#peg lynch

[oldshowbiz]

Ethel and Albert (1955)

[jamieroxx]

Birthday Remembrances. Today, Nov 25, 1916 – Peg Lynch, American actress and screenwriter (d. 2015) was born. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_Lynch) *The Lady who invented the Sit Com

[oldshowbiz]

Comedy writer Peg Lynch

[oldshowbiz]

Comedy writer Peg Lynch wrote approximately 11,000 different radio scripts over the course of her long career. She created the serialized sitcom Ethel and Albert for radio in 1941. It endured for a decade until its move to television in the early 1950s.

[oldshowbiz]

Ethel and Albert, a 1940s radio show, was the very first sitcom created by a woman. Premiering on ABC Radio in 1945, it moved to TV in 1953.

[professionalcomedians]

Peg Lynch, “The Lady Who Invented Sitcom”

[stevenhmacdowalldrawings]

Peg Lynch (Margaret Frances Lynch) Born: November 25, 1916, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA Died: July 24, 2015 (aged 98), Becket, Massachusetts, USA She was an American writer and actor, and creator of the radio and television sitcom Ethel and Albert. She was one of the first women to star in, own, and write, singlehandedly, her own comedy series. Peg Lynch married Odd Knut Ronning (1918-2014), a Norwegian pulp and paper engineer in Manhattan on August 12, 1948. The couple have a daughter, Astrid Ronning King, also a writer, married to composer Denis King, and one grandchild, Alexander, a musician. Lynch lived in Becket, Massachusetts, and continued to write, revisiting the characters of Ethel and Albert as a couple in their 90s. -- Peg Lynch, Writer and Star of Early Situation Comedy, Dies at 98 by Bruce Weber - July 27 2015 - http://www.nytimes.com Photo I: Alan Bunce and Peg Lynch in a publicity photo for “Ethel and Albert,” a show she wrote about the mundane details of life. // Photo II: Peg Lynch in April 2014 Peg Lynch, who wrote and starred in “Ethel and Albert,” one of television’s earliest situation comedies, died on Friday at her home in Becket, Mass. She was 98. Her daughter, Astrid King, confirmed the death. Ms. Lynch, who wrote nearly 11,000 scripts for radio and television without the benefit of a writer’s room committee (or even a co-writer), was a pioneering woman in broadcast entertainment. As a creator of original characters and a performer of her own written work — every bit of it live! — she might be said to have created the mold that decades later produced the likes of Tina Fey and Amy Schumer. And long before Jerry Seinfeld made a famous show ostensibly about nothing, mining the mundane details of the lives of single New Yorkers, Ms. Lynch did much the same thing, mining the mundane details of the lives of Ethel and Albert Arbuckle, a representative young married couple living in a representative American town called Sandy Harbor. “I base my show on the little things in life,” Ms. Lynch said in an interview in The New York Times in 1950, when the show, then on radio, was known as “The Private Lives of Ethel and Albert.” “I believe that people like to find out that other people have some of the same problems they do.” The show had its first national exposure as a 15-minute, five-day-a-week radio program on the Blue Network (the progenitor of ABC) in 1944, with the actor Richard Widmark playing Albert. Three of the radio scripts were staged for television in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1946 — by then her co-star, who remained with the show for its remaining years, was Alan Bunce — and in 1950 “Ethel and Albert” appeared in sketches on “The Kate Smith Hour,” an afternoon variety show. It became its own weekly series, broadcast on Saturday nights on NBC, in 1953, later moving to CBS and then ABC before going off the air in 1956. An affectionate portrayal of a loving couple and their ordinary befuddlements in ordinary pursuits — balancing the family budget, planning a trip, giving a party — “Ethel and Albert” was distinguished by its verisimilitude. It was shrewd and observant in its writing; Jack Gould, The Times’s television critic, praised Ms. Lynch’s “uncanny knack for catching the small situation in married life and turning it into a gem of quiet humor.” And the understated comic acting of Ms. Lynch and Mr. Bunce (Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz,” made guest appearances as Albert’s aunt), made it persuasively realistic, a mirror for its middle-American, Eisenhower-era viewers. “The charm of Ethel and Albert,” Mr. Gould wrote, “is that they could be man and wife off screen.” Margaret Frances Lynch was born on Nov. 25, 1916, in Lincoln, Neb. Her father, Hugh, who worked for the Moline Plow Company, died in the flu pandemic of 1918, and she and her mother, the former Clara Frances Renning, moved to Minnesota. She grew up in Kasson, Minn., near Rochester, and later Rochester itself, where her mother was a nurse at the As an enterprising teenager she worked at a radio station owned by a classmate’s father, among other things lining up sponsors and, according to her website, interviewing celebrities like William Powell, Lou Gehrig, Jeanette MacDonald, Ernest Hemingway and Knute Rockne who were in town for medical reasons. An avid reader and writer from childhood, she graduated from the University of Minnesota. In 1938, Ms. Lynch was writing copy for a variety of programming for KATE, a small radio station in Albert Lea, Minn., when, 10 years before she was married herself, she invented Ethel and Albert, who first appeared in three-minute sketches within other programs. “ ‘Ethel and Albert’ was initially a sort of commercial,” Ms. Lynch’s daughter wrote on her mother’s website, “Peg having discovered that a husband-wife format could be adapted to sell a variety of products. Try writing 15 minutes of snappy dialogue every week for 12 weeks in which a wife tries to persuade her husband to buy an Allis Chalmers Tractor and you’ll get the picture.” She brought the characters with her when she moved to other stations, first in Charlottesville, Va., and later in Cumberland, Md., where Ethel and Albert were given their own 15-minute evening segment. From there it was on to New York in 1944. Her pleasant, undemonstrative affect, no doubt a product of her Midwestern upbringing, and somewhat nasal voice, became signatures of the character of Ethel. “When we first brought the show to New York, I didn’t want to play Ethel,” she said in an interview in The Times in 1946. “I was scared, you know, the big city and all that. But when we started auditioning other people I became frantic. They all had such beautiful lush voices, and I knew I simply couldn’t write for somebody like that.” Before agreeing to appear on the Blue Network, she turned down an offer from NBC, which wanted to co-own the show, “possibly the only smart business move my mother has ever made,” her daughter wrote. Ms. Lynch retained ownership of “Ethel and Albert” throughout her life. Ms. Lynch’s marriage, to Odd Knut Ronning (her Norwegian third cousin), ended with his death in 2014. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a grandson. Ms. Lynch and Mr. Bunce returned Ethel and Albert to radio for three years in a show called “The Couple Next Door,” and they performed the roles in numerous advertisements. “I’ve heard from various people over the years that the conversational style in ‘Ethel and Albert’ is similar to a show I’ve never seen,” Ms. Lynch said in an interview published last year in the book “Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Top Comedy Writers” by Mike Sacks. “ ‘Siegfield’? ‘Zigfeld’? ‘Feigold’? Something like that?” She added: “I’d like to write an ‘Ethel and Albert’ now, and what their problems would be like and how they would get through them. It would be interesting. Life becomes different when you’re in your 90s. People treat you differently. People are always asking ‘Are you warm enough?’ or ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘What can I do for you?’ No, I’m fine thanks. I’ll do it myself.” -- www.thursdayfile.com - the Thursdayfile is back to posting each Thursday - subscribe today! - Steve

[obitoftheday]

Obit of the Day: “The Lady Who Invented the Sitcom”*

Peg Lynch wrote 11,000 radio and television scripts in a career that began in 1930 when she was just 14 years old. She penned commercials, talk shows, farm shows, dramas, and sketches as she moved from Minnesota across the United States, eventually ending up in New York City.

It was one show, though, that drove her singular success: Ethel and Albert. Ms. Lynch would write the scripts for all 2,722 episodes of the show that premiered in 1938 as a three-minute long commercial. The couple’s humorous back-and-forth so entertained audiences that they quickly moved from selling products to having their own show. Ms. Lynch  would take the fictional couple wherever she went from Rochester, Minnesota to Charlottesville, Virginia and eventually Cumberland, Maryland. 

The show’s success brought in north to New York City in 1944, and joined the Blue Network (forerunner to ABC), where Ethel and Albert gained a national fan base. The fifteen-minute episodes ran five nights a week. Six years later it transitioned to NBC television, as a segment of The Kate Smith Show. In 1952, Ms. Lynch and the cast were given their own time slot - a full thirty minutes long. (The TV version of Ethel and Albert only ran for 121 episodes and appeared, at different times, on ABC and CBS, as well.)

After the show was canceled in 1956, Ms. Lynch returned to radio and Ethel and Albert lived on as The Couple Next Door for another three years and 768 episodes.

One of the factors that allowed the show to endure for nearly forty years in various incarnations was the subject matter - the details of married life. There were no crises or special episodes, in fact, the show was compared, in later years, to Seinfeld. Ms. Lynch had even heard the comparison. She was quoted in Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Best Comedy Writers as saying, “I’ve heard from various people over the years that the conversational style in ‘Ethel and Albert’ is similar to a show I’ve never seen. ‘Siegfield’? ‘Zigfeld’? ‘Feigold’? Something like that?”

Peg Lynch, who was once told by her aunt “It doesn’t matter that you’re not pretty, you have a nice personality,” died on July 24, 2015 at the age of 98.

* The title was unofficially bestowed on Ms. Lynch by writer, and Tony nominee, Dick Vosburgh who was also a BBC radio host. 

Sources: NY Times, PegLynch.com, The Berkshire Eagle

(The video is courtesy of Peg Lynch on YouTube, an account created by her daughter, Astrid King, who also runs PegLynch.com. The eleven minute video features an opening by Ms. Lynch herself and then a sketch written on 1948 but then later televised. You can find more Ethel and Albert videos on YouTube or PegLynch.com)

Some other contemporaries of Ms. Lynch previous featured on OOTD:

Alice Coachman - THe first black woman to win and Olympic gold medal (1948 London)

Beate Sirota Gordon - Helped write Japan’s post-war constitution

Frederica Sangor Moss - A screenwriter of silent films who was later blacklisted