Educating Archie was a BBC Light Programme comedy show broadcast from June 1950 to February 1958 on Sunday lunchtimes featuring ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. The programme was successful despite a ventriloquist on radio seeming strange, though in the United States, Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy, had also undertaken radio work. Educating Archie averaged 15 million listeners, and a fan club boasted 250,000 members. In 1956 the programme transferred to television before debuting on ITV in 1958.

The show introduced comedians who became well known including Tony Hancock, who always replied to a put down by Archie with “flipping kids”, Benny Hill, Harry Secombe, Dick Emery, Bernard Bresslaw, Bruce Forsyth and a young Julie Andrews as the girlfriend of Archie.

[edit] ITV sitcom adaptation

In 1958 "the same year the BBC Light Programme ended" Educating Archie transferred to ITV for a sitcom "made and adapted by former ITV company A-RT" broadcast under the same name, the adapted itv sitcom was broadcast 1958-59 and featured the ventriloquist's dummy Archie Andrews taking on life of its own and talks and walks all over its creator Peter Brough and is aided and abetted by a housekeeper (played by Irene Handl), a non-paying lodger (played by Freddie Sales later Ray Barrett) and a jack-of-all-trades (Played by Dick Emery.

[edit] References

• "Educating Archie star Brough dies". BBC News. 5 June 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/361459.stm. Retrieved 2009-05-04. 

[edit] External links

• BBC entry