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The 169 episodes that aired 1977-1984 list Don Nicholl, Michael Ross, and Bernie West as the creators. But that, as they say, is the tip of the iceberg.

Nicholl, Ross, and West were brought in around 1976 to improve on an earlier version done by Larry Gelbart, of M*A*S*Hfame. Gelbart had been asked in 1975 to redo (in his own words, as "naughty postcards") an adaptation of the British show Man About the House licensed to Donald Taffner and Ted Bergmann.

The original British show was created by Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke. Mortimer, by the way, was a writer and playwright of some renown in the UK. Among his earlier work were translations of the nineteenth century French farceur Georges Feydeau's plays A Flea in Her Ear (1966) and Cat among the Pigeons(1969).

All this is interesting because when Nicholl, Ross, and West were brought in, they revamped the scripts, quite consciously, from naughty postcards to a Feydeau farce: abbreviated to one act, of course, but with all the absurd elements properly in place.

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16y ago

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