It's Higgins, Sir

The Premise

The central joke was written into the will. A distant English relative, Lord Robertson, died and left the Roberts family a $10,000 silver tea service — and along with it, his butler. The catch was in the fine print: if Higgins ever left, the tea service went with him. So the Roberts household acquired a proper British manservant the way another family might acquire a piano, and the comedy followed naturally from the collision between his old-world formality and their thoroughly American disorder.

Harry McNaughton played Higgins, and the casting was almost overdetermined. He had spent most of the 1930s playing Bottle, the butler, on The Phil Baker Show, reprised the same role on Honolulu Bound in 1939, and had been a fixture on It Pays to Be Ignorant throughout the 1940s. By the time he arrived in the Roberts living room, he had been a radio butler for twenty years. One reviewer described his delivery as "fantastic lines, accentuated by the use of stereotypical butler-speak" — original and funny within a register he had essentially perfected.

The Cast and the Run

The show aired Tuesdays at 9 on NBC, half an hour each week, from July 3 to September 25, 1951 — slipped into the summer schedule as the replacement for The Bob Hope Show. Thirteen episodes, a complete run, with titles tracing Higgins's adjustment to American life: "Higgins Arrives," "Summer Vacation," "A Day on the Farm," "Higgins Befriends a Hobo," "Higgins Gets Amnesia," "The Vegetarian."

Vinton Hayworth played attorney Philip Roberts, the head of the household. Hayworth was a busy man that summer — he was also serving as president of AFRA, the radio performers' union, a post he held from 1951 to 1954. (He was Rita Hayworth's uncle, and Ginger Rogers's by marriage.) Peggy Allenby, Charles Nevil, Pat Hosley, Denise Alexander, Ethel Wilson, and Adelaide Klein filled out the family and its orbit. Paul Harrison created the show and directed every episode, sharing writing duties with Rik Vollaerts.

Afterlife

The premise didn't die when the summer ended. More than a decade later, Harrison revived it for television as Our Man Higgins, a 34-episode ABC sitcom that ran from October 1962 through May 1963, with Stanley Holloway in the butler's coat and Audrey Totter as the lady of the house. The premiere episode borrowed the radio show's title outright — "It's Higgins, Sir" — and featured a young Ryan O'Neal in a guest spot, two years before Peyton Place made him a star. Variety judged the opener slow but promising, praising Holloway while wishing the American family had more pull. Scheduled opposite The Dick Van Dyke Show, it lasted a single season.

There was a quieter sequel back on radio, too. When NBC premiered My Son Jeep in 1953, it reused the musical score from It's Higgins, Sir, and in one episode the Roberts family turned up as neighbors to the Allisons — a small wink from one summer comedy to another.