The Bickersons

The Bickersons was a long-running series of comedy sketches featuring Don Ameche as John and Frances Langford and Blanche. Blanche is a profligate spender, while John works two jobs to feed her appetite for furs.

In a typical sketch, Blanche awakens John, often in the wee hours, and a spat ensues. Their fights feature twisty non-sequiturs and gross misunderstandings, as when John discovers that the package wrapped in brown paper by the kitchen sink every morning was not the lunch Blanche had made for him, but the garbage.

The sketches were quite popular, but attempts to transform them into stand-alone, half-hour series on both radio and television failed. I suspect that there just was not enough substance to the characters to sustain a full show.

The sketches ran from 1946 to 1951, following Ameche and Langford to several different broadcasts during the run. A decade later, when comedy record albums became popular, many of the sketches were repackaged as comedy albums and received wide play.

For more information, see Wikipedia.

Series description provided by Frank Bell.