Radio: Un-Average American Family

The Crazy Creightons is radio’s daffiest 30 minutes.

Mother Creighton is an unpublished murder-mystery writer (You Too Can Be The Death Of The Party, No Cream With Your Coffin) whose slogan is “the gore the merrier.” For her scatterbrain, a telephone conversation poses a major intellectual dilemma.

Father Creighton, as graciously wacky as his wife Serena, is a penniless sculptor who never quite finishes his masterpieces before the supply company calls to repossess its marble. Once, when he sold a statue of a dog to a dog kennel, he accepted a mongrel dog (“Buffalo Bull”) in payment because it looked just like his son Victor.

Victor is a 17-year-old scientist: he breeds guinea pigs in the house.

Only non-pixillated Creighton is 13-year-old Cordelia, who is driven nearly crazy by the others.

Last week The Crazy Creightons moved into a Sunday night spot on NBC (10:30, E.W.T.) in addition to their Saturday morning show (11, E.W.T.). Their creator beamed. She is a bushy-haired Hunter College graduate named Priscilla Kent, and to her the doings of radio’s average American families (Pepper Young’s Family, One Man’s Family, The Parker Family, The Aldrich Family) are a pain in the neck. What has always interested her is the “un-average American family.”

So she started The Crazy Creightons. She drew heavily on her own family for color and there was plenty to draw on. Once Scripter Kent’s 17-year-old brother, an amateur scientist, discovered a pigeon nesting on the fire escape, froze out his family while he kept the window open to warm the mother pigeon with a sun lamp. Her mother, who has Mother Creighton trouble with telephones, often returns from the cinema raving about Rickey Mooney.

Priscilla Kent herself, a 27-year-old New Yorker who got fed up with publicity writing before she went to NBC as script writer, works “when the mood strikes,” which is usually at night while she is putting her hair in curlpapers. What the Kent family lacked in source material, she may have picked up by natural affinity from the screwy Sycamores of You Can’t Take It With You.