Blanche has let John’s new tuxedo to her brother Amos.

Drene Time/The Bickersons – The New Tux

Danny Thomas, Don Ameche, Frances Langford, Gale Gordon, Tobe Reed (announcer).

NBC network. Sponsored by Drene Shampoo.

Download the show here!

Blanche has bought a puppy.

Drene Time/The Bickersons – The New Puppy

Don Ameche, Frances Langford, Tobe Reed (announcer).

NBC net. Sponsored by Drene Shampoo.

Download the show here!

Gale Gordon portrays a psychiatrist trying to talk Danny Thomas out of a phone booth. The skit contains clever song material.

Drene Time/The Bickersons – Danny Thomas in a Phone Booth

Carmen Dragon and His Orchestra, Danny Thomas, Don Ameche, Frances Langford, Gale Gordon, Tobe Reed (announcer).

NBC net. Sponsored by Drene Shampoo.

Download the show here!

John and Blanche visit the home of her dear departed uncle’s home for the reading of a will.

Drene Time/The Bickersons – Reading the Will

Don Ameche, Frances Langford, Marvin Miller (announcer).

NBC net. Sponsored by Drene Shampoo.

Download the show here!

The Drene Time Show – Frances starts the show by singing, “No Business Like Show Business.” Blanche’s shiftless brother Amos is about to let the unemployed John in on the ground floor of a brand new business venture.

This episode is dated by most 9/22/1946 but seeing that Don Ameche wishes everyone a “Happy New Year” at the end of the show, I’d guess the date to be more accurately December 29th, 1946 instead.

Drene Time/The Bickersons – Amos’ Deep Sea Treasure Enterprise

Don Ameche, Frances Langford, Danny Thomas, Marvin Miller (announcer).

NBC net. Sponsored by Drene Shampoo.

Download the show here!

The second special request today comes from Dena Campbell in Kansas City, Missouri. She posted on my Facebook profile that she’d like to hear The Bickersons.

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 Harriet 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. Continue on to listen to Another Special Request, The Bickersons: 9/08/1946 – The Honeymoon is Over »