He’s the Bishop of Lido Isle

The last time Joey Bishop watched his sitcom “The Joey Bishop Show,” LBJ had only just begun widening the Vietnam War, the Rat Pack was the epitome of middle-aged cool, and the Beatles had yet to go psychedelic.

But thanks to the TV Land cable channel, which started showing the 1961-65 sitcom last month, Bishop now has videotapes of 92 episodes of his first TV series lining a shelf in the living room of his Newport Beach home.

Missing from his collection is the show’s first season, which was not part of the TV Land deal.

In the first year of the series, which aired on NBC three seasons and on CBS its final season, Bishop played the same character, Joey Barnes, but that first year he was a public-relations man living at home with his mother (played by Madge Blake). A 23-year-old Marlo Thomas played his sister.

At Bishop’s initiation, the show underwent a dramatic change of format after that first season: Joey Barnes became a newly married New York City-based late-night talk-show host. Abby Dalton played his wife. Guy Marks--and later Corbett Monica--played his best friend, and roly-poly Joe Besser played the janitor of his apartment building.

The format change not only gave the deadpan comic a more likely character to play but an opportunity to ad-lib and play off a string of guest celebrities. Among them: Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Danny Thomas, Jack Benny, Jack Jones, Jan Murray, Cliff Arquette, Oscar Levant and members of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“You must allow me the privilege of playing a part of one show for you,” Bishop, 80, said at the outset of an interview in his waterfront Lido Isle home. “Did you like Edgar Bergen? Please. And then I’ve got one with the Andrews Sisters you gotta let me show you.”

But the tapes would have to wait.

Spend an afternoon with Joey Bishop and the conversation ranges from his series to working with fellow Rat Packers in Vegas to the first time he met Danny Thomas--whose company produced “The Joey Bishop Show”--in New York City in the ‘40s.

Bishop, in fact, believes the resurgence of interest in the Rat Pack gives him “a very important break” with today’s young audience, one not shared by the stars of other vintage television series.

“All those young kids know Joey Bishop from the Rat Pack,” he said. “I’m as up-to-date as anything with an out-of-date show.”

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Bishop isn’t the only one taking pleasure in having his old series back on the tube.

“I got a nice compliment the other day in a letter a woman wrote,” Bishop, casually dressed in a sweatsuit and sandals, said before settling onto a sofa. “She said, ‘Thank God, they’ve got your show on the air. My 9-year-old son can now watch television again.’ ”

Ask Bishop what he thinks of the state of comedy on TV today and he has a ready answer: It’s too crude.

“When we entertained, we entertained an entire family. If I went out in a nightclub, sitting ringside could be a bar mitzvah boy. A sweet-16 girl. A grandfather celebrating his 80th birthday. The mother and the father. Priests! Nuns!

“Today, [comics] have only their own age [group]--21 to 35--and the dirtier they get, the funnier they think they are.”

Unlike most comedians who dream of starring in their own sitcoms, Bishop wasn’t eager to do a TV series when it was offered.

“I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “Not a series. It wasn’t my forte.”

Though the first season playing a PR man “was working out,” Bishop said, “it wasn’t something I couldn’t wait to go and do. They just happened to make a big mistake in casting me in my family because I had to kind of play sympathetically [toward his mother] Madge Blake. I couldn’t kid with her.”

Feeling as though he were “a fish out of water,” Bishop came up with the perfect solution to phase out the family format at the end of the first season: a dream sequence in which he plays a talk-show host, “so I can have, during the show, celebrities that I can ad-lib with and have fun with. And that’s what we did.”

As for ad-libbing on the series, which was shot before an audience of 350, he said, “I’ll give you an example. It turned out be to be very funny.”

In one episode his wife, Ellie, tells him she’s pregnant. Joey is convinced they’re going to have a boy and dreams that his son “is the finest surgeon who ever lived.”

Bishop plays his son, wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit and wheeling into the operating room on a scooter. Besser played his patient, and Dalton and Mary Treen (who played their maid) were his nursing assistants.

During the operation, Bishop asked for a scalpel and the usual instruments. But when he asked for scissors, somebody in the audience yelled out, “Scissors?!”

They could have stopped filming, Bishop said. Instead, without breaking character, he faced the audience and said, “Will the visiting surgeon please refrain from talking while the operation is in progress.”

And they continued filming, Bishop said. “Now that was my forte. You understand?”

Because many of the episodes featured guest stars playing themselves, the writers would naturally tailor story lines for them.

“For example,” Bishop said, “Milton Berle is a takeover guy, right? You know that. So when I’m showing him my baby’s room for when the baby comes, you know he’s going to redo the room.”

Bishop inserted a videotape of the show featuring Edgar Bergen into his VCR.

The story line has Joey’s talk-show guest, Bergen, later teaching him the rudiments of throwing his voice. Joey then plays a practical joke on his wife by making her believe 4-month-old Joey Jr. (played by Dalton’s son) can talk.

Pausing the videotape, Bishop said that what he doesn’t like about many current situation comedies is “the striving for a laugh. If you’ve got something funny to say, throw it away.” The low-key Bishop, of course, was a master at underplaying.

“Please,” he said at the end of the Bergen episode, “let me just play a little bit of the Andrews Sisters.”

He popped in the episode in which he puts the fear of God into Patty, Maxine and LaVerne by suggesting he join them in a song when they appear on his talk show. Bishop, of course, has no singing voice. As he remarked as the episode unfolded, “Frank Sinatra would say I hit notes only Jewish dogs could hear.”

Bishop calls an episode featuring Andy Williams and JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader, whose “The First Family” was the era’s hottest-selling comedy album, “one of the funniest shows I ever did in my life.”

But TV Land viewers won’t be seeing the episode because it never aired: The day after filming was completed, President Kennedy was assassinated.

One episode TV Land viewers will see features pianist Oscar Levant, a notorious hypochondriac in real life.

“That was a classic. A classic!” Bishop said. “He wanted to do the show, but he was so ill that he had a nurse in attendance bringing him in and we had a doctor on the set.”

The idea was that Levant, who is living in the same apartment building as Joey, is having his apartment painted. Joey’s wife, who knows nothing about Levant except his name, volunteers to let him stay in their guest room.

Explained Bishop: “Now she tells me. I said, ‘Oscar Levant?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘For three days, he’s coming here?’ ‘Yes.’ As I’m talking to her, the doorbell rings. I go to the door and there’s Oscar Levant with six suitcases. I said, ‘I was under the impression you’re staying only for three days.’

“He said, ‘These are just my pills.’ ”

The deadpan Bishop nearly cracked a smile.

“You never heard a laugh like that in your entire life. You hear what I’m telling you? They screamed.”