Here's an episode of Topper, a 1953-1955 situation comedy based on the 1937 Cary Grant movie of the same name. Cosmo Topper, played in the TV series by Leo G. Carroll, lived in a home inhabited by three ghosts (one of them, a dog) that only he could see. I remember watching this show over and over in syndicated reruns in the late fifties and early sixties but this is the first time I ever saw a print of it with the original opening and closing. It's also full of commercials for Camel cigarettes, which I guess explains why everyone in the show was always smoking. Even the dead people.
This is one of the eleven episodes written by George Oppenheimer (a screenwriter and playwright who among other credits wrote on the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races) and his then-partner, Stephen Sondheim. This is not the episode in which Topper's wife entered a jingle-writing contest and penned a terrible entry that didn't rhyme very well. That may well have been the first Sondheim lyric to be performed on television…and the worst.
