We Had Them, Babe | CBS Watch

We Had Them, Babe | CBS Watch

Remember When--

Long-haired Sonny & Cher set the stage for the summers of the 1970s

They arrived in August 1971 with a six-week summer replacement series, a couple of hippies with a few hit records, repackaged as the Battling Bickersons of bohemian glamour. Sonny and Cher, the husband-and-wife singing duo-cum-comedy team, were an instant success with TV audiences. I can vouch for one 8-year-old who remembers CBS’ The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour as being the best thing to come down the pike during those dog days 40 years ago.

The variety program was loosely patterned after The Carol Burnett Show but, built around two married rock singers instead of a Broadway star, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour had more of an edge. It had animation. It had music videos. It had balls—orange ones with caricatures of the two stars on them, as part of the set. Part concert, part sketch comedy show, it let us know just how talented a performer Cher was, and just how likable a mustachioed little Italian whose greatest strengths had always been behind the scenes as a songwriter could be on camera. Together, they were golden.

Each week, Sonny and Cher would open with a song, then pause to trade barbs about his height, her nose, each other’s heritage and Sonny’s meddling mother, and launch back into the number. It was a lovers’ quarrel that always ended with a musical kiss-and-make-up moment. Then Cher might sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” and, after a commercial, turn her hand to comedy, at which she proved more than adept. Sketches might include a “Vamp” routine in which Cher would play various femmes fatale, or “Sonny’s Pizza,” in which Sonny ran a restaurant. The funniest moments would come when Cher would trade her glamorous Bob Mackie-clad façade for a tiger-striped unitard with one bra strap always showing to play a horny housewife named Laverne. It was high-tack—although that costume was designed by Mackie, too—and it was hilarious.

The formula worked so well that summer that The Sonny & Cher ComedyHour was brought back as a regular series just after Christmas that year. Sonny and Cher became the Dick and Liz of a new generation, and spawned a later tide of summer series, such as Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Hudson Brothers Show, Shields and Yarnell and The Jacksons. Sonny and Cher’s series, the best of which is available on DVD, ran until 1974 when the couple, who’d seemed so happy in their squabbles, announced they were splitting up.

They each tried going it alone on television: Sonny’s show bombed; Cher’s had only modest success. When they then reunited on television as a divorced couple performing together on The Sonny & Cher Show, the magic was gone. Their put-downs, which were so lovingly delivered when they were married, now just seemed sour.

Although both went on to enormously successful careers—Sonny Bono as a congressman and Cher as, well, Cher (plus an Oscar)— America always liked them best together. Anyone who ever doubted that fact needed only to tune in to a 1987 installment of Late Night with David Letterman on which Sonny and Cher reunited and sang an impromptu version of their popular hit “I Got You Babe.” It was a magic moment in TV history, one that transported us all back to that summer 40 years ago when the beat had just started to go on.

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I so fondly remember the musical/comedy era of TV. Carol Barnett, Sonny & Cher, The Osmonds, were just a few of the ones I turned in to see. No VCR's then so you had to watch it live. To bad someone hasn't tried an updated version of this instead of the constant cramming of "reality" shows down out throats.