Radio: Old Army Game

When owl-eyed Phil Silvers scored his surprising Trendex rating victory over Milton Berle, he was the first entertainer to accomplish the feat in all Berle’s years on television. Silvers followed his win with a similar victory over Martha Raye. Last week, to prove it was no accident, he beat Uncle Miltie again. Bald, horn-rimmed Phil Silvers, 43, has been near the show-business top for years (as in Broadway’s hit musicals, High Button Shoes and Top Banana}, but until his TV Phil Silvers Show (Tues. 8 p.m., CBS), he had never quite scored a national success. He is still bitter about Hollywood, which kept him dangling for nearly a decade: “When I did work in pictures, I was always Blinky, the hero’s best friend. I was the one in the last reel who tells Betty Grable that the guy really loves her.” Phil began to circle cautiously around television a year ago. NBC offered to star him in some Spectaculars, but he refused: “So you make a big hit in a Spectacular — the next day you’re the forgotten man. I wanted a steady job and a steady pay check.” CBS gave him a contract and tossed in Producer-Writer Nat Hiken, a gloomy young man (41) who has supplied funny lines and situations for a generation of radio and TV comics, including Fred Allen, Jack Carson, Milton Berle and Martha Raye. The two men moved into Hiken’s private office, a coldwater, off-Broadway flat on Manhattan’s West Side, and set to work. They considered and discarded dozens of formats. For a while. Phil was going to play a busybody brother-in-law; then they switched to making him the manager of a minor-league baseball team; then the proprietor of a combined gymnasium and rehearsal hall. Silvers says: “When Nat first thought of this Army thing, I didn’t like it. But it had one major quality — it wasn’t show business. I’m fed up with comedies about show business.” So Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko was born. As Silvers plays him, the sergeant’s middle name is larceny: he bamboozles everybody on the post with the fast-talking ease of a gypsy promising to double a housewife’s savings if she will just wrap up the dough in a clean handkerchief. The show is filmed in Manhattan, where Brooklyn-born Phil Silvers is happiest, and he has his weekends free to go to prizefights, hockey games, and, in season, root for the Dodgers. His left-footed TV platoon is loaded with ex-ringmen (Middleweight Walter Carder, Light-weight Maxie Shapiro, Fight Manager Jack Healy), and Silvers hopes he is settled for a long TV run: “I had adoration before, but it was never anything like this. It was a limited-type adoration. Now they adore me all out.”