By David Flynn

At this time of year, many classic US tv series had special episodes built around the yuletide season which featured their characters in stories showing the happiness or sadness of Christmas time.
‘Mama’ was one of television’s first ever sitcoms, and was based on the Oscar nominated movie, ‘I Remember Mama’. The series, which premiered in 1949, had a long run on the CBS network and had an interesting cast, which it’s claimed, briefly included legendary 1950s movie icon, James Dean.

The premise of the series Mama involved a Norwegian family living in the early 1900s period in San Francisco. The family was led by matriarch, Mama Hansen, played by Broadway stage star Peggy Wood, who was Oscar-nominated in the mid-1960s for the role of the Mother Abbess in the movie, ‘The Sound of Music’.

In the early years of the series, Mama, the teenage actor, Dick Van Patten was drafted into the US army and had to leave the series. He was replaced by his friend, James Dean, who later made the movies, ‘East of Eden’, ‘Rebel Without A Cause’ and ‘Giant’, before he was killed in a car crash in 1955 age 24 years.
Dick revealed in an interview that he told the army that he was the sole support of his real-life mother, and they let him return to work on the hit tv series. He said that he believed James Dean had starred in two shows of Mama before his return.

In its third season, Mama had a Christmas episode entitled, ‘The Night the Animals Talked’, which aired on December 21st, 1951.
The Hansen family were excited with Christmas approaching, while Mama told them a nostalgic tale from her childhood in Norway.

John Forsythe was star of the US tv sitcom, Bachelor Father. He played the independently wealthy bachelor, Bentley Gregg in the hit tv series which began on US television in 1957. In its fifth and final season, the sitcom’s Christmas episode, ‘Deck The Hall’ saw Bentley tiring of trying to educate his family and friends about the true meaning of Christmas, so he donates to charities in their names, rather than giving them gifts!

McHale’s Navy was a sitcom set around a navy boat on an island in the Pacific Ocean after the attack on Pearl Harbour. Despite WW2 being on, eighteen military men lived an almost idyllic life on the island, led by Lt. Commander Quinton McHale, played by Ernest Borgnine.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own