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When Canadians and Americans settled down to an evening’s entertainment in the new year of 1953, they could be forgiven for relegating one of the most influential moments in U.S. presidential history in favour of a scatterbrained redhead who would change forever how we relate to the medium of television.
On Jan. 21, 1953, 44 million TV viewers watched the I Love Lucy episode in which Lucille Ball gave birth to Little Ricky — the same day she gave birth in real life to Desi Arnaz Jr. — representing an astonishing 72 per cent of all televisions in the U.S., and to this day one of the most-viewed broadcasts ever.
The day before, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential inauguration attracted 29 million viewers. As author David Halberstam writes in his book The Fifties, politics was for the first time being delivered to Americans through their television sets.
Eisenhower, says Halberstam, was “uneasy with television but presided over the years in which it became an ever more dominant force in American life.”
Yet no politician, no matter how telegenic, could compete with the ditzy charms of Lucy Ricardo (Ball), and her Cuban bandleader husband Ricky Ricardo (played by her real husband, Desi Arnaz), in I Love Lucy, which debuted in October 1951 and ran on CBS until 1957.
By far the most popular show in the U.S. for four of its six prime-time seasons, I Love Lucy set the standard for sitcoms through its three-camera high-quality-film format in front of a live audience, paving the way for the syndicated reruns that would define the genre.
That 1953 episode, Lucy Goes to Hospital, was not the first TV event to feature a visibly pregnant character; the sitcom Mary Kay and Johnny, which aired from 1947 to 1950 and also starred a real-life married couple, got there first.
Still, tackling childbirth was a fraught affair for TV executives and censors, who insisted Lucy was “expecting” rather than the vulgar and sexually suggestive “pregnant.” A Catholic priest, a rabbi and a minister were hired to vet the scripts, lest anything objectionable slip through.
Fifties squeamishness aside, it was television gold. Ball was deluged with 30,000 congratulatory letters and gifts, and the scene where Lucy breaks the news of her pregnancy to Ricky saw both actors in tears. The director reshot the scene, but backtracked after deciding the raw emotion of the original was more poignant.
Baby blues weren’t the only thing exercising network honchos — there was the problem of Desi’s Cuban ethnicity.
I Love Lucy was adapted for TV from the radio comedy My Favorite Husband, which starred Ball opposite Richard Dennis as her husband. When it moved to the small screen, Ball threatened to scupper the project if Arnaz was not cast as her co-star.
In the vanilla times, however, CBS executives feared the public would not accept a white American woman married to a Hispanic immigrant. To prove them wrong, Ball and Arnaz presented a stage version of the show at a local theatre to enthusiastic reviews — and the studio bosses relented.
That’s not to say the writers were above playing Arnaz’s Cuban heritage for laughs. But when studio audiences balked at “jokes” riffing on his mangled English, it became an unwritten rule that only Ball herself could poke fun at her husband’s accent.
Arnaz left Cuba for the U.S. at age 17 and was a proud naturalized American, reportedly rejecting one script in which his character fiddled his taxes. The scene, in Lucy Tells the Truth, was reworked to make it clear Ricky would never cheat Uncle Sam.
Combining an unerring talent for comedy with an innate appreciation of the growing power of television, Ball and Arnaz created Desilu Productions in 1950. By 1952, Halberstram notes, there were 19 million televisions in the U.S., and each month a thousand new stores opened to feed the demand for sets.
“Nothing showed the power of this new medium to soften the edge between real life and fantasy better than the coming of Lucille Ball,” says Halberstam.
Ball and Arnaz always insisted on relatability (her character on I Love Lucy was originally envisaged as a movie star), and her knack for physical comedy endeared her to millions of North Americans, for whom the show was like catching up with an old friend. Indeed, some have likened this “parasocial” relationship to the bonds between today’s influencers and their social media followers.
A perfectionist, Ball understood the possibilities of television before it understood itself, says PBS. “She saw that it could have the excitement of vaudeville, the wonder of the movies, and come directly to people’s homes with the intimacy of radio.”
Ethel and Fred Mertz (Vivian Vance and William Frawley), were the comedic foils on I Love Lucy, but it was the crackpot schemes of Lucy and Ricky that kept viewers hooked — even 70 years on. It was, wrote one TV historian, married life as seen through the distortions of a “Coney Island mirror.” Ball herself called it the art of “exaggerated satire.”
Her pratfalls are legendary: stuffing her face with marshmallows; struggling with ill-fitting slippers; and stomping grapes at a winery in Italy — her personal favourite.
Critics at the New York Times dismissed it as down-market, but Big Apple viewers were smitten — it was No. 1 in New York City within four months. By April 7, 1952, nearly 11 million households were hooked, the first time a TV show had reached such numbers.
And much like Mr. Bean, Lucy appealed to all age groups, with children delighting in a dopey adult with childlike frailties.
Born in Jamestown, N.Y., on Aug. 6, 1911, Ball died in 1989 at age 77, but her legacy survives at the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum in her hometown, where sitcom lovers can visit a replica of Lucy and Ricky’s New York City apartment.
Before she came along, the TV situation comedy was a rather static extension of radio serials. Ball remade it in her own wacky image, putting CBS on the path to profitability and ensuring television’s place as the largest advertising medium in the world.
Not bad for a scatterbrained housewife once dismissed as “The Queen of the B Movies.”