Alan Woollcombe writes, regarding this video link from the other day…
A little bit of film trivia here: the universal reaction in our household to your Jack Benny/Liberace clip was "Hey, that's Richard Wattis!"
Who?
Well, speaking from a British perspective, we didn't have Jack Benny or Liberace on our TV screens in England in the 60s (though most knew who Liberace was). What we did have was the tail end of a great British film comedy boom, and one of the principal character actors was Richard Wattis, who makes a fleeting appearance in your Benny/Liberace clip here as the butler. He did a great line in exasperated officialdom (he was in the St Trinian's films as a man from the Ministry of Education) as well as snooty butlers. When British comedy migrated from the big screen to the small, Wattis largely disappeared from view — at least to British audiences. Interesting to see that he made it onto American TV. Was he a regular on either Benny's or Liberace's shows?
If you have any more Wattis clips — with or without that showoff piano player or disgruntled violinist — do let us see them. The man was an unsung genius at what he did.
I don't have any other clips. I don't even have that one. I just linked to it on YouTube, where I believe it's a preview of an upcoming DVD release of Liberace's TV work. Mr. Wattis certainly wasn't a regular on Benny's shows and I'm not familiar enough with Liberace's to know if he made appearances in other episodes. (For that matter, I don't know if the program was taped here or in Great Britain. In the late sixties and seventies, a lot of American TV shows taped over there for no other reason than that it was cheaper.) In any case, Wattis sounds like my favorite kind of comic actor. I'll keep an eye out for him elsewhere.