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The honored art of pure slapstick is so out of vogue that few people even remember that the word refers to an actual stick--"a device," says Webster, "made of two flat pieces of wood, sometimes used in farce by one actor striking another in such a way as from the loud noise to make it appear that the blow was a severe one." One might think that television would be a wilderness of slapstick, but actually there is remarkably little of it. Last week NBC tried to change this situation by introducing three new slapstick comedies in one 90-minute package.

Nudes & Tirades. Called 90 Bristol Court, the program was conceived and largely written by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who wrote and produced the old Amos 'n' Andy series. Each half-hour is a series starring a different set of people, all of whom live in the same complex of garden apartments. In the first segment last week, a 16-year-old girl (Debbie Watson) drove to an airport to pick up an Italian exchange student who was to be her blind date for a school prom. Instead, she picked up Alberto Giacometti, or his equivalent, a world-famous Italian sculptor, who happened to be passing through with a sensational bronze nude in his hand.

The middle-aged Giacometti, who could not speak a word of English, soon found himself in an American living room being looked over by a suspicious father. To get rid of him, the daughter craftily telephoned an Italian butcher, who blasted Giacometti over the phone for being a dirty old man. The show succeeded in a swirl of mistaken identities, mistaken overcoats and wonderful long tirades in uninterrupted Italian.

Consummate Cleavage. The second segment was about a lantern-jawed toad (Jack Klugman), whose secretary was so dumb that she wrote him notes so badly garbling the English language that she said RETURN A MOOSE'S HARNESS when she meant RETURN MRS. HARRIS' CALL. It fuzz not fairy hill airy us. But the third was plotted with Elizabethan comedic geometries. The net end of its contrivances was to place a consummately luscious, half-dressed young wife in the same apartment with two unlikely men, both innocent of adulterous intent, while her savagely jealous husband was closing in for the kill. New dimensions of television were opened as the camera focused down her talented cleavage and fondly delineated the removal of a stocking from a leg that could wake the Visigoths.

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