Goodman Ace - "Terrible Vaudeville": You Are There

"Terrible Vaudeville": You Are There

Ace may have needled TV as "terrible vaudeville," but he wasn't averse to giving television a try. The couple adapted Easy Aces to television in December 1949, with a fifteen-minute filmed version on the DuMont network (also syndicated in some areas through Ziv Television Programs) that ended in mid-June 1950, after airing Wednesday nights from 7:45-8:00 p.m., according to The Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows - 1946 to Present (First Edition). "As on radio," authors Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh wrote, "Ace was his witty, intelligent self, and his wife, Jane, was a charming bundle of malapropisms". The television show included Betty Garde as Jane Ace's friend, Dorothy. What it didn't include, alas, was an audience equal to the ones who kept Easy Aces on radio for all those years, the ones who listened each week for that quiet drollery uninterrupted even by a studio audience. The demise of the show also meant the demise of the Aces' career in front of a microphone or camera. Jane Ace retired almost completely; Goodman Ace merely retired as a performer, becoming mainly a writer from 1949 forward.

Ace did have a serious side, too, and he melded it to his sense of the absurd to create a radio show with the twist of taking listeners to re-created historical events described by actual CBS News reporters. The problem, as revealed by CBS historian Robert Metz (in CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye), was that Ace didn't get official credit for his creation for many years; a CBS executive vice president named Desmond Taylor gained the original credit for the show born on radio as CBS Was There and famed (especially on television, with future anchor Walter Cronkite narrating) for its introduction, which leapt into the American vernacular: "All things are as they were then, except you... are... there!"