Horror Stories About Prop People. Part Four.

I've saved the best, or at least the most grotesque, for last.
1978.
I was doing a pilot with Ted Knight that became a series that lasted for six episodes on CBS.
It was called "The Ted Knight Show".
Ted played the head of an escort service.
The kind that people thought didn't exist.
The kind that didn't involve prostitution.
But they in fact did exist.
Ted was very funny playing this stuffy, no nonsense boss.
The idea for the pilot was one that I witnessed by watching Lynn Redgrave and her husband talk about it on "Tomorrow with Tom Snyder".
Lynn Redgrave's husband had actually worked as one of those escorts at one of those respectable kinds.
His job, one evening, was to accompany his female client, a fairly young girl, to her parents house for dinner.  He was to be introduced as her new fiancée.
This ruse was contrived so that he would be so obnoxious that her parents would relent and give their blessing to her real boyfriend, who they also disapproved of, but not nearly as much.
And it worked.
We thought that this would be a natural for Ted Knight, who has already been established as
Mr. Stuffy, Mr. Dignity.  But he allowed himself to be pressed into service for this gig, dreading it  at every turn.
We play out the scene, and it was hilarious.
It culminated with dessert.
It was the father's birthday and they wheeled out a huge seven layer birthday cake.
Ted, commenting on how great it looked, proceeded to lean over it and take a huge bite directly out
of the cake.
No plate, just directly out of the cake.
In situations like this, the prop man has to have at least six spare cakes on hand in case something goes wrong during the filming .
And he had six spare cakes.
But at the first run-through for the writers, we used a cake that looked like  all the others.
And Ted took a huge bite into it.
The only problem was that this cake was made out of cement.
And you could hear Ted's teeth practically shatter as he bit into it.
Nobody had gone to the trouble of telling Ted it was not a real cake.
Fortunately, no serious damage was done, but really, the level of stupidity was off the charts.
All that was required was for the prop man to have read the script.
But it was too much trouble.
I dare anybody to top that one.

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