Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In for "Laugh-In" was Ian Bernard. He wrote the opening theme music, "Inquisitive Tango", plus the infamous "What's the news across the nation" number. He wrote all the musical "play-ons" that introduced comedy sketches like Lily Tomlin's character, Edith Ann, the little girl who sat in a giant rocking chair, and Arte Johnson's old man character, Tyrone, who always got hit with a purse. He also appeared in many of the cocktail scenes where he directed the band as they stopped and started between jokes. Composer-lyricist Billy Barnes wrote all of the original musical production numbers in the show, and often
The Man Who Never Was Balchin's screenplay won the BAFTA for that year. In 1943, Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander, Ewen Montagu (Clifton Webb), comes up with a scheme to deceive the Nazis about the impending invasion of Southern Europe. It entails releasing a dead body just off the coast of Spain, where strong currents will almost certainly cause it to drift ashore in an area where a skilled German secret agent operates. The corpse will appear as a plane crash victim, the non-existent Royal Marine, Major William Martin, who is carrying false letters about a forthcoming Allied invasion of German-occupied Greece, rather than the obvious