Ethel and Albert
Ethel and Albert (aka The Private Lives of Ethel and Albert) was a radio and television comedy series about a married couple, Ethel and Albert Arbuckle, living in the small town of Sandy Harbor. Created by
Radio historian
The show began as three-minute filler between a pair of Minnesota KATE station programs, then expanded to 15 minutes, and finally became a half-hour show during its last years on radio. Like Easy Aces, the humor on Ethel and Albert was low key; like Vic and Sade, it was constructed around such simple, often mundane household situations as efforts to open a pickle jar. Often Ethel or Albert attempted to prove the other wrong over some inconsequential matter. For example, one entire script centered on Ethel's disputing Albert's claim that he could see her using only his peripheral vision. "I realized that I didn't have to sit down and knock myself out every minute to try to think of something funny," Lynch told critic Leonard Maltin years later. "All I had to do was look around me."
Two film stars had a presence in the show.
Television
Peg Lynch brought her series to television as a continuing 15-minute segment on The Kate Smith Hour during the 1952–53 season. Lynch admitted years later that she wasn't happy with the move. "Ethel and Albert was a quiet show," she told Nachman, "and I was not a stage person who was accustomed to performing in front of an audience, as comedians are. And I always felt it spoiled my timing. I would have to hold up for the laugh."[1]
The radio program about peripheral vision was only one of the radio scripts that Lynch rewrote for television. The Ethel and Albert television series was launched on NBC (April 25, 1953 – December 25, 1954). It moved to CBS (June 20, 1955 – September 26, 1955) as a summer replacement for December Bride and ended its television life on ABC (October 14, 1955 – July 6, 1956).
Scripts, kinescopes, financial documents and correspondence from the show are contained in the Peg Lynch Collection at the Knight Library at the University of Oregon.[2] Several episodes of the television version also survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
The Couple Next Door
The Couple Next Door was a similar Peg Lynch radio series which aired on CBS Radio during the waning days of network radio, (December 30, 1957 – November 25, 1960) with Margaret "Peg" Lynch and Alan Bunce as the married couple. Essentially, it reprised Ethel and Albert, but the new name was necessitated because Lynch had lost the rights to the original title. The CBS iteration was named Best Daytime Radio Program for 1959 by The National Association for Better Radio and Television.
Lynch and Bunce brought the program to NBC's weekend
Very few of the original Ethel and Albert radio programs are known to have survived, but almost all of the CBS Couple Next Door episodes exist. Lynch authorized a CD release of 12 Ethel and Albert vignettes from Monitor.
The theme music for The Couple Next Door is "Miss Melanie" by British composer Ronald Binge.
References
- ^ a b Nachman, Gerald. Raised on Radio. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
- ^ "Other Events | Event Categories | Cinema Studies | Page 9". Archived from the original on 2015-06-20. Retrieved 2015-07-31.
Sources
- Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio Comedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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