Bigger & Better

In the flood of radio & TV shows returning to the air last week, two stood out for technical and professional competence:

P: In radio, the venerable Jack Benny Show (Sun. 7 p.m., CBS) began its 19th year before a studio audience so enthusiastic that even the commercial (for Lucky Strike) got as much welcoming applause as any of the cast. By now, 56-year-old Jack Benny's tightwad, pompous radio personality has become a U.S. institution, and the show's humor lies as much in his familiar character as in comic invention. As always, Benny played the foil for the acid comment of his wife, Mary Livingstone, the booming illiteracy of Bandleader Phil Harris, the naive malevolence of Singer Dennis Day, and the jaundiced animadversions of Eddie Anderson as Rochester, Benny's valet. There were indications that Benny was using his radio time as a dry run for his TV debut next month: the biggest laughs from the studio audience came from sight gags about a milk-horse that were an imposition on millions of radio listeners.

P: On TV, one of the biggest, and certainly the longest (2 1/2 hours) of the returning shows was Saturday Night Revue (Sat. 8 p.m., NBC-TV). The Revue is divided into unequal parts: the hour-long Jack Carter Show, a melange of slow jokes and vaudeville turns, and Your Show of Shows, brilliantly staged by Broadway's Max Liebman and reaching a TV high in literacy, talent and theatricality. Stars of Liebman's show are Sid Caesar, TV's best home-grown comic, and tiny Imogene Coca, an ex-nightclub comedienne. Whether playing the part of young marrieds having the boss to dinner, or a fellow and a girl suffering through the false starts and affectations of a date, they bring a satirical accent to familiar American situations. When Caesar and Coca are offstage, the TV screen is agreeably filled by good dancers and singers. Far less agreeable are the commercials scattered jerkily throughout the entire Saturday Night Revue, hawking the products of the nine sponsors who foot the $60,000 weekly bill.

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