You have questions, I have some answers.
Q: When will “The Gilded Age” begin again?
A: I have mentioned before that the acclaimed HBO drama will have a second season. But I can now also mention an air date: Oct. 29. Among the new season’s stories: Bertha still challenging the social system, Marian seeking her way in the world, Ada in a new courtship and Peggy tapping into her activist side. All of which makes for a very busy eight episodes.
Q: I seem to remember, from my younger days, two comedy shows. The first one starred Patty Duke and Richard Crenna, and the second one had Tom Poston as a clown in an apartment closet. Do you recall the names of these two sitcoms and if there is any DVD availability?
A: Crenna and Duke (then billed as Patty Duke Astin) starred in “It Takes Two,” which aired on ABC in 1982-83. They played a married couple where he was a surgeon and she was an assistant D.A. It’s also worth noting that their children were played by Helen Hunt and Anthony Edwards, both of whom went on to big careers.
Tom Poston played a clown whose only known name was Clown in the comedy “Committed,” which aired on NBC for a few months in 2005. The series was about “misfits in love,” according to one reference, with Josh Cooke and Jennifer Finnigan as the misfits; Clown lived in the closet of the woman’s apartment.
I do not know of authorized DVD releases of either show.
Q: I am trying to remember a delightful cooking show featuring two older ladies who traveled around Great Britain on a motorcycle with a sidecar. Not only were they good cooks, they seemed to really enjoy their crafts and travels at various venues across the country. Is it available anymore?
A: You are remembering “Two Fat Ladies,” which starred Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright as two cooks showing off their cooking at various locations. They favored, as the New York Times put it, “cholesterol-soaked dishes.” But there was also what the Guardian called “the unscripted whimsy of their on-screen exchanges.”
Paterson and Dickson Wright made about two dozen episodes of the show from 1996 to 1999, when Paterson died. Dickson Wright passed away in 2014. One place to see the shows now is on YouTube.
Q: Can you identify a TV show from about 1956 that featured a young woman named Susan, who sat on a chair and conversed with a talking table? I can’t recall if there were other people or puppets, but there might have been another piece of furniture that talked.
A: That was “Susan’s Show,” a CBS Saturday-morning program in 1957-58. It had begun as a local show in Chicago and was hosted by Susan Heinkel, a veteran performer at the age of 12, with — as Time magazine put it in 1957 — “big, fluttery eyes, shiny bangs and friendly full-moon face.” It indeed had a talking table (which also flew) and an array of other characters including “an all-animal orchestra which included Wolfgang, the violin-playing bear, flop-eared Gregory, the rabbit flutist, and Bruce, the world’s only drum-beating gopher,” Time said. There were also cartoons.
Tribune News Service
