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.
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| 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
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