Platoon, Hup!

With its cover date of one hundred years hence, and content drawn from the science-fiction imagined worlds of Gerry Anderson, the comic TV21 seems like a strange place to encounter the character of Sgt. Ernest Bilko, late of Fort Baxter, Roseville, Kansas; but it was here, in the autumn of 1967, that I first became properly aware of the character.

TV21 had always contained a number of funny pages, usually based on popular American television comedies of the era. My Favourite Martian was there from week one, slickly drawn by Bill Titcombe; and although I have never to this day seen an episode from the series (haphazardly shown across the ITV regions and never troubling our screens here in the Midlands), it always felt like a good fit with TV21’s sci-fi slant. By the same token, Mel Brooks’ spy-spoof Get Smart, debuting on BBC One in October 1965, played well alongside TV21’s spy in residence, ‘Agent 21’. The Get Smart strip, drawn by artist Tom Kerr, made its debut in January 1966, along with The Munsters. So far, so good. But hold on, Sgt. Bilko? How does he fit into the TV21 melting pot? And, as Colonel Hall might add, staring bemusedly into the middle distance,‘why?’

* * *

The Phil Silvers Show had debuted on British television in 1957, quickly becoming a perennial favourite, and retaining a place in the primetime schedules until well into the next decade. Late in 1966, BBC One began a repeat season variously billed as ‘Bilko Returns’ and ‘The Best of Bilko’. The episodes did exactly what it said in the Radio Times, presenting a selection of classic episodes drawn from across the show’s four seasons, but leaning heavily on the superior first and second years. After a short lay-off, these broadcasts recommenced in April 1967. The early evening timeslot, placed directly after the news, meant that the series registered, if only dimly, on my personal TV radar, although I didn’t really take much notice at the time. It was only when I saw it later in TV21 that I remembered the barrack-room comedy I’d seen snatches of several months earlier. The masthead photos also served as a reminder that the strip’s origins were on television, as did the Columbia Broadcasting System copyright credit at the bottom of the page. 

Bilko’s presence in TV21 was almost certainly a result of those 1966-67 repeats. The series filled a gap between the second series of Get Smart and the return of The Munsters. Someone in the TV21 office must have been keeping tabs on both titles, and when Bilko hove into view, his place in the comic was assured, albeit short-lived: Ernie’s first appearance was in issue 139, with a cover date of September 16, 1967, just two weeks before a facelift that would see the introduction of Gerry Anderson’s latest series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Missing a single week (issue 153), Bilko continued in TV21 until its next revamp at the end of the year, clocking up 14 strips in all. Once again, Tom Kerr was on artwork duty, and provided some passable likenesses of Bilko and Colonel Hall. Of the other platoon members, only Doberman was recognisable, although Paparelli was often referred to, despite his likeness bearing no resemblance to actor Billy Sands. The single-page strips were, of necessity, very simple, but stuck to the series’ formula of involving Bilko in various finagling get-rich-quick schemes and gambling.

Bilko's first appearance in TV21 (September 1967)

By the time he was given his marching orders from TV21, Bilko had also departed the small screen, for a lay-off that would last six years: no episodes were shown between March 1967 and April 1973. When he returned, it was in what would become the series’ best known timeslot, late Saturday night, once considered a graveyard slot, but latterly revered for its ‘post-pub’ potential. Despite being recognised as a ‘thing’ only relatively recently, the ‘back from the pub’ effect almost certainly helped to foster a revival of interest in Bilko, with episodes in this time slot scoring notably higher ratings than might have been expected. A tradition was born: Sgt. Bilko would retain his Saturday night commission (with occasional sideways moves into the Sunday/Monday small hours) for another ten years. I was well aware of these late night repeats, but even on Saturdays, they felt a little too late for me. I didn’t know then what I was missing.

A fact which surfaced occasionally in my readings on the subject of vintage television around this time concerned what might be called the ‘DNA’ of Hanna-Barbera’s series Top Cat, which had been a long-time favourite since childhood. Now and then, I would come across the suggestion that Top Cat’s format and characters had been derived from Sgt. Bilko. Every time I turned up this fact, I made a mental note to check out Sgt. Bilko some time, if only to play the game of ‘spot the voice artiste’.There seemed no hurry to do so: a casual glance at the Radio Times on any given week usually revealed Bilko to be present and correct in his customary place in the schedule; a reliability record that Colonel Hall would have found it hard to credit...

During 1980, I must have stumbled on the old Top Cat fact again, because it was on Saturday 7 June of that year that I finally burned the midnight oil, staying up to the ungodly hour of 12.15am to take in my first ever episode of Sgt. Bilko, which aired that night at 11.50. The Radio Times had long since stopped printing episode titles, but I accidentally ‘invented’ the correct title when making the entry in my diary: The Song of the Motor Pool. (The diary also notes, with an exclamation mark, that the episode’s copyright date was 1956, making it the oldest programme being shown on television at the time.) As Bilko episodes go, it’s not in the first rank, but it came from the second series (which I would later come to revere as the show’s ‘golden era’), and the plot, concerning an attempt to win a cash prize for composing an original platoon song, was classic Bilko fodder.

The Top Cat connection was immediately apparent when I heard the voice of Doberman, instantly recognisable as Benny the Ball, whose rotund physique also recalled the appearance of actor Maurice Gosfield – a name I recognised from Top Cat’s end credits. The rest of the platoon vaguely suggested Top Cat’s other cohorts, while the authority figure of Colonel Hall became Officer Dibble. As to Bilko himself, it was clear that, in the lead vocal role, Arnold Stang had based his T.C. peformance on that of Silvers, but it was more than mere imitation. Curiously, I know people who love Top Cat but can’t get on at all with Sgt. Bilko...

The next episode I caught, on 5 July, was Bilko’s War Against Culture, which saw the Sarge counteracting the influence of a Cultural Officer who arrives on the post with the aim of taking the men’s minds off gambling. With Bilko’s influence, her lectures soon provide ripe fodder for betting. A further episode followed on 26 July, and a couple were missed through clashes with other late-night shows (The Outer Limits and a horror film). Thereafter, a lull intervened, with no further episodes airing until a single night in October. By the time a more organised run of repeats began early in 1981, I now had the means to capture the series on video tape, and the 25-minute episodes provided a neat way of filling up the blank space at the ends of 3-hour tapes. VHS also meant that, when an episode proved to be a classic (The Twitch, Empty Store, Eating Contest, Rest Cure, Sick Call Ernie), I could watch it again and again. Which is why, today, and without looking it up, I can tell you the average weight of Richardson’s Owl...*

The 1970s and 80s repeats of Bilko were a completely random collection of episodes, initially deriving from the first and second series, but delving into the third and fourth years as time wore on. Later episodes were instantly identifiable from Bilko’s headgear: his peaked cap, pale khaki in the first two series, was now in ‘dress uniform’ dark green (or grey as we saw it on TV). It wasn’t long before I began to notice a slight decline in quality from the high water mark of series two, with episodes often replaying earlier plot devices, generally to poorer effect. There was also less of Bilko’s so-called ‘fatal flaw’, an empathic side to his character that saw him back off when he realised a money-making scheme would cause hurt or upset. On the other side of the fence, Colonel Hall gradually became less of a bumbler, and was sharper in picking up the scent of another Bilko scheme.

One week, an episode turned up which I guessed – correctly, as it turned out – to be the last ever produced. Weekend Colonel sees Bilko employing a lookalike of Colonel Hall to get round camp regulations, a scheme which ends up with the Sergeant and his cohorts Henshaw and Barbella behind bars and monitored on closed-circuit TV. In a deliberately ironic piece of dialogue, the Colonel, gazing at his TV set, remarks: “It's a wonderful show, and as long as I'm the sponsor, it will never be cancelled.” Bilko the series wasn't as lucky, and without the Colonel's sponsorship, was cancelled at the end of its fourth season, seemingly on account of the actors’ payroll – maintaining such a large cast can’t have come cheap. In America, the series immediately sold into syndication on rival network NBC, who reportedly did well out of the deal. Here in Britain it remained on BBC television, where as we’ve seen, repeats would endure initially until the mid 60s. Over on ITV, Phil Silvers’ replacement vehicle – imaginatively titled The New Phil Silvers Show, tried but failed to transplant the Bilko formula from barrack room to factory floor.

Back in the 1980s, I was amassing dozens of Bilko episodes on tape, some of which would be played time and time again. I was still relying on made-up titles to tell the episodes apart, and eventually, in search of some better information, I visited Birmingham’s old Central Reference Library, where a complete run of Radio Times resided in the stack. These soon furnished me with proper titles and a good overview of the series’ broadcast history in Britain. BBC repeats remained a cross-series grab bag until 1984, when, in recognition of the show’s continuing popularity (and the surprisingly high ratings of the late-night broadcasts), a new time slot was found: 6.15 on BBC2. This must have been a little too early for some: indeed, I could rarely get home from work in time myself, but video saved the day. This repeat run, prefaced by a short Bilko documentary (narrated, somewhat incongruously, by Kenneth Williams), finally presented the episodes in their original, American first-run order. With 142 episodes to get through, it would prove hard to keep track of the repeats, and I’m afraid I never quite did. Many years later, I was still turning up episodes like Bilko the Potato Sack King (series 4, episode 4) that had sat unwatched on the shelf for decades.

When DVD arrived to supplant VHS as the home entertainment medium of choice, Bilko seemed like a certainty for release: a video edition would have been simply too much bulk to contemplate, but on DVD, the four series could be accommodated across a more modest number of discs. It was a long time coming – first we got a ‘best of’ compilation, followed by a standalone series one. Eventually, the long hoped for complete set emerged, and while there were noticeable quality issues with the encode (and, in some cases, poor source material), we did at last have all four series within our grasp. I still haven’t got through all the episodes... 

Back on the BBC, repeats of Bilko continued into the 90s and beyond. By this time, I’d given up trying to keep track of the episodes, which were now liable to turn up almost anywhere in the schedule. But even the greatest TV series of all time has to end somewhere, and after fifty two years on air, Bilko drew his last breath on terrestrial television on Bonfire Night 2004 with the episode Bilko and the Flying Saucers. (My own summary of Bilko’s BBC career can be found on Wikipedia where I posted the results of various Genome trawls around five years ago).

Bilko may be over sixty years old, and its production limitations all too apparent on screen, but it is still, for me, the single funniest television series ever created. Highlights are too numerous to list, but honorable mentions must go to Rest Cure – for the funniest scene ever mounted (Colonel Hall’s barnyard imitation: a scene so funny you can tell where it was edited because everyone on set surely cracked up) – and Bilko’s TV Idea: arguably the first example of post modernism on television and a sharp dig at the clichés of the ‘comedy situation’ at a time when the genre was still in its infancy.

I’ll take even the poorest Bilko episode in preference to anything that modern TV has to offer: and while Bilko may hail from an age when different values held sway, it is refreshingly free from the kind of casual, cheap racism and sexism that provided so much fodder for so-called comedians of the same era. Nat Hiken, the series creator, was, simply, a comedy genius, who had an extraordinary facility for creating mini-comic masterpieces. Bilko is, simply, better than anything else, before or since; even the revered Fawlty Towers cowers in its shadow. It will never be bettered...

A museum dedicated to the career of Phil Silvers can be found, somewhat unexpectedly, in Coventry:

www.sgtbilkosvintageemporium.com

(* Three pounds, six ounces: It’s For the Birds)

'It must be funny, the grown-ups are laughing'

 

Growing up with comedy

It may seem surprising – indeed, it surprised even myself when I realised it – but the first comedies I remember seeing on television were all American: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Car 54, Where Are You, Bewitched, The Beverley Hillbillies. Of contemporary British sitcoms – The Rag Trade, Marriage Lines, Bootsie and Snudge, etc – I have no recollection whatsoever. Was there a reason for this? Were American comedies more plentiful in the early 1960s? Were they scheduled at times when I would have been more likely to see them?

Taking a popular British sitcom of the era as a baseline – Steptoe and Son – we find that, around 1965, it was being shown at a typical timeslot of 8pm: quite late for me as a four-year-old, but hardly post-watershed; by 1965 it was on even earlier (7.30pm) and it is around this time that I first became aware of the series: although I didn’t sit down to watch an episode until much later. Curiously, I remember taking note of the show because it was being promoted on air as the end of an era: the current series was to be the last, a fact which prompted comment from my parents and grandparents. The programme trail – containing clips from the episode Those Magnificent Men and Their Heating Machines – is my earliest memory of this iconic series, and dates, I believe, to a Sunday evening in the autumn of 1965, with the trail promoting the following night’s broadcast.

So, I knew something of Steptoe and Son, but what of, say, Tony Hancock? Like many other series of the very early 60s, Hancock remained well off my personal radar until much later. I have the vaguest recollection of my dad commenting regretfully on his passing in 1968, but the name meant nothing to me at the time. Of ITV’s crop of comedies, the only one I knew at all was Just Jimmy, the televisual vehicle for diminutive Lancashire child impersonator Jimmy Clitheroe, and then only on account of its family-friendly teatime slot on ABC television. Clitheroe was also familiar from Sunday afternoon radio broadcasts; but in spite of the plethora of comedy emanating from the ‘wireless’ at this time, I remained oblivious to almost all of it.

It’s safe to say that, at the age of four or five, I didn’t understand comedy in anything other than in the broadest, slapstick terms. Laurel and Hardy had been broadcast on BBC television since 1947, and their antics were familiar to me from an early age, alongside Bob Monkhouse’s Mad Movies, a weekly showcase for silent-era knockabout comedy from the Mack Sennett stable. But sitcoms?

American imports certainly lay thick on the ground in the early 60s, if only because studios were able to crank them out in such quantity and on film, which lent itself to broadcasting in the UK without the compatibility issues that would dog later, colour VT shows from the States. The Dick Van Dyke Show was very familiar to me, and it had the advantage of a relatively early evening timeslot, having moved from 8.50pm to 7.35pm early in 1964. By May 1966 it could be seen even earlier, at 7.05pm. I must have seen (or sat in front of) plenty of these, although the only things that remain in my memory are his comedy tumble in the opening credits, and his portrait beneath the closing captions. I do, however, remember a kind of warm, happy feeling that this show seemed to exude, although I can’t detect any of this from looking at a sample episode today – the humour is fairly forced, although DVD himself is amusing to watch.

Also around ‘64 or ‘65, I got to see a show with some serious comedy credentials: Car 54, Where Are You came from Bilko creator Nat Hiken, and featured as its leads two comic actors who had both been seen in the Phil Silvers Show – Joe E Ross had memorably portrayed luckless Sgt. Ritzik across three seasons, whilst Fred Gwynn (later to achieve immortality in the role of Herman Munster) had been in two episodes as the preternaturally gifted but downbeat Ed Honegar. Car 54... was, mysteriously, scheduled during children’s programming hours, with a slot at 5.25pm, which explains how I got to see it. I’m not sure I even twigged it was meant to be funny, although the laughter track (a subject I will return to in a future post) must have provided a clue.

Another familiar show from the same era was Bewitched, although this tended to air in a later timeslot, debuting at 8pm in October 1964. Despite this handicap, I’m sure I saw at least the cartoon title sequence at this date, with full episodes coming a little later: by July 1966, Samantha and co had landed in the more kiddy-friendly slot of 7.35pm. Again, I remember the same sense of cosy, domestic warmth that Bewitched gave off. I’m even convinced that I acquired my love of mid-century interiors from watching this and The Dick Van Dyke Show: barring the obligatory big telly, my living room of 2021 could have been set-dressed for a revival of either.

Aside from these few grown-up examples, the place for humour on TV at the age of five or six was cartoons: and with their laughter tracks, Hannah-Barbera’s offerings like Top Cat and The Huckleberry Hound Show were a kind of sitcom for kids. But again, we’re looking at American imports. When, exactly, did British comedy – specifically, the sitcom – arrive in my life?

Aside from the aforementioned Jimmy Citheroe, the earliest example of a British-made situation comedy that I know I watched – and enjoyed – at the time of its first appearance, was Oh Brother! This was a monsatic comedy vehicle for Derek Nimmo, whose slightly effete, fluting-voiced performance struck me as funny at the age of seven (the series debuted as part of the BBC’s autumn season in 1968) but now is beyond endurance. That same autumn, ITV gave us Please, Sir! which quickly became established as a favourite in our house. It was somewhat too old for me, but I could just about relate to the schoolroom setting.

The actual experience of watching comedy as a child is interesting: taking an example like On the Buses, I was immune to most of the smutty innuendo, but I could still appreciate the comic qualities of a character like Inspector Blake. Watching sitcom in childhood was often a case of ‘the grown-ups are laughing, so it must be funny’: even if I didn’t quite get what everyone was laughing at. And, as previously mentioned, there was a feelgood quality to shows like Bewitched that you could still appreciate even if you couldn’t understand the gags.

* * *

By the dawn of the 1970s, American comedies were losing ground on British screens, with the BBC ditching almost all of its examples, the few that survived the cull being relegated to Sunday afternoons (Here’s Lucy) or late nights (Bilko). ITV offered the likes of Nanny and the Professor, but it was deemed kiddie-fare and scheduled accordingly, whilst others, such as Jimmy Stewart’s belated entry into the sitcom arena, were thwarted by regional variations in scheduling. By this time, though, ITV ruled the airwaves as regards home-grown sitcoms, with a slew of what would prove to be enduring titles rolled out from the late 60s through to the mid-70s: On the Buses, Man About the House, Rising Damp, George and Mildred, Father, Dear Father.

The working-class credentials of many of these titles was a clear factor in their popularity. The BBC had rejected On the Buses and seemed reluctant to abandon the decidedly middle-class arena it had carved out for itself in the genre – a trend that can be traced back to the likes of Marriage Lines (1964) and was still in favour by the mid 70s – cf. The Good Life, Butterflies and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Steptoe and Son, of course, was a very notable exception...

Class distinctions didn’t make any difference to me: I was only interested in series that made me laugh. By the age of 10, my tastes were expanding to accommodate the anarchy of Marty Feldman, whose Comedy Machine was a staple of Saturday nights, and Bob Todd’s forgotten lavatorial sitcom In for a Penny. That same year (1971) I discovered The Goodies, which finally breached the gap between the madcap slapstick of cartoons, and the verbal humour of the sitcom. It was a golden age for comedy on television, an era in which considerations of taste and decency were kept at arm’s length, and comedy dampers like political correctness and ‘wokeness’ lay decades distant, allowing us to enjoy unfettered nonsense without any self-righteous finger-wagging. But that was then...

Looked back on, much vintage comedy looks outrageously ill-advised and offensive: and scripts are often lazily reliant on cliché, where they aren’t simply unfunny. But such is the nature of reality: things change, ideas evolve, we move on. Whether modern comedy is still funny or not is a different question entirely, and clearly a matter of personal choice and taste. I just know that much of what I see or hear presented today as comedy (especially anything broadcast post-10pm on Radio 4 Extra) seldom raises a smile and is frequently annoying (cf. John Finnemore).

I’ve found, in fact, that I seek out comedy less and less these days: if only to avoid disappointment, as the advertiser’s cliché goes. Even the older series have lost their sheen, aside from a few notable exceptions – Rising Damp, The Good Life, Ever Decreasing Circles. Yet, if it’s comedy I want to see, I always resort to the DVD player, where I can get to see what is still, for me, television’s outstanding comedy, and the funniest series ever to go before the cameras...

I’ll tell you what it is next time...