Our Miss Brooks
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Our Miss Brooks, an American situation comedy, starred Eve Arden as a witty, sarcastic high school English teacher. It began as a radio show which lasted from 1948 to 1957. In 1952 the program migrated to television to become one of the earlier hits of the so-called Golden Age of Television, and in 1956, it became a feature film.
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[edit] Characters
- Connie Brooks, played by Eve Arden, is a smart, sardonic English teacher at fictional Madison High School.
- Osgood Conklin, played by Joe Forte and later, Gale Gordon, is the principal of Madison High. He is a gruff, unsympathetic character and a constant pain to Miss Brooks.
- Walter Denton is a high school student. He is goofy and well-intentioned, and he often drives Miss Brooks to school. He was played by Richard Crenna, who created a high, nasal voice for Walter.
- Mr. Boynton is a biology teacher played by Jeff Chandler and later, Robert Rockwell. He is the shy, clueless object of Miss Brooks' affections.
- Jacque Monet is a French teacher. He was played by Gerald Mohr.
- Margaret Davis is Miss Brooks' absentminded landlady. She has a cat named Minerva.
[edit] Radio
It may be impossible to imagine Miss Brooks being played by anybody other than Eve Arden, but she actually wasn't the first choice to play the role. The show's producer, Harry Ackerman, wanted Shirley Booth, until he realised Booth was so focused on the downside of a teacher's life at the time---being underpaid---that she couldn't make it work as a comic role. [1]
Lucille Ball also turned down the role, though she herself recommended Arden. Arden still had doubts about the early scripts until CBS president Bill Paley himself persuaded her to take the part in 1948.
[edit] Television
The cast of the radio show made the transition to television in 1952, with the exception of Jeff Chandler, who was replaced by Robert Rockwell. The show continued to revolve around around Connie's daily relationships with Madison High School students, colleagues, and pompous principal.
Partway through the series, Miss Brooks and Mr. Conklin graduated from public high school to an exclusive private school, with Gene Barry joining the cast as physical education teacher Gene Talbot. He also introduced a new romantic twist into Connie Brooks's life; he pursued Connie, previously the pursuer of Mr. Boynton.
Our Miss Brooks ran for 154 episodes and won an Emmy award before it was cancelled in 1956.
[edit] Awards and Recognition
Both the radio and television shows drew as much attention from professional educators as from radio and television fans and viewers and critics. Eve Arden was voted the top ranking radio comedienne in a poll of Radio Mirror listeners in 1948 and 1949 and in a poll of critics by Motion Picture Daily at the end of 1949---but her notices soon expanded beyond her media. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Arden was made an honorary member of the National Education Association and received an award from the Teachers College of Connecticut's Alumni Association (in 1952) "for humanising the American teacher".
Written with intelligent wit, Our Miss Brooks was considered groundbreaking for showing a woman who was neither a scatterbrained klutz nor a homebody but, rather, a working woman who transcended the actual or assumed limits to women's working lives of the time. Connie Brooks was a realistic character with an unglamorised profession (she often joked, for example, about being underpaid, as many teachers were at the time) who showed women could be competent and self-sufficient outside their home lives without losing their femininity or their humanity.
Miss Brooks was an immensely popular character among teachers, parents, women, and high school students, so much so that Eve Arden was even offered teaching jobs. She turned those down, but she did sometimes speak at PTA meetings.
Our Miss Brooks remains Eve Arden's most identifiable and popular role, with numerous surviving recordings of both the radio and television versions entertaining fans even today. A quarter century after the show ended, Arden told radio historian John Dunning in an on-air interview just what the show and the role came to mean to her: "I originally loved the theater. I still do. And I had always wanted to have a hit on Broadway that was created by me. You know, kind of like Judy Holliday and Born Yesterday. And I griped about it a little. And someone said to me, 'Do you realise that, if you had a hit on Broadway, probably a hundred or two hundred thousand people might have seen you in it, if you'd stayed in it long enough. And this way, you've been in Miss Brooks, everybody loves you, and you've been seen by millions.’ So, I figured I'd better shut up while I was ahead."[2]
[edit] Movie
In 1956, the cast once more made a transition, this time to feature film. Directed by Al Lewis and written by both him and Joseph Quillan, the movie disregarded the past four years of television and started with a new storyline.
[edit] References
- Wertheim, Arthur Frank, Radio Comedy (1979) Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN: 0195024818
- Arden, Eve The Three Phases of Eve (1985)
