The Bickersons
Encyclopedia
The Bickersons was a radio
comedy sketch series that began in 1946 on NBC
, moving the following year to CBS
where it continued until 1951. The show's married protagonists, portrayed by Don Ameche
and Frances Langford
, spent nearly all their time together in relentless verbal war.
, the one-time Eddie Cantor
writer who had also created the Fanny Brice
skits (for The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air
and Maxwell House Coffee Time
) that grew into radio's Baby Snooks. Several years after the latter established itself a long-running favorite, Rapp developed and presented John and Blanche Bickerson, first as a short sketch on The Old Gold Show and The Chase and Sanborn Hour
(the show that made stars of Edgar Bergen
and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy), and then as a 15-minute situational sketch as part of Drene Time
. This was a variety show starring Don Ameche and singer-actress Frances Langford as co-hosts, airing on NBC and sponsored by Drene Shampoo. Announcing the show—and later familiar to television viewers as The Millionaires presenter and executive secretary, Michael Anthony—was Marvin Miller
.
Drene Time typically opened with Langford singing a big band-style arrangement before Ameche and Langford would slip into routine comedy, often aided by co-star Danny Thomas
, in routines that often expressed Ameche's frustration that Thomas was more interested in modern technology and discoveries than in women. After another musical number and a commercial spot for Drene Shampoo, Miller would announce Ameche and Langford as the Bickersons, "in 'The Honeymoon's Over'," for the final 15 minutes of the show.
The listener heard a chorus of low-roaring snoring, punctuated occasionally with something that sounded like laughing. Blanche would awaken John, even at three in the morning, and the feuding would continue with their trademark arguments about John's job, Blanche's domestic abilities, John's alleged eye for neighbor Gloria Gooseby, Blanche's shiftless brother Amos (played by Thomas) or John's taste for bourbon. Rounding out the cast was future children's television favorite Pinky Lee
in occasional supporting roles.
As New York Herald Tribune
critic John Crosby
described them (in the May 25, 1948 column which gave the couple their nickname, "The Bickering Bickersons"):
or the protagonists of The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show
; or, such earthily loving couples as Chester A. Riley and wife Peg in The Life of Riley
. Fred Allen
and Tallulah Bankhead
may have sent up the more saccharine of the pre-Bickersons family shows in a skit (the legendary "Mr. and Mrs. Breakfast Show"), and Goodman and Jane Ace
(in Easy Aces) may have been a gently tart union of wry exasperation and effortless, brain-bending malaprops, but a regular series featuring a couple as highly combustible as John and Blanche may have been as daring as that era's network radio got when dealing with married life.
The Bickersons seemed to have no business being married at all, but they proved the prototype for such battling comic couples as Ralph and Alice Kramden of The Honeymooners
(surely, Jackie Gleason
, who admired the show, owed a debt to The Bickersons as a partial model for blustery Ralph and acid Alice; writer Rapp, according to fellow comedy writer Irving Brecher
, once tried unsuccessfully to sue Gleason over some of the similarities), Nels and Harriet Oleson of Little House on the Prairie
, and—much later, perhaps the closest of them all to the Blanche-and-John prototype—Al
and Peg Bundy of Married... with Children
. The title couple of the long-running newspaper comic strip The Lockhorns
also bear more than a passing resemblance to the Bickersons.
The Kramdens, Olesons, Bundys and others who followed may have made The Bickersons seem tame. But The Bickersons might also have helped marriage by showing, maybe too vividly, what not to do and how not to do it. Writer Rapp based the couple in part on his own rocky marriage; his son, Joel, eventually told radio historian Gerald Nachman, "I've hidden under a lot of tables in my day. My father would scurry off to the typewriter while the dialogue was still fresh." Rapp himself admitted, too, that "so much sweetness" in radio marrieds such as Ozzie and Harriet Nelson or the Andersons of Father Knows Best
"was not marriage as I knew it."
Jackie Gleason probably knew that Christmas exchange—drawing as did the Bickersons episode on O. Henry
's "The Gift of the Magi
," a "classic 39" Christmas episode of The Honeymooners involved blustery bus driver Ralph hocking his brand-new bowling ball in a mad dash to get Alice a last-minute Christmas gift... only to learn the hard way that Alice bought him a stylish new bowling ball bag.
s harried, slightly overbearing father Lew Marie) took the role of John Bickerson, as he also did on radio a season earlier. But it did not work as well as the original skits. Parker and Langford weren't seen to have the seamless anti-chemistry of Ameche and Langford. Premiering as a summer season replacement, the television version of The Bickersons lasted only 13 episodes.
Ameche and Langford's work together didn't end with The Bickersons, either. They co-hosted a variety series, The Frances Langford-Don Ameche Show, in 1951–1952, and featured among the few regular performers a very young Jack Lemmon
, as a newlywed in a sketch series known as "The Couple Next Door." When Langford hosted a variety special in 1960, there was Ameche to join in the fun with The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Joe DeRita at the time), Bob Cummings and Johnny Mathis
.
eventually released long-playing albums—The Bickersons, The Bickersons Fight Back, and The Bickersons Rematch—that featured newly-recorded performances of Rapp's adapted radio scripts by Ameche and Langford as John and Blanche.
A beautiful woman with a honey voice who used sheer talent to turn herself into the venomous Blanche Bickerson, Frances Langford enjoyed a fine career as a singer and actress in film (including a memorable cameo in the otherwise stylised The Glenn Miller Story
) and television, as well as radio; she died July 11, 2005. Don Ameche, whose name sometimes became synonymous (and a kind of running gag) with the telephone (thanks to his film portrayal of Alexander Graham Bell
), became a familiar television face as well as a well-respected film actor, enjoying a late-life popular revival through his roles in the 1983 film Trading Places and the 1985 film Cocoon. He died in 1993.
, England. Satsuma & Pumpkin starred the late Bob Monkhouse
OBE, and was also his very last work before he died. Monkhouse was a big fan of The Bickersons and The Baby Snooks Show
.
In the movie MASH
, when Radar O'Reilly bugs Margaret Houlihan's tent as she and Frank Burns have a sexual encounter, Father Mulcahy mistakes their conversation (and noises) for an episode of The Bickersons, until he realizes otherwise.
In the Season 1 finale of NewsRadio
, Dave
and Lisa
are called "the magnificent Bickersons" by Bill
(at once a reference to the radio show and a play on the title of Orson Welles
' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons
). Ameche and Welles shared the same hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin
, and at 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time on the night of October 30, 1938, Welles made his legendary "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast on the CBS network while Ameche hosted The Chase and Sanborn Hour
on the Red Network of NBC.
The Bickersons can be heard in the video game L.A. Noire
, playing on the radio during driving sequences.
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
comedy sketch series that began in 1946 on NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
, moving the following year to CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
where it continued until 1951. The show's married protagonists, portrayed by Don Ameche
Don Ameche
Don Ameche was an Academy Award winning American actor with a career spanning almost sixty years.-Personal life:...
and Frances Langford
Frances Langford
Julia Frances Langford was an American singer and entertainer who was popular during the Golden Age of Radio and also made film appearances over two decades.-Birth:...
, spent nearly all their time together in relentless verbal war.
Origins
The Bickersons was created by Philip RappPhilip Rapp
Philip Rapp was a film and television director and screenwriter. He wrote for Eddie Cantor and for a brief period, wrote film scripts for Danny Kaye. Rapp is perhaps best known as the creator of Baby Snooks and The Bickersons...
, the one-time Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter...
writer who had also created the Fanny Brice
Fanny Brice
Fanny Brice was a popular and influential American illustrated song "model," comedienne, singer, theatre and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show...
skits (for The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air
The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air
The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air, broadcast on CBS during the 1930s, attempted to bring the success of Florenz Ziegfeld's stage shows to the new medium of radio....
and Maxwell House Coffee Time
Burns and Allen
Burns and Allen, an American comedy duo consisting of George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, worked together as a comedy team in vaudeville, films, radio and television and achieved great success over four decades.-Vaudeville:...
) that grew into radio's Baby Snooks. Several years after the latter established itself a long-running favorite, Rapp developed and presented John and Blanche Bickerson, first as a short sketch on The Old Gold Show and The Chase and Sanborn Hour
The Chase and Sanborn Hour
The Chase and Sanborn Hour was the umbrella title for a series of US comedy and variety radio shows, sponsored by Standard Brands' Chase and Sanborn Coffee, usually airing Sundays on NBC from 8pm to 9pm during the years 1929 to 1948....
(the show that made stars of Edgar Bergen
Edgar Bergen
Edgar John Bergen was an American actor and radio performer, best known as a ventriloquist.-Early life:...
and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy), and then as a 15-minute situational sketch as part of Drene Time
Drene Time
Drene Time was a 30-minute radio variety show starring Don Ameche and singer-actress Frances Langford as co-hosts, airing on NBC's Sunday night schedule in 1946-47....
. This was a variety show starring Don Ameche and singer-actress Frances Langford as co-hosts, airing on NBC and sponsored by Drene Shampoo. Announcing the show—and later familiar to television viewers as The Millionaires presenter and executive secretary, Michael Anthony—was Marvin Miller
Marvin Miller (actor)
Marvin Elliott Miller was an American film and voice-over actor. Possessing a deep, baritone voice, he began his career in radio in St. Louis, Missouri before becoming a Hollywood actor...
.
Drene Time typically opened with Langford singing a big band-style arrangement before Ameche and Langford would slip into routine comedy, often aided by co-star Danny Thomas
Danny Thomas
Danny Thomas was an American nightclub comedian and television and film actor, best known for starring in the television sitcom Make Room for Daddy . He was also the founder of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital...
, in routines that often expressed Ameche's frustration that Thomas was more interested in modern technology and discoveries than in women. After another musical number and a commercial spot for Drene Shampoo, Miller would announce Ameche and Langford as the Bickersons, "in 'The Honeymoon's Over'," for the final 15 minutes of the show.
Feud for thought
The typical Miller introduction would set the scene:- The Bickersons... have retired. Three o'clock in the morning finds Mrs. Bickerson wide awake and anxious, as poor husband John, victim of contagious insomnia, or Schmoe's Disease, broadcasts the telltale signs of the dreaded affliction. Listen...
The listener heard a chorus of low-roaring snoring, punctuated occasionally with something that sounded like laughing. Blanche would awaken John, even at three in the morning, and the feuding would continue with their trademark arguments about John's job, Blanche's domestic abilities, John's alleged eye for neighbor Gloria Gooseby, Blanche's shiftless brother Amos (played by Thomas) or John's taste for bourbon. Rounding out the cast was future children's television favorite Pinky Lee
Pinky Lee
Pincus Leff , better known as Pinky Lee, was an American burlesque comic and host of a children's television program, The Pinky Lee Show, in the early 1950s.-Biography:...
in occasional supporting roles.
As New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...
critic John Crosby
John Crosby (media critic)
John Crosby was a newspaper columnist, radio-television critic, novelist and TV host. During the 1950s, he was generally regarded as the leading critic of television....
described them (in the May 25, 1948 column which gave the couple their nickname, "The Bickering Bickersons"):
- Blanche... is one of the monstrous shrews of all time. She makes her husband... take two jobs, a total of 16 working hours, in order to bring in more money which she squanders on minks and the stock market. Meanwhile, he can't afford a new pair of shoes and goes around with his feet painted black. In the few hours he has to sleep, she heckles him all night with the accusation that he doesn't love her. Her aim appears to be to drive her husband crazy and she succeeds very nicely. The harassed John's only weapon is insult, at which he's pretty good.
Dialogue
As transcribed by John Crosby, this was a typical Bickersons exchange:- B: You used to be so considerate. Since you got married to me you haven't got any sympathy at all.
- J: I have, too. I've got everybody's sympathy.
- B: Believe me, there's better fish in the ocean than the one I caught.
- J: There's better bait, too.
- B: I don't see how you can go to bed without kissing me good night.
- J: I can do it.
- B: You'd better say you're sorry for that, John.
- J: Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
- B: You are not.
- J: I am too. I'm the sorriest man that was ever born.
- B: Is there any milk for breakfast?
- J: No.
- B: Then you'll have to eat out.
- J: I don't care, I've been doing it all week.
- B: What for? I left you enough food for six days. I cooked a whole bathtub full of rice. What happened to it?
- J: I took a bath in it.
- B: Why didn't you eat it?
- J: I've told you a million times I can't stand the sight of rice.
- B: Why not?
- J: Because it's connected to the saddest mistake of my life.
- B: You stopped loving me the day we were married.
- J: That wasn't the day at all.
Battling couples
At the time The Bickersons bowed, the typical radio marriage conveyed almost exclusively sweetness and light, no matter what ephemeral disaster might befall. The idea of a lower middle-class marriage whose partners spent what little time together they had at each other's throats was jarring and even threatening to many people at the time. Audiences were becoming accustomed to broadcasting life with loving and stable couples, such as those featured in The Adventures of Ozzie and HarrietThe Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is an American sitcom, airing on ABC from October 3, 1952 to September 3, 1966, starring the real life Nelson family. After a long run on radio, the show was brought to television where it continued its success, running on both radio and TV for a couple of years...
or the protagonists of The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show
The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show
The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, a comedy radio program which ran on NBC from 1948 to 1954, evolved from an earlier music and comedy variety program, The Fitch Bandwagon...
; or, such earthily loving couples as Chester A. Riley and wife Peg in The Life of Riley
The Life of Riley
The Life of Riley, with William Bendix in the title role, is a popular American radio situation comedy series of the 1940s that was adapted into a 1949 feature film, a long-run 1950s television series , and a 1958 Dell comic book...
. Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it...
and Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an award-winning American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante...
may have sent up the more saccharine of the pre-Bickersons family shows in a skit (the legendary "Mr. and Mrs. Breakfast Show"), and Goodman and Jane Ace
Goodman Ace
Goodman Ace , born Goodman Aiskowitz, was an American humourist, working as a radio writer and comedian, a television writer, and a magazine columnist....
(in Easy Aces) may have been a gently tart union of wry exasperation and effortless, brain-bending malaprops, but a regular series featuring a couple as highly combustible as John and Blanche may have been as daring as that era's network radio got when dealing with married life.
The Bickersons seemed to have no business being married at all, but they proved the prototype for such battling comic couples as Ralph and Alice Kramden of The Honeymooners
The Honeymooners
The Honeymooners is an American situation comedy television show, based on a recurring 1951–'55 sketch of the same name. It originally aired on the DuMont network's Cavalcade of Stars and subsequently on the CBS network's The Jackie Gleason Show hosted by Jackie Gleason, and filmed before a live...
(surely, Jackie Gleason
Jackie Gleason
Jackie Gleason was an American comedian, actor and musician. He was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy style, especially by his character Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners, a situation-comedy television series. His most noted film roles were as Minnesota Fats in the drama film The...
, who admired the show, owed a debt to The Bickersons as a partial model for blustery Ralph and acid Alice; writer Rapp, according to fellow comedy writer Irving Brecher
Irving Brecher
Irving Brecher enjoyed early success as a screenwriter for the Marx Brothers; he was the only writer to get sole credit on a Marx Brothers film including At the Circus in 1939 and Go West in 1940...
, once tried unsuccessfully to sue Gleason over some of the similarities), Nels and Harriet Oleson of Little House on the Prairie
Little House on the Prairie (TV series)
Little House on the Prairie is an American Western drama television series, starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert, about a family living on a farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the 1870s and 1880s. The show was an adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder's best-selling series of Little House books...
, and—much later, perhaps the closest of them all to the Blanche-and-John prototype—Al
Al Bundy
Al Bundy is a fictional character from the U.S. television series Married... with Children. He was played by Ed O'Neill.-Character history:...
and Peg Bundy of Married... with Children
Married... with Children
Married... with Children is an American surrealistic sitcom that aired for 11 seasons that featured a dysfunctional family living in Chicago, Illinois. The show, notable for being the first prime time television series to air on Fox, ran from April 5, 1987, to June 9, 1997. The series was created...
. The title couple of the long-running newspaper comic strip The Lockhorns
The Lockhorns
The Lockhorns is a United States single-panel cartoon created in 1968 by Bill Hoest and distributed by King Features Syndicate to 500 newspapers in 23 countries. It is continued today by Bunny Hoest and John Reiner.-Characters and story:...
also bear more than a passing resemblance to the Bickersons.
The Kramdens, Olesons, Bundys and others who followed may have made The Bickersons seem tame. But The Bickersons might also have helped marriage by showing, maybe too vividly, what not to do and how not to do it. Writer Rapp based the couple in part on his own rocky marriage; his son, Joel, eventually told radio historian Gerald Nachman, "I've hidden under a lot of tables in my day. My father would scurry off to the typewriter while the dialogue was still fresh." Rapp himself admitted, too, that "so much sweetness" in radio marrieds such as Ozzie and Harriet Nelson or the Andersons of Father Knows Best
Father Knows Best
Father Knows Best is an American radio and television comedy series which portrayed a middle class family life in the Midwest. It was created by writer Ed James in the 1940s.-Radio:...
"was not marriage as I knew it."
The flip side
Though they spent their allotted time together at each other's throats, assuming always that the shrewish Blanche could awaken John from his snoring, there were moments when the couple showed an uncommon tenderness to each other—particularly in a Christmas skit. (It should have been hinted at the outset by Marvin Miller's atypical introduction: "The Bickersons—have not retired.") After arguing over whether John had sent Blanche a Christmas card (he had—it was buried in a stack of newspapers), they exchanged their gifts to each other... with a twist. Tight in the pocketbook this Christmas season, Blanche swapped a fur coat to buy her bourbon-loving husband a portable bar; John—bourbon lover though he is—swapped his stock to buy Blanche a matching fur muffler, before confessing that for all that they're each other's biggest pain in the rump, there really is a love between them.Jackie Gleason probably knew that Christmas exchange—drawing as did the Bickersons episode on O. Henry
O. Henry
O. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter . O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.-Early life:...
's "The Gift of the Magi
The Gift of the Magi
"The Gift of the Magi" is a short story written by O. Henry , about a young married couple and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money...
," a "classic 39" Christmas episode of The Honeymooners involved blustery bus driver Ralph hocking his brand-new bowling ball in a mad dash to get Alice a last-minute Christmas gift... only to learn the hard way that Alice bought him a stylish new bowling ball bag.
Television
The Bickersons were barely ready for prime time radio (they lasted only two full seasons) as it was, but a 1951 CBS television version didn't last half as long. Lew Parker (later familiar as That GirlThat Girl
That Girl is an American television situation comedy that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. It stars Marlo Thomas as the title character, Ann Marie, an aspiring actress, who had moved from her hometown of Brewster, New York to make it big in New York City...
s harried, slightly overbearing father Lew Marie) took the role of John Bickerson, as he also did on radio a season earlier. But it did not work as well as the original skits. Parker and Langford weren't seen to have the seamless anti-chemistry of Ameche and Langford. Premiering as a summer season replacement, the television version of The Bickersons lasted only 13 episodes.
Ameche and Langford's work together didn't end with The Bickersons, either. They co-hosted a variety series, The Frances Langford-Don Ameche Show, in 1951–1952, and featured among the few regular performers a very young Jack Lemmon
Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts , Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925June...
, as a newlywed in a sketch series known as "The Couple Next Door." When Langford hosted a variety special in 1960, there was Ameche to join in the fun with The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Joe DeRita at the time), Bob Cummings and Johnny Mathis
Johnny Mathis
John Royce "Johnny" Mathis is an American singer of popular music. Starting his career with singles of standards, he became highly popular as an album artist, with several dozen of his albums achieving gold or platinum status, and 73 making the Billboard charts...
.
Recordings
But neither did the twosome abandon the characters that made them famous as a comedy team in the first place: Columbia RecordsColumbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
eventually released long-playing albums—The Bickersons, The Bickersons Fight Back, and The Bickersons Rematch—that featured newly-recorded performances of Rapp's adapted radio scripts by Ameche and Langford as John and Blanche.
A beautiful woman with a honey voice who used sheer talent to turn herself into the venomous Blanche Bickerson, Frances Langford enjoyed a fine career as a singer and actress in film (including a memorable cameo in the otherwise stylised The Glenn Miller Story
The Glenn Miller Story
The Glenn Miller Story is a 1954 American film directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart in their first non-western collaboration.-Plot:...
) and television, as well as radio; she died July 11, 2005. Don Ameche, whose name sometimes became synonymous (and a kind of running gag) with the telephone (thanks to his film portrayal of Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....
), became a familiar television face as well as a well-respected film actor, enjoying a late-life popular revival through his roles in the 1983 film Trading Places and the 1985 film Cocoon. He died in 1993.
Adaptations and cultural references
With the Rapp family approval, an adapted version of The Bickersons was written for a comedy puppet show, Breakfast with the Bickersons, premiering at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show was adapted and directed by British comedian Jeremy Engler. Amongst other work, Engler is notably known for writing and directing a World War II sitcom pilot based around three hapless codebreakers at Bletchley ParkBletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, England, which currently houses the National Museum of Computing...
, England. Satsuma & Pumpkin starred the late Bob Monkhouse
Bob Monkhouse
Robert Alan "Bob" Monkhouse, OBE was an English entertainer. He was a successful comedy writer, comedian and actor and was also well known on British television as a presenter and game show host...
OBE, and was also his very last work before he died. Monkhouse was a big fan of The Bickersons and The Baby Snooks Show
The Baby Snooks Show
The Baby Snooks Show was an American radio program starring comedienne and Ziegfeld Follies alumna Fanny Brice as a mischievous young girl who was 40 years younger than the actress who played her when she first went on the air. The series began on CBS September 17, 1944, airing on Sunday evenings...
.
In the movie MASH
MASH (film)
MASH is a 1970 American satirical dark comedy film directed by Robert Altman and written by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on Richard Hooker's novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. It is the only feature film in the M*A*S*H franchise...
, when Radar O'Reilly bugs Margaret Houlihan's tent as she and Frank Burns have a sexual encounter, Father Mulcahy mistakes their conversation (and noises) for an episode of The Bickersons, until he realizes otherwise.
In the Season 1 finale of NewsRadio
NewsRadio
NewsRadio is an American television situation comedy that aired on NBC from 1995 to 1999. The series was created by executive producer Paul Simms, and was filmed in front of a studio audience at CBS Studio Center and Sunset Gower Studios...
, Dave
Dave Foley
David Scott "Dave" Foley is a Canadian comedian, writer, director, and producer best known for his work in The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio, A Bug's Life, and Celebrity Poker Showdown...
and Lisa
Maura Tierney
Maura Therese Tierney is an American film and television actress, who is best known for her roles as Lisa Miller on NewsRadio and Abby Lockhart on the television medical drama ER.-Early life:...
are called "the magnificent Bickersons" by Bill
Phil Hartman
Philip Edward "Phil" Hartman was a Canadian-American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and graphic artist. Born in Brantford, Ontario, Hartman and his family moved to the United States when he was 10...
(at once a reference to the radio show and a play on the title of Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons
The Magnificent Ambersons (film)
The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1942 American drama film written and directed by Orson Welles. His second feature film, it is based on the 1918 novel of the same name by Booth Tarkington and stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins...
). Ameche and Welles shared the same hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Kenosha is a city and the county seat of Kenosha County in the State of Wisconsin in United States. With a population of 99,218 as of May 2011, Kenosha is the fourth-largest city in Wisconsin. Kenosha is also the fourth-largest city on the western shore of Lake Michigan, following Chicago,...
, and at 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time on the night of October 30, 1938, Welles made his legendary "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast on the CBS network while Ameche hosted The Chase and Sanborn Hour
The Chase and Sanborn Hour
The Chase and Sanborn Hour was the umbrella title for a series of US comedy and variety radio shows, sponsored by Standard Brands' Chase and Sanborn Coffee, usually airing Sundays on NBC from 8pm to 9pm during the years 1929 to 1948....
on the Red Network of NBC.
The Bickersons can be heard in the video game L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire is a 2011 crime video game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games. It was released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows. It was released as a 3-disc game for the Xbox 360 console, which prompts the player to switch to another disc at certain points in the...
, playing on the radio during driving sequences.