Since the TV Land Awards are for television legends, Carol Burnett should feel right at home.
In fact, it’s the Legend Award that the widely beloved star and her former Carol Burnett Show cronies will receive during the nostalgic network’s third annual ceremony celebrating classic television programs and stars. The event will be simulcast on TV Land and sister network Nickelodeon tonight, three nights after its taping at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif.
In getting the Legend Award, The Carol Burnett Show follows two worthy recipients that were jewels in CBS’s crown: The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Although she hasn’t attended in previous years, Burnett embraces the TV Land Awards as “a nice opportunity to get together with the gang again. We get together fairly often anyway, but it’s nice to dress up. It’s always fun to see the clips, and it’s also good to see that everybody’s looking OK … breathing and healthy.”
Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway, Lyle Waggoner and costume designer Bob Mackie also helped The Carol Burnett Show earn three Emmys as outstanding variety or musical series. Burnett deems it a “neat thing” to have them share in the Legend Award.
“Maybe there were people who had as much fun as we did, but I’d be hard-pressed to think they might have had more,” she says. “You could tell the camaraderie on shows like Mary Tyler Moore’s and Dick Van Dyke’s. You could see the love and the joy they had in creating those programs. It’s hard to find that anymore.”
Burnett enjoyed relating to her studio audience through the question-and-answer session she led at the start of each hour. “It was not planned for me to do that when we started the show,” she says. “We were going to have what they usually have, a warm-up guy who comes out and tells jokes. I got a little nervous, because I thought, ‘What if he’s funnier than some of the material in the show?'”
Television producer Bob Banner suggested the Q&A; idea to Burnett, who had seen how it worked for Garry Moore, the host of an earlier CBS variety show on which she appeared. “I objected,” Burnett says. “I didn’t think anybody was going to believe we weren’t planting people in the audience to ask the questions. Bob said, ‘Well, try it a couple of times.’ I did, and I realized people at home would know it was truthful … because I don’t think we ever could have written some of those questions.”
The Carol Burnett Show was long part of a high-rated CBS Saturday schedule along with The Bob Newhart Show, which also will be saluted at this year’s TV Land Awards with the Icon Award. “That lineup was really something,” Burnett says. “When you look at the clips that hold up, you realize that’s a time gone by. I don’t want to sound like an old fogy at all, but in general, they just don’t make ’em like they used to. With all the reality shows now, it’s television on the cheap.”
A 2003 Kennedy Center Honors recipient, Burnett is staying as active in television as she can. She has just filmed an ABC version of the Broadway musical that made her a star, Once Upon a Mattress, which also features Tracey Ullman. “I co-produced it, too,” Burnett says.
ON TV
Program: TV Land Awards 2005
Airs: 9 tonight on TV Land and Nickelodeon
