Back in this post, we linked to a video commercial for the short-lived revival of You Bet Your Life with Buddy Hackett trying to fill the stool of Groucho Marx. It recently brought this message from Eric Burns-White…
I'm a bit out of date — I've been ill — and so I'm making up several weeks on your blog. And I just reached the December 12 link to the Buddy Hackett You Bet Your Life incarnation from 1980. You asked if we knew about it.
Well, for me, Buddy Hackett's You Bet Your Life is the definitive, because it's the one I saw. And it harkens back to another illness. See, in 1980, I was 12 years old. Just old enough to have a nasty bout of — I think — tonsillitis. Not so nasty that I had to have them out, but nasty enough that for a couple of weeks I was desperately ill and stayed in bed. At the foot of that bed was a television, and we were in the odd situation of having really good cable (I grew up in Fort Kent, Maine. As we only received one American commercial station, plus one English Canadian one, two French Canadian stations and PBS, we got cable significantly before markets with lots of overlapping signals.) And every morning, around 11 am, You Bet Your Life with Buddy Hackett came on the television, on WVII TV out of Bangor, if I recall correctly.
This was a new kind of Buddy Hackett for me. I was young enough that I only rarely saw Buddy Hackett on Carson or the like, and I think I managed to miss his appearances on Merv or Mike Douglas or John Davidson. So for me, Buddy Hackett was the guy from the Disney movies — the one who acted a bit like an Idiot Savant and blowtorched bits of Herbie while Dean Jones tried to win the race. And here Hackett was, funny and as dirty as syndicated television would let him be, making jokes and mocking the duck and taking on the contestants.
I was enthralled. A lifelong love of the nightclub humor of Buddy Hackett was born of that illness — to the point that I was kind of stunned as an adult and saw Hackett was sometimes in the Disney films I had originally associated with him. How someone could take four letter words and double-entendres away from Hackett was beyond me.
Seeing that bit of Youtube, still recovering from an illness in my 40's, puts me right back in the person of that sick 12 year old boy who had his understanding of comedy expanded by the irrepressible Buddy Hackett all those years back. As I got older and fell in love with what's now called vintage or classic radio and television, I got to know the original Groucho Marx YBYL and I'd seen (and not been terribly impressed with) the Bill Cosby version, and there were days I wondered if I were the only one to remember Buddy Hackett's turn with the secret word. Thanks for letting me know I'm not.
Buddy Hackett was an interesting guy…in some ways, the last of a breed. He was darn near the last guy who would just get on a stage in Vegas and tell funny stories of the "Two Jews walk into a bar…" variety. But he was also a pretty good comic actor and a good enough ad-libber that his game show should have worked. I suspect it was done in by bad time slots and clearances. There was a period there where syndicators were all trying to establish a game show hit in the 11 PM time slot as an alternative to the local news. None of them ever caught on, and the Hackett You Bet Your Life was largely pushed for that slot, as I recall.
Turning to other matters: The other day, I linked to an odd video clip of The McLean Stevenson Show. I didn't know why someone had made an edited version of it with the opening, closing and commercials but without the episode itself. Brad Ferguson figured it out…
It's most likely an aircheck from WNBC-TV in New York. The station was making a record of the commercials it ran during the Stevenson show. It shows agencies that all their ads had been run as scheduled and without glitches, so pay the bill already. There was no reason to archive the program content. The reason your credit is there is because they'd run just enough of the opening of an episode of something to be able to identify it, which in effect would time-stamp it. That was most easily done by letting the credits roll.
Stations usually didn't keep airchecks for very long. Somebody out there must really be into McLean Stevenson.
Thanks, Brad. And it turns out that a reader of this site actually has a recording of the entirety of that episode so he's making me a copy. I'll get to find out what it was about.
A couple of folks wrote me messages like this one from G. Hallaran…
Since you worked on the show McLean Stevenson did after leaving M*A*S*H, maybe you can answer this question I've always wondered about. What the hell was he thinking? He left the best sitcom in history for a steady stream of the worst. Was the money that good for playing Hello Larry?
I only met McLean Stevenson on a few occasions (and not at all while Dennis and I wrote that episode) but I think I can give you an answer. It came down to a number of things, not the least of which was a feeling that he was sinking forever into the Supporting Actor category on M*A*S*H and that if he was ever going to move up to full stardom, that was the time. He also had some ugly battles with "the suits" (I think that's what he called them) at Twentieth-Century Fox, producers of M*A*S*H. Fox was a pretty cheap outfit and they really didn't like it when the show was a hit and Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers renegotiated for a lot more money. They seem to have taken their frustration out on McLean, treating him as a lot more expendable that he probably was.
At the time, Stevenson was having some problems of anger and temperament, and he got to really dislike the studio and vice-versa. He had a particularly nasty fight with them one morning when the show was going on location to shoot exteriors. It was a cold morning, the crew and craft services truck were late, and Stevenson blew up at the shoddy way he and the cast were being treated and, he said, practically walked off the show then and there.
At that point, one thing was going quite right in Stevenson's life. He was occasionally guest-hosting The Tonight Show and doing a darn good job of it. At the time, there seemed to be a very good chance that Johnny Carson was about to step down. In fact, there are those who claim Carson actually did quit and meant it but that he was persuaded to re-up before the news got out. NBC was talking about McLean as a possible replacement, and that had a lot to do with him deciding to jump networks and sign that NBC contract. If he'd wound up replacing Carson on The Tonight Show, leaving M*A*S*H wouldn't look like such a foolish move now, would it?
Since he didn't get Johnny's job, it was back to the sitcoms…and from there on, I think it was just a matter of the wrong shows or maybe the right shows done wrong. Good actors sometimes make bad movies or TV shows and it isn't always their fault. The trick is to keep the ratio under control and he obviously wasn't able to do that. I suspect there was a wonderful sitcom he could have done after M*A*S*H that would have capped his career in a different, more positive way. He just never managed to find it.