This episode begins with Gladys and her friend Carol tying to come up with a jingle for a Cat Food contest. Pete comes in complaining that the women are spending so much time with these contests that they neglect things-such as that night's supper-surprising them by revealing that it's already 7 o'clock.
Gladys apologizes for neglecting him by not noticing the time, but explains that the contests have wonderful prizes, such as free trips to Hawaii. Next we see Gladys and Carol trying a product for another contest-they want to use it so they can write a winning jingle. It's a hair dryer that utilizes a vacuum cleaner for the power source. They attach the hose to the dryer hood that you place just above your head and to the vacuum and turn it on, only to learn that they missed the part of the instructions about putting the vacuum on blow instead of suck.
Now I've never had a vacuum cleaner that did both, but in this show, a switch can get it to do just what was needed. What the blunder leads to is Gladys being stuck to the hood of the dryer and bumbling around before finally getting released. The women blame the machine instead of their foolishness in not reading the instructions properly.
Next we see Gladys receiving a telegram that she's won 5th place in a contest and she and Pete happily welcome Richard Deacon (Mel from Dick Van Dyke) as the company rep to give her the prize, with a photographer at his side. It turns out, the prize is that very hair dryer Gladys had the mishap with. She runs away, insisting she wants nothing to do with the product.
She winds up being a news item for refusing a prize. The company execs try to get her to change her mind-without doing the logical thing by asking what is wrong with the product and getting a chance to demonstrate how well it does work-which would have ended the episode, of course. Next we see Pete at work on the phone with his company's executive explaining that the hair dryer company does a lot of business with his company and it would be a lot easier to replace Pete than to risk losing a customer. Pete needs to get Gladys to change her mind and endorse the product.
He does get her to finally give it a second try, only this time Pete overlooks part of the instructions about cleaning out the vacuum before using as a hair dryer. The results are a wife full of dust and dirt that was shot out of the vacuum cleaner-a funny picture, but we wonder how anyone could not instantly realize this would happen.
The couple then realizes, somehow, that it was their fault for not reading the instructions first, Gladys changes her mind and everything is fine. (That's not really a spoiler is it?)
Silly as it was, this was one of the funnier episodes I've seen in this DVD set I recently bought. There was some good word-play when the women were working on a jingle, and a nice exchange with Pete and his friend emptying out his desk at work, expecting to be fired. There was also a funny scene where Pete tried the hair dryer on his own.
This series had potential, but too often they put Gladys in the sort of ridiculous situations that seemed like plots that would have been in an I Love Lucy show if it had been on another season. I'm referring to the episodes of Lucy that were too dumb to be funny, not the ones that were hilarious-she had both. Pete was quite an ordinary guy. His role was fine, but what was missing were a couple of really funny people to surround this couple. Gladys needed one regular friend, her "Ethel" or "Viv." She seemed to have a new friend almost every episode. From the cast list on IMDB, it seems like nobody was there more than a few episodes. In the first season, an older woman who kept dropping by, but she wasn't really a friend Gladys did things with, and nobody else is listed as being on more than 13 episodes. The ever-changing list of friends and neighbors definitely hurt the series, but the often bad scripts did the most to keep it from lasting longer.
Gladys apologizes for neglecting him by not noticing the time, but explains that the contests have wonderful prizes, such as free trips to Hawaii. Next we see Gladys and Carol trying a product for another contest-they want to use it so they can write a winning jingle. It's a hair dryer that utilizes a vacuum cleaner for the power source. They attach the hose to the dryer hood that you place just above your head and to the vacuum and turn it on, only to learn that they missed the part of the instructions about putting the vacuum on blow instead of suck.
Now I've never had a vacuum cleaner that did both, but in this show, a switch can get it to do just what was needed. What the blunder leads to is Gladys being stuck to the hood of the dryer and bumbling around before finally getting released. The women blame the machine instead of their foolishness in not reading the instructions properly.
Next we see Gladys receiving a telegram that she's won 5th place in a contest and she and Pete happily welcome Richard Deacon (Mel from Dick Van Dyke) as the company rep to give her the prize, with a photographer at his side. It turns out, the prize is that very hair dryer Gladys had the mishap with. She runs away, insisting she wants nothing to do with the product.
She winds up being a news item for refusing a prize. The company execs try to get her to change her mind-without doing the logical thing by asking what is wrong with the product and getting a chance to demonstrate how well it does work-which would have ended the episode, of course. Next we see Pete at work on the phone with his company's executive explaining that the hair dryer company does a lot of business with his company and it would be a lot easier to replace Pete than to risk losing a customer. Pete needs to get Gladys to change her mind and endorse the product.
He does get her to finally give it a second try, only this time Pete overlooks part of the instructions about cleaning out the vacuum before using as a hair dryer. The results are a wife full of dust and dirt that was shot out of the vacuum cleaner-a funny picture, but we wonder how anyone could not instantly realize this would happen.
The couple then realizes, somehow, that it was their fault for not reading the instructions first, Gladys changes her mind and everything is fine. (That's not really a spoiler is it?)
Silly as it was, this was one of the funnier episodes I've seen in this DVD set I recently bought. There was some good word-play when the women were working on a jingle, and a nice exchange with Pete and his friend emptying out his desk at work, expecting to be fired. There was also a funny scene where Pete tried the hair dryer on his own.
This series had potential, but too often they put Gladys in the sort of ridiculous situations that seemed like plots that would have been in an I Love Lucy show if it had been on another season. I'm referring to the episodes of Lucy that were too dumb to be funny, not the ones that were hilarious-she had both. Pete was quite an ordinary guy. His role was fine, but what was missing were a couple of really funny people to surround this couple. Gladys needed one regular friend, her "Ethel" or "Viv." She seemed to have a new friend almost every episode. From the cast list on IMDB, it seems like nobody was there more than a few episodes. In the first season, an older woman who kept dropping by, but she wasn't really a friend Gladys did things with, and nobody else is listed as being on more than 13 episodes. The ever-changing list of friends and neighbors definitely hurt the series, but the often bad scripts did the most to keep it from lasting longer.