Phil and Alice

The Phil Harris - Alice Show was an old time situation comedy which ran from 1946 to 1954 on the NBC Radio
Network. Evolving from their earlier variety show, The Fitch Bandwagon, the show starred singer-bandleader
Phil Harris and his wife, actress-singer Alice Faye -- both of whom proved excellent comedians -- playing
slightly fictionalized versions of themselves as a working radio and musical couple raising two young daughters
in a slightly madcap home. The program was sponsored first by Fitch Shampoo, then by Rexall Drug Company
and, after a period of self-sustainment, RCA Victor.

Phil & Alice were radio veterans. Phil had been a mainstay and musical director for The Jack Benny Program. The couple's combined comic talents made them the obvious breakout stars of The Fitch Bandwagon, formed originally to showcase big bands, including Phil's. When announcer Bill Foreman hailed, "Good Health To All... From Rexall !", The Phil Harris - Alice Faye Show launched its independent life under Rexall's sponsorship, with a debut plot that recalled the fictitious day the couple signed their sponsorship deal.

In short order, the show was a success, partially due to being scheduled in NBC's powerhouse Sunday night lineup (Jack Benny and Fred Allen before them, Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy following them), but The Fitch Bandwagon had already made them a Sunday night presence, well before NBC moved other shows to that night. Playing themselves as radio and music star parents of two precocious young daughters (played by actresses Janine Ruse and Ann Whitfield, instead of Harris's own young daughters), Phil refined his character from a booze - and - borads, hip jive talker into a slightly vain and dunderheaded husband who usually needed rescuing by Alice as his occasional tart but always sweet wife. References to his wavy hair became a running gag.

Phil often passed wisecracks about buddy Frank Remley's taste for the spirits, a contrast to Phil's former Benny character. The show's writers, Ray Singer and Dick Chevillet, also used Alice's experience making the ill-fated film "Fallen Angel" as a source of gags, to say nothing of setting up situations in which Phil was recognized (if at all) as her husband or "Mr. Alice Faye".

Phil's radio character was also scripted as an occasional language and context mangler, six parts Gracie Allen and a half of a dozen parts Yogi Berra. The Sardonic humor that laced the show was far beyond the gentility of that other show which featured a bandleader and his singing wife playing "themselves", The Adventures Of Ozzie & Harriet".

Legendary character actor Gale Gordon appeared as Mr. Scott, the slightly pompous and withering fictitious representative of actual sponsor Rexall, and this made a unique relationship between the sponsor and the show. One of the show's running gags involved Scott's affected distain for Phil, wondering just how on Earth he and Rexall has consented to sponsor this philistine of a fellow who should have been paying Rexall to appear on the show and not the other way around. Another involved Phil's continious misidentification of the Rexall brand (naming the companies trademark colors as pink and purple, rather than their familiar blue and orange) -- when he remembered them at all.

Rexall not only didn't mind the script's jokes that referred to the company (without quite integrating the company more fully into the plot) or brought the company briefly into a full scene's worth of a joke, Rexall didn't even mind that the Scott character himself could be seen as satirizing the company more than promoting it. That said a lot for such a successful and influential company in an era where sponsors didn't always enjoy being zapped on the programs they were paying to produce, and even stood accused of influencing the content of the shows they sponsored heavy-handed. Rexall sponsored The Phil Harris - Alice Faye Show through 1950; and, after a period of self-sustainment, RCA Victor picked up the show through the end of its original run in 1954. That didn't stop Gordon (who was also a regular as the vain, blowhard principal who bedeviled "Our Miss Brooks") from continuing his recurring role as Mr. Scott -- this time, or course, representing RCA Victor, and with the same satirical edge as had been the case when he portrayed the fictitious Rexall rep.

The sponsorship switch to RCA also brought the Harris family a pet, a dog named Nipper, a la the familiar Boston Bull Terrier with an ear cocked to a Victrola horn, in the famous painting "His Master's Voice" that served as RCA's logo for many years. Sometimes Phil would address the dog with a backhanded allusion of the famous painting: "Sit boy. Listen to your master's voice."

Phil's character often as not found trouble because of buddy - guitarist Frank Remley, as he had done in a lesser role on the Benny show. Remley often behaved as though his sense of proportion, logic, and just plain sense was left behind. "What would you do without me, Curly?" Remley might ask Phil, who would shoot right back, "The same thing you're doing with it -- be a moron!". In due course, after Phil ceased to be Jack Benny's music director, the Remley character was changed in name only - to Elliot.

Waltery Tetley, a child impersonator (who did the same job playing spunky nephew Leroy on another radio hit, The Great Gildersleeve), played obnoxious delivery boy Julius, who had a pocketful of sarcastic one-liners for Phil and Remley and a crush on Alice - at least, until he married sponsor rep. Scott's daughter. Rounding out the show's usual cast were Robert North as Alice's fictitious humorless but somewhat down-to-earth brother, Willy; and announcer Bill Foreman.

It was almost unheard of for any episode of the show to go without two musical interludes, one a swing-style number ususally by Phil, the other a ballad ususally by Alice (Occasionally they switched musical roles). And through their on-air personae were that of s stumbling husband whose wife sometimes wanted to throw up her hands everytime she had to rescue him from himself, Phil and Alice's genuine love for each other showed without apology on the show; Phil often rewrote song lyrics to work in a reference to Alice.

Phil and Alice stayed with NBC rather than succumb to the CBS talent raids of the late 40's that began when Phil's former boss, Jack Benny, was lured to CBS and took a few NBC stars with him (George Burns and Gracie Allen). NBC offered Phil and Alice a lucrative new deal to stay, though Phil would allude to Benny's network switch on the Harris - Faye Show(typically, Phil would crack an odd joke and then say, "I gotta give this one to Jackson! It might bring him back to NBC!").

While several radio programs were being transferred to television during the show's lifetime, one eposide ("The Television Test") comically exaggerated how terrible the audience would receive Phil on the small screen.
Producer #1 - "Do you think it's wise to let the public see what Harris looks like?"
Producer #2 - "Oh, he doesn't look THAT bad!"

Phil and Alice were not averse to appearing on radio outside their comic personae - sort of. At the height of their radio show's popularity, the couple made a memorable appearance on the CBS Radio mystery hit, "Suspense", in a 1951 episode called "Death on my Hands". The title alluded to an accidental shooting local people assumed to be murder. Phil played and outback-touring bandleader playing a high school dance who was accosted back at his hotel room by an autographed-seeking girl. As she reached for a photo in an open suitcase, the suitcase fell to the floor and a pistol inside discharged, shooting her to death and provoking a local lynch mob. Before the dance, he'd bumped into Alice (who was his former band singer, who wandered the country for six years). After the incident, Alice sought to help him convince the town of the truth.

Phil and Alice also did the occasional stage tour during their radio years, including a tour with Jack Benny in the early 50's. But by the time The Phil Harris - Alice Faye Show left radio in 1954, American radio such as they had helped make memorable, had very little time left to live.

The Phil Harris - Alice Faye Show remains a popular find for old-time radio lovers; many if not all of it's episodes stood the test of time admirably. The show was one of the best written and most cleverly delivered of it's genre and may have been somewhat ahead of its time for sardonic family humor.