'I had to push for it!' Carol Burnette was discouraged from doing her own comedy
Carol Burnett was discouraged from doing her own kind of comedy and had to "push" to get her now-legendary variety show on the air.
Carol Burnett was discouraged from doing her own kind of comedy.
The 89-year-old comedienne entertained TV audiences for more than a decade in the 1960s and 1970s with her self-titled variety show but revealed that producers initially "poo-pooed" the idea and wanted her to do a typical sitcom instead.
She told Fox News Digital: "I had done 'The Garry Moore Show', which was a very good variety show. So, I had all of that experience under my belt. [But] they poo-pooed my idea, saying, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ And [they] had a sitcom they wanted me to do, to which I said, ‘I don’t want to be the same person every week. I want variety, I want music, I want different characters to do.’
"They had to put us on the air because I had a 10-year contract… I just said, ‘This is what I know, and this is what I want to do.’ I wasn’t deterred at all. I just simply said, ‘I want to have fun.’ And I pushed for that. They had to put it on the air."
The 'Annie' star went on to add that she would like to see her kind of sketch show revived once more but claimed that no network would commission such a programme these days because it would be too costly to make.
She said: "I’d like to see variety come back. But [the networks] could never do what we did because I think the cost would be extravagant now," she explained. "We had a 28-piece orchestra, 12 dancers. We had 60 to 75 costumes a week. Bob Mackie designed for our guest stars.
"All of that you couldn’t do today. It would be too much. We did kind of a Broadway mini-musical comedy review every week. And that couldn’t be done today. But there could be a hybrid of some way to do a variety show because there are people who could certainly do variety. But I don’t think a network would take a chance. I just wish they would.
