August 11, 2010

John Aylesworth Co-Creator of Hee Haw, Dies

With partner Frank Peppiatt, he conceived one of television’s most successful series.

John Aylesworth, a TV writer and producer who co-created the long-running comedy-variety show Hee Haw, died July28, 2010, at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California. According to news reports, he died from complications of pneumonia. He was 81.

Aylesworth was born August 18, 1928, in Toronto. Canada. He broke into television in 1953 as a writer and performer on the Canadian sketch comedy show After Hours and moved to the U.S. in 1958 to write for the CBS music show Your Hit Parade.

He and his former performing and writing partner, fellow Canadian Frank Peppiatt, reteamed in 1959 to write for The Andy Williams Show, a summer replacement program on CBS.

Aylesworth and Peppiatt went on to write for Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall, The Judy Garland Show, Hullabaloo, The ABC Comedy Hour and many other shows. For the 1965 special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, they received a Peabody Award and were nominated for a Primetime Emmy.

They also were among the writers who shared an Emmy nomination for The Julie Andrews Hour in 1973 and for The Sonny and Cher Show in 1976.

But Aylesworth and Peppiatt found their biggest success when they created Hee Haw, an hour-long variety and comedy show hosted by country singers Buck Owens and Roy Clark and steeped in rural culture and country music.

Although Aylesworth and Peppiatt had never visited the rural South or Midwest before developing Hee Haw, which launched in 1969, they had a sense that the format would be a success based on the television ratings in the late 1960s, when the show premiered. When they noticed that the two most popular series at the time were The Beverly Hillbillies and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, they struck upon Hee Haw as a hybrid of the two.

When CBS decided to steer away from rural-themed programming in 1971, Hee Haw was canceled despite high ratings. In a bold move at the time, Aylesworth, Peppiatt and a business partner found advertisers and syndicated the program on their own. It remained in production until 1992 and, with 585 episodes, was one of the longest-running shows in television history.

After selling Hee Haw to a syndicate for $15 million in 1982, Mr. Aylesworth and Peppiatt wrote a musical stage show about Jimmy Durante.

Despite his long record of success, Aylesworth found little work as a television writer after turning 50. In recent years, he was a plaintiff in a series of class-action lawsuits accusing studios and agents of age discrimination.

Survivors include his wife, five children and a grandson.

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