with the Liverpool Daily Post, Dec. 28, 1976. There are references to the British custom of Panto, a comedy stage production that may consist of some kind of fairy tale, fable or legend, aimed at both children and adults.

SO NOW IT'S ARE YOU BEING RECOGNISED?
says PHILIP KEY
SHE RETURNS breathless from a shopping expedition around Liverpool, a stylish turban atop her head. Then comes a look of alarm as she notices you have beaten her to the stage door appointment.
“Oooh . . . . I am sorry I’ve kept you waiting,” she says (she’s just one minute late). “Come up into my sitting room.”
The sitting room is a 1950’s-style effort just off her dressing room in the city’s Empire Theatre, and home for the next five weeks or so for actress Mollie Sugden.
Mollie—whose Mrs. Slocombe in the telly series Are You Being Served is one of the great comic creations—is playing her first panto season for 30 years.
And that first episode, she points out, wasn’t exactly a classic. It was at Oldham Rep, and took a week to rehearse and a week to play, she remembers.
On that occasion, she was the principal boy. This time around she’s the dame.
Mollie admits frankly that she done big-time pantomime before the simple reason being that no one bothered to ask her. Mrs Slocombe put paid to that.
This year, Liverpool wasn’t the only place that wanted her.
It all began, she says, when she appeared some years ago in the television comedy series Hugh and I as the snooty next door neighbour.
Actress and mum
Then came the Liver Birds written by Carla Lane in which writer John Chapman was called in to help work on the scripts. Carla has just created this role of Sandra’s snooty but basically working class mum.
Chapman said he knew just the person . . . and Mollie got the role.
Then when David Croft came to write department store series Are You Being Served, he too remembered Mollie.
“It’s been a tremendous,” she smiles, “but not right from the start. At one time, the cast thought the show was finished.”
Its pilot in the Comedy Playhouse series was suddenly put on the screen without publicity or warning. It was an amazing five years ago during the Olympic coverage in Munich and the tragic massacre there left a blank evening on the screens. The show was put in at the last minute.
“We really thought that was it, then it was put out again, and that time against another popular comedy series on the other side.
“But when it went on a third time it was up against something like This Week, so people thought: ‘What’s on the other side? The viewing figures shot up and they’ve been there ever since.”
It’s been quite a heady success for Mollie after years in what many would call the theatrical wilderness. She was playing what she called “small but lucrative roles”—mainly North Country women.
Now she admits gleefully to enjoying the fruits of success which includes instant recognition in the street. “Perhaps in Liverpool more than elsewhere people aren’t reticent about talking to you.
“I love it. You know, people in stores will tell me ‘ooh—we’ve got a Mrs Slocombe here, or a Mr Humphries. The only trouble is when I get home. I find I got half the things I went out for!”
Mollie is married to Coronation Street actor William Moore and has 13-year-old twin sons, all of them up in the city for Christmas.
Another funny face
She reckons she manages to combine the role of actress and mum okay, especially when she’s doing television work. “I can see the twins off to school, go and rehearse, and then they see me ironing in the evening, so I must look like a mother to them,” she laughs.
But what about those naughty lines in Are You Being Served, I wonder?
Mollie laughs again and says the great thing about Mrs Slocombe is that she realise doesn’t saying she’s naughty things with double-meanings, and that’s the way she plays it.
“The writers know just how far to go, and I’ve had people coming up to me saying: ‘Oooh, I love your show—it’s so CLEAN’.”
Mollie born in Keighley, Yorkshire, but now settled in Surrey, has had a hectic work schedule since television success.
There’s been a long summer season of the stage version in Blackpool, more filming for the Liver Birds, now the panto, and then on to making more Are You Being Served shows in February.
And although she admits to some luck in her career (“something leads to something else, and that leads on to another thing”), she’s willing to come out behind a bushel and it’s says not ALL luck.
“After all, people aren't going to be laughing at you today because you had a bit of luck 20 years ago.”
Mollie pulls another funny face—she peppers her conversation with highly amusing mugging that has you giggling most of the time—and heads off for some more rehearsal.

Perhaps the most-liked character on the show was Mr. Humphries, played by John Inman. Humphries was a “Whoops, my dears!” stereotype that didn’t go down with some gay people in the 1970s, who thought they were being ridiculed. Inman, like almost anyone in that era, was coy about his own sexuality because of homophobia but, many years later, let it be known he had been in a relationship with a man since before Are You Being Served? appeared on British television.

The difference in attitude back then can be seen by the word gay being in quotation marks (even during the mass AIDS deaths in the 1980s, a Canadian wire service insisted on using the word “homosexual” in its copy, except in direct quotes).

This story comes from the Evening Star, published in Burnley on Jan. 12, 1979.

Talking to Mr Humphries of TV fame . . .
A gentle hint from John . . .
By ALBERT WATSON
“WHETHER I’m gay or whether I’m what they call straight is nobody’s business but mine,” said John Inman. “I just get on my work, and I expect other people to do the same.”
It was a gentler rebuke than it looks in print, gentler than the dishonesty of my question—“Does it bother you that many people assume you are gay”—deserved.
But John Inman is a gentleman, and a very gentle man. Years of having the “mickey” taken have left him cautious, jealous of his privacy, but not bitter.
In voice and mannerism he is very like Mr Humphries, the dapper department store assistant he plays in the successful BBC TV comedy series “Are You Being Served?” which has been described by bisexual Elton John as “an insult to homosexuals.”
“That kind of comment really upsets me,” John Inman told me during a break in rehearsals of the show. “I don’t think I’ve done a bad turn to ‘gays’; in fact, I think I have helped to make them more acceptable.
“There is now a gay character, Mr Humphries, on a mass-appeal television show and people don’t seem to be offended by him.”
Indeed, such is the skill with which John Inman has made the character sympathetic that he frequently gets away with “gay” lines which from the mouth of many other actors would cause outrage.
“Yes,” he agrees. “but we always leave a ‘way out,’ an alternative of understanding the line. If it is too much for you, you can tell yourself that it really meant something else.”
Like Larry Grayson, with whom he can in some ways be compared, John Inman claims a high percentage of female fans. “In fact, I think I’m the only performer to have brought largely female audiences to the Windmill Theatre in London,” he says.
Inman starred for 14 months at the theatre, famous for its nude revues and sex plays, in “Let’s Get Laid” during which time “Are You Being Served?” became popular.
“When we opened, the audience was 99 per cent men; by the time I left, the men were outnumbered,” he told me.
John Inman was born in Blackpool, where he visits his mother as often as he can, and made his stage debut at the South Pier Pavilion at the age of 13.
Later in repertory theatres he tried singing and straight acting, but soon discovered that comedy was his forte.
He moved to London to appear in the stage musical “Ann Veronica,” but the inevitable “resting” periods came and, during one of them, John worked as a window dresser in a men’s store.
He says that Mr Humphries is based on people he met there, but immediately adds: “You know, people who work in stores always say how real the characters in the show are—but its never actually them.
“I have met middle-aged, well-corsetted ladies with purple hair who reckon they know a Mrs Slocombe on the next counter.”
“Are You Being Served?”—along with the spin-off movie, stage shows, and the offers John has had as a result of his success in the series—has served John Inman well.
One of the things he would like to do with his new financial security is to move from his London home into the country—but that plan is hampered by the fact that he can’t drive.
“I’ve tried,” he told me. “but I’m so nervous. I’m wet through before I get in the car—so I've given up and decided to keep death off the road. I’m a good passenger, though—I’m so ignorant of how it all works that I put complete trust in anybody clever enough to make the car go and get it around corners.”
Theatre
Occasionally this lack of mobility can be a real disadvantage, as John discovered when he turned up at an hotel in Norwich late one night and realised next morning that he didn’t know the way to the theatre in which he was to appear.
“I asked for directions and started walking,” he said, “then this Corporation dustcart stopped next to me and the driver asked for my autograph. I said ‘Swop you—my autograph for a lift to the Theatre Royal’ and that’s why I turned up at the theatre in a Corporation dustcart.
“The manager was disappointed; he said if had known he would have got the Press in.”
For the third year in succession, John Inman will be playing Mother Goose in pantomime this winter. “I don’t play her anything like Mr Humphries,” he insists, “though I do get the kids shout ‘I’m free. .’.” Next year he hopes fulfil an old ambition playing “Charley’s Aunt” on tour, and possibly in London. The part, of course, could have been written for him.
And if the BBC asks him to do yet another series of “Are You Being Served,” he will be willing, and none of this nonsense about being restricted by playing the same part for years.
Besides, he seems genuinely to like, and be liked, by the rest of the cast of the show. As our interview came to an end, Trevor Bannister, alias Mr Lucas, came into the room pointing out that the gang was going down to the pub and would John like a lift?
Assured that I had all I wanted, he replied: “I’ll be right down, Trev. Thanks a lot, love.”
And with one bound he was, dare I say it, free.

Most comedies suffer as the years go on. The dynamic wasn’t the same, nor as good in my opinion, when cast members began leaving. It may not be the best British sitcom of all time, but it still entertains audiences, and that’s the goal of any TV show.

Owl of Tomorrow

Tex Avery fills T.V. of Tomorrow (1953) with quick gags, some of them one-liners.

This example lasts five seconds. Avery supplies a darkened room. The only animation is some eye blinks and a flickering television. Narrator Paul Frees sets it up with the line: “Of course, TV does keep you up late for those night-owl shows.”



The lights quickly come up to reveal a pun.



The only animation is the flickering light from the TV. The human and owls are immobile on a background painting or cel.

Avery used five animators: Mike Lah, Ray Patterson, Bob Bentley, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons. Ed Benedict designed the characters.

Incidentally, there is no mother-in-law joke in this cartoon.

A Safe Gag

The last new Bugs Bunny cartoon shown in theatres is full of familiarity. False Hare (1964) features a wolf resembling Ralph Wolf/Wile E. Coyote (except with bloated cheeks), Mel Blanc doing his standard “nephew” voice and a bunch of gags that were variations of ones used time and time again in Warners cartoons.

Here’s one that’s a switch on the “Endearing Young Charms” gag that Friz Freleng was endeared with. Character sets up a musical trap. Bugs doesn’t do the right thing to activate the trap. Character gets frustrated with Bugs’ inability, demonstrates how to do it correctly and BAM!

In this case, Uncle Big Bad has rigged a knife to a desk clerk’s bell. When the bell is rung, it cuts a rope keeping a huge safe aloft. The safe falls on top of the ringer.

In olden days, Bugs didn’t need to have advance knowledge. He was the good guy so, naturally, the bad guy (eg. Yosemite Sam) lost. In this case, writer John Dunn has Bugs clue in by looking up and seeing the safe.



We all know where the gag is going. Bugs deliberately avoids using the little button to sound the bell.



Big Bad doesn’t hit the bell, either. His hand goes past it. That’s because the bell is on Bob Gribbroeck’s background painting. At one time, the button would be animated, but that would cost more money.



The safe doesn’t squash Big Bad, either. The cel with the safe on is slid down in front of a stationary cel of the wolf, just like in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. That saves money, too.



The cartoon was made by the Bob McKimson unit. There’s a cameo at the end by McKimson’s Foghorn Leghorn but even the dialogue, I SAY EVEN THE DIALOGUE, sets it up that you can see that coming, too. TOO, THAT IS.

Jack Benny, 1935 Version

It’s a little hard for old-radio fans to picture Jack Benny without Rochester, Dennis Day, the Maxwell and being something other than 39 years old. But not only was Benny on the air for a goodly number of years without them, he was number one in radio popularity polls.

We’re talking about the Jack Benny of 1935. Don Wilson was around then, touting the real fruit goodness of Jell-O (“twice as good as ever before”). Mary Livingstone was more prone to dizziness and poetry than sarcastic cracks of later years. At the start of the year his singer was Frank Parker, who had appeared on radio in the early ‘30s but was elevated to stardom by the Benny show. Don Bestor was his bandleader (no Phil Harris yet).

Here are two pieces marking Jack’s 190th and 200th shows, both in 1935. First up is a column from the Pittsburgh Press, July 14. Unfortunately, the broadcast mentioned is not available for listening. It aired before the Benny-Allen feud existed.

Vacation Days Are Here For Jack As Fourth Radio Series Is Ended
Benny Plans Return In Autumn With Schlepperman
By S. H. STEINHAUSER
Jack Benny, the ginger ale-automobile-tire and desert salesman, will do his 190th coast-to-coast broadcast at 7 o'clock tonight, then leave the air until September, when he will return for the same sponsor. Fred Allen will be tonight's guest star. Since May, 1932, when he made his radio debut he has had four sponsors, three of the firm names beginning with the word General but strangely enough, he has never acquired the nickname General. His friends know him as Jack. Mary Livingstone, his wife, calls him “toots” off the air and on. He calls her Sadie, because that's her name.
In almost two-hundred broadcasts, Jack has never once wavered in the slightest from wholesome fun. On an October Sunday night he started to comment on one of Frank Parker's songs "That's darn good" and his tongue slipped and he said "damn." Jack has never ceased being sorry about that. He's that kind of a person.
In every survey of the past year Jack has been voted almost unanimously radio's outstanding entertainer.
Jack's story is one of the rise of a vaudeville ham to a weekly radio salary of $6,500, a stage Income of $10,000 per week and a movie contract calling for $70,000 per picture. He has just finished one talkie and is starting another. And with their fortune, Jack and Mary remain the same folks they were when the going was not so soft. They have an apartment in New York and employ one servant. Mary likes to cook the things she knows Jack likes best. When they are at home the maid is not permitted to answer the door. They do that.
Evenings at home are "family affairs," with Gracie Allen and George Burns from across the hall in, to compare adopted babies. Drinking is at a minimum. An occasional cocktail is the limit.
Their engagement is one of the funny stories of radio. It would make an ideal skit for a broadcast. Jack was courting Mary's sister and Mary always gave Jack the bird. In fact she bribed some of her pals to go to a theater where Jack was playing and to refrain from laughing or applauding.
If you take Jack's story, on a certain Sunday he proposed to Mary, on Monday Mary said "Yes," on Tuesday the engagement was broken, on Wednesday she changed her mind, on Thursday the engagement was off again, and on Friday they were married and life became just one gag after another.
* * *
Jack's own story begins like this, "To begin with, I used to be dumb. Then Mr. Marconi invented radio and it became unpopular and I quit fiddling while a blond girl thumped a piano, to become a vocal sandwich man. It was the toughest step I ever took in my life, to rehearse in private, then to walk into a studio where everyone looked like they wanted to hang me, then to spring gags on George Olsen's band and Ethel Shutta and hope they would laugh. The waits were terrifying."
Jack skipped too much territory. His career started when his father gave him a violin and a wrench and told him to become a plumber and a violinist. By the time Benny Kubelsky (that's Jack) was 16 he had thrown the wrench away and was playing the violin in a Chicago orchestra—and he didn't play "Love in Bloom."
A year later he went professional and started a vaudeville tour with a pianist. Come the war, and Jack joined the navy. Officers who knew of his fiddling drafted him for seamen's shows. His violin got no laughs and no money for seamen's benefits, so he started to wisecrack. That was actually the beginning of one of radio's greatest careers. Jack Benny the ace clown of radio is a war product.
The war over, Jack returned to the stage, talking and telling jokes, and without his fiddle. He broke a record of eight weeks at a Los Angeles theater, landed a contract as a master of ceremonies, met Mary and her sister, married Mary. They went east on their honeymoon, were invited to a show by Earl Carroll, joined the show—the Vanities stole the show with Jack as the star and Mary acting his dumbell secretary. And there was born a radio idea—a comedian husband and a dumb wife. But if you think Mary's dumb, you're crazy. She's dumb enough to collect $1,000 per week for her radio services and Jack isn't telling how much he pays her for stage work. She keeps out of the movies.
With all of the talk, scandal and divorce business in the entertainment world, Jack and Mary are outstanding examples of the other side of the story. They are madly in love. Their eighth wedding anniversary was observed in Pittsburgh. Soon after leaving here they adopted a baby. Some day, they say, they'll adopt more.
* * *
To make his story more unusual Jack, although the star, has always made himself the goat for his associates' jokes but with all that has kept his lead on them. Yet he has added fame to the careers of Don Bestor, Frank Parker, Don Wilson and Sam Hearn "Schlepperman’s" “Jake sent me."
When Jack went to the coast he was wondering what to do about "Schlepperman." He had promised Sam Heam, portrayer of the role, that he would be needed in Hollywood within four weeks but Schlepperman never got into the skits. Jack decided that "Jake sent me" was a thing of the past for the current season. So Schlepperman went on an Eastern stage tour and is still packing them in and drawing down more than $2,000 per week.
A wire from Jack assures our readers that Schlepperman will positively rejoin him when the Benny troupe returns to work in Radio City next September. There will be a grand reunion on the first broadcast of the next series, with Frank Parker and Hearn both on the job.

But things changed. Parker got his own show on CBS and was replaced with Michael Bartlett, who didn’t last two months, then Kenny Baker was brought in. Jack was in the movies now. Bestor wanted to remain in the east so he was replaced with Johnny Green.

Jack’s 200th broadcast was on December 1. A transcription of it does not exist, but it was touted as a tribute to the first show on May 2, 1932, with current cast members re-enacting parts performed by the original players. The only thing is the premiere broadcast consisted of music, and Jack making quips to the home audience. There were no comedy routines.

The first bandleader on the show was George Olsen. The Chicago Tribune caught up with him.

We’ve reprinted an interview with Olsen from the 1950s where he took credit for Jack Benny being hired for the show. In this story, he takes credit for an idea that turned out to be a success (but disliked by the show’s sponsor). As Benny, soon with Harry Conn, wrote the Canada Dry show, and Olsen did not, you can take the claim however you want. The first show exists, and you can hear the orchestra play “That’s How We Make Music” and Olsen botch Benny’s name.

OLSEN RECALLS 1ST BENNY SHOW ON ANNIVERSARY
Idea of Kidding Sponsor Was George’s
BY LARRY WOLTERS.
Oddly enough, the New York Philharmonic Symphony; orchestra and Jack Benny are both putting on their 200th broadcast this afternoon. The symphony will present an all request program. Jack Benny will turn back the clock (6 p. m. on WENR) and recreate his very first program. In that show, Incidentally, George Olsen and Ethel Shutta were probably regarded as the stars by radio listeners since they were already well acquainted with them. But they soon decided that Benny was good, too.
George recalled some of the amusing incidents at the College inn the other evening in connection with that first broadcast. The Idea for the program was Bertha Brainerd's, the NBC executive. George and Ethel were selected to provide the music. A comedian was wanted and Benny was finally picked as one who ought to click on the air.
Kidding Product, Olsen's Idea.
And here's something for which millions of radio fans have George Olsen to thank. The idea of kidding the sponsor and the product was his. When it was suggested to the sponsor he said, “Go as far as you like." The rest, of course, is history. That suggestion has had a mighty effect in radio. In the three Intervening years the heavy, stodgy hand of many a sponsor has been eased because of the success of the foolery over the sponsor's wares initiated on the Benny program.
The first Benny show went on from the old "Midnight Frolics on the Amsterdam roof In New York In April, 1932. There was an audience, but a glass curtain separated them from the performers.
Benny Introduced as Denny.
Olsen Introduced Benny thus: “Ladies and gentlemen, Jack Denny, the Canada (pause) dry humorist." (Denny was a favorite band leader that season. What's become of him now?)
To which Jack retorted, "Jack Benny is the name, Lopez." And so the show was off amid a welter of confusion, prevailing to this day.
Ethel Shutta sang "Rockabye Moon” and "Listen to the German Band," two numbers which are almost her trade marks now. Olsen recalls that his crew played "That's How We Make Music."
In order to make the laughter spontaneous the Olsen bandsmen were not allowed to hear Benny in rehersal. In a few weeks the program became so popular that Olsen was besieged by players from other bands who wanted to join his outfit just to hear the comedy. Bob Rice who sat fairly near the microphone laughed so loudly during the first broadcast that they had to move him back. Listeners wrote in complaining that the one fellow roared so boisterously that he obviously was a stooge. But it was really the spontaneous reaction of Rice.
How Mary Got In.
Mary Livingstone didn't even see Jack's first broadcast. She listened in on the radio. She was first introduced as a New Jersey fan who had written a letter asking Benny for a job as secretary. Her first big laugh line came when Jack asked her whether he might take her home and she retorted that Dick (later Hotcha) Gardiner, one of the orchestra men, was taking her.
Ethel encouraged and coached Mary a lot. George and Ethel were working for NBC at the time and when the sponsor moved to CBS after 26 weeks because he found a better spot they were forced to drop out. Mary then took over the leading feminine part and Ted Weems was engaged to do the music.
For his first series Benny got $1,250 for two programs a week. Now he is reported getting $7,000 for one program a week. His band masters after the two mentioned above: Frank Black, Don Bestor, Jimmy Grier, and Johnny Green. Other soloists: Andrea Marsh, James Melton, Frank Parker, Michael Bartlett, and Kenny Baker.

It’s a shame so few programmes from 1935 are around to be heard. Fans have to satisfy themselves with reading the scripts, all of which are intact, and re-printed by the fine folks at BearManor Media. Editor Kathy Fuller-Seeley, about as knowledgeable as anyone about this period of Benny’s show, provides valuable insight and context.

Boris Gorelick

Such is the life of an artist that one can go from creating intense artwork of a lynching to painting a cartoon village for Speedy Gonzales to one-up Pussy Gato Sylvester.

The description applies to Warner Bros. background artist Boris Gorelick.

We tend to think of the three units at the cartoon studio as being fairly stable in the senior personnel after the shutdown ended in 1954 but there were comings and goings. It’s difficult to say when they happened because cartoons with opening credits were released more than a year after they were finished. We have to rely a bit on the Warner Club News staff newspaper but in the 1950s it stopped mentioning departures and omitted some arrivals.

Gorelick was assigned to the Freleng unit. Irv Wyner gets credit for backgrounds on Friz’s releases at the start of 1957. Several of Freleng’s cartoons do not mention a background artist, then Gorelick’s name appears on the acclaimed Birds Anonymous. He is also credited on Bugsy and Mugsy, Greedy for Tweety, Show Biz Bugs, Gonzales’ Tamales (all 1957), Hare-less Wolf and A Waggily Tale (both 1958). His name disappears and Tom O’Loughlin is credited afterward until the studio closed (and even later with DePatie-Freleng).

The Warner Club News does not mention Gorelick’s arrival. It does not list him under birthdays in its June 1956 issue, but does in June 1957. It reported in the October 1957 edition that O’Loughlin had been hired.

Gorelick’s birth year is in question. He claimed in a 1964 interview he was born in 1912. The World War Two Draft Card he signed says he was born on June 24, 1911 in Eketarinaslau, Russia. As a young child, he arrived in New York with his family; his father Aaron was a clothing designer. He has no occupation in the 1930 U.S. Census, the 1940 Census records him as “artist” and the 1950 Census gives his occupation as “artist, art school.”

By this time, he and his parents were living at 1770 North La Brea Ave. in Los Angeles. His Draft Card, dated Oct. 16, 1940, lists him as a “freelance artist.” The card has one New York address crossed out and replaced with another, which is also crossed out and an address in Los Angeles written above it. A Voters List for the 1944 election gives his La Brea address, occupation “illustrator” and his party affiliation as a Democrat. This shouldn’t be surprising, given his activist leanings. As you might imagine, the F.B.I. had a file on him, claiming as of March 1, 1961 he was a member of Club Number 2, Beverly-Fairfax Section of the Southern California District Communist Party. An unnamed informant is the source.

An extremely helpful book by Frances K. Pohl called “Of the Storm: An Art of Conscience” (Chameleon Books, 1995) gives this short biography:

BORIS GORELICK (1909—1984) was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1911. He lived in New York and studied at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League and Columbia University. Among his significant instructors were Nicholai Fechin, Sergie Soudekin, Leon Kroll, Sidney Dickinson, and Hugh Breckinridge. Gorelick received a Tiffany Scholarship and studied for a while at Oyster Bay, Long Island, as well as at the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Like Ribak and others of his generation, Gorelick was employed in the early 1930s by the Morgan Committee—a philanthropic organization set up during the early years of the Depression that paid artists to decorate New York City churches and synagogues. Gorelick and others from he hundred or so artists on the Morgan team were the core group behind the formation of the Artists Union, which in turn was instrumental in fomenting the Federal Art Project under the wing of the Works Progress Administration. Gorelick was president of the Artists Union for a number of years, contributed to the union’s journal, Art Front, and addressed the American Artists’ Congress in February of 1936. In 1933, he was involved in Treasury Section murals at Riker’s Island and King’s County Hospital with Michael Loew and O. Louis Guglielmi. Gorelick was a member of the New York lithography workshop from its inception, and in 1935—36, traveled to Phoenix to set up the local FAP school of art and design there. He moved to California in 1942, and during the war, did industrial design for Lockheed and the Hughes Corporation. Around 1945, Gorelick began working in the movie idustry as an animator and designer. He taught part-time at the Otis Art Institute and was involved in several mural projects for leading California architectural firms. Sources: Archives of American Art: Betty Hoag interview, May 20, 1964; Park and Markowitz, New Deal for Art, pp. 9, 88; Fowler, New Deal Art, p. 46.

The 1964 interview mentioned above reveals he started at UPA as a designer. Film Daily announced his hiring in its issue of August 13, 1945. Among the industrial shorts he worked on were Brotherhood of Man (1946), the oil industry propaganda film Man on the Land (1951) and the cancer warning short Man Alive! (1952). He continued his activism; the 1946 through 1948 Year Book(s) of Motion Pictures list him as a member of the executive council of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization (along with Chuck Jones), representing the Screen Cartoonists Guild. When the interview was conducted he was working for Ade Woolery’s Playhouse Pictures.

We’ll jump back to animation in a moment.

A 1936 newspaper story from New York reports a Gorelick piece called “Circus Wagon” (evidently a water colour) was on display at the Federal Art Project Gallery (7 East 39th St.). Perhaps his most important work was “Strange Fruit.” Pohl’s book not only reprinted the lithograph, but told its story.

A final example of the numerous images of lynchings that appeared in the 1930s is Boris Gorelick’s Strange Fruit (1939). Gorelick chose to present his condemnation of lynching in a surreal, dreamlike—or, one could say, nightmarish—manner. The title of Gorelick’s work comes from a poem written by Abel Meeropol (a k a Lewis Al1en) in 1936, which was turned into a song first performed by Billie Holiday. The first verse reads:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

The origin of the print was not, however, the text of this song. It was, instead, a newspaper story of a lynching Gorelick came across in the 1930s. In a letter he says:

I tried to incorporate and juxtapose all of the known facts of the event as reported. However, I meant it to be more than “Graphic Reportage.” It was a personal statement of outrage and protest. The story shown is of a young Negro, in the dark of night in Mississippi, snatched from his bed and family by the local sheriff and his posse, and dragged to the jail-house where the keys are thrown to a waiting mob of klansmen who lynch him by hanging him from the nearest tree. His body is later found by his wife and buried by his family and friends. It is a cry from the grave.” [Gorelick, Aug. 30, 1976, quoted in Marlene Park’s Lynching and Antilynching, pp. 349-50]

Through distortions of scale, macabre shadows, and exaggerated gestures, Gorelick achieves his “personal statement of outrage and protest.” The body of the lynched man in the center of the Composition is both present and absent: it dissolves into dust before our eyes, the dust falling into a waiting coffin; it casts two shadows, one to the left and one below on the ground. The right side of the composition is filled with grotesque hooded figures and threatening trees. On the left the lynched man’s family and friends lay him to rest. In the center of the image are the keys, symbolic of the betrayal of justice that lynching embodies. The print is a compendium of the iconography of lynching that appeared with such frequency in the works of artists, African American and white, during the 1930s.

If you wish to see Strange Fruit, it is reproduced here. A web search will direct you to some of his other works. Here are two. The first one is “Flood,” the second “The Case Of...” both from the 1930s.



In the early 1950s, newspapers mentioned some of murals that Gorelick designed and painted. He created the backdrop for Penelope at the Players Ring Theater. Ann St. John’s column in the Hollywood Citizen-News of Aug. 7, 1952 included this:

The new Brazilian Room of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel made its bow with a cocktail party showing off its new dress. It’s bound to be a popular rendezvous, for it has the lush intimacy so desirable in such a spot. We had quite a chat with Artist Boris Gorelick, who did the murals, a delightful fellow with a sense of humor. He was proudest of the fact that the Brazilian consul told him his scenes have “the feel of Brazil.” “When I finished the French Room murals recently in the Fairmont Hotel in Phoenix [sic], people asked me how long I had lived in Paris,” Mr. Gorelick recalls. He was born in New York and has never been in either place. “It’s a matter of research,” he says. “I find it all in the library.” It’s worth a trip just to look at them.

In the mid-1960s, he taught art on a freelance basis. He had one class at the Westside Jewish Community Center, and another in life drawing sponsored by the Palos Verdes Community Arts Association. 1967 was also the year Gorelick joined other Democrats in signing an open letter in the Los Angeles Times to President Johnson demanding an immediate American pull-out from Vietnam.

As for animation, it’s unclear what Gorelick did immediately after leaving Warner Bros. He found work painting backgrounds on the UPA feature 1001 Arabian Nights (1959), then was hired on April 12, 1960 to do the same (with former UPA artist Jules Engel) for Jack Kinney’s studio making Popeye cartoons for television (1960). Kinney was tied in with Herb Klynn’s Format Films, and when Format was picked to make The Alvin Show the following year, Gorelick was among the background artists. Other jobs included Linus the Lionhearted (1964, the series was originally made on the West Coast) and various shows for Filmation.

Gorelick died July 27, 1984.

For interest’s sake, here are frames from his background work at Warners, following the layouts by Hawley Pratt.


Birds Anonymous


Mugsy and Bugsy


Greedy for Tweety


Show Biz Bugs


Gonzales' Tamales


Hare-Less Wolf


A Waggily Tale

Gorelick shows a varied pallette of colours and I suspect Pratt was pleased to have someone who had worked at UPA to paint his more modern designs. Though he worked on the Oscar-winning Birds Anonymous, with Warren Foster’s story gently satirising some aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous, I’d like to think of Gorelick as a fighter of racism and social injustice through art.

Zooming Owl Head

The Van Beuren Studio’s original idea of a sound Fables cartoon was to make them just like a silent Fables, but add a music track in the background. A great example is Summertime, released in 1929. There’s no attempt to match mouth movements to voices, or much real dialogue at all. I get the impression sound effects were recorded when musicians and others watching the cartoon made appropriate noises when they saw something on the screen.

The only attempt at synchronisation is when a mouse jumps on piano keys to play the first four notes of “How Dry I Am.”

However, this short has something that was a staple at Van Beuren for a few years—a head zooming toward the camera. In this instance, it’s a sleeping owl disturbed by a squirrel outside enthusiastically cheering a performance of “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a 1914 song written by Walter Donovan and Arthur Fields. The owl kind of hoots (see the lines coming out of its mouth) then the head retreats.



Musical notes fade on and off the screen while being played by a frog and a monkey (in the woods?) while the words “Hooray!” “H-ray!” appears when the squirrel shouts. This may seem superfluous but there were still theatres not equipped for sound, vainly hoping it was a fad and they wouldn’t have to spend money on equipment to pipe in the noise.

Other songs in Carl Edouarde’s score include “The Arkansas Traveler” (played by the frog on a mushroom), “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” (mice clarinet/spring sequence), and “Fire! Turn the Hose on Me” by Richard Whiting and Byron Gay, composed in 1926 (Farmer Al looks at thermometer, sun zooms in).

John Foster and Harry Bailey get the “by” credit.