Ben Lyon, Bebe Daniels, and their two children move into a new house. There are still some things to settle: faulty electricity, poor drains, and the owner has neither signed the 75-year lease nor handed over the keys
Daniels and Lyon moved from the US to Great Britain, at first because their American film careers were drying up, and they had offers in England. Then, when the Second World War started, they were among the few American entertainers to stick it out. They were enormously popular on stage, screen and radio, first with Vic Oliver. They came back to the US after the War, Ben worked at 20th Century-Fox, and Bebe tried producing, but that didn't pan out. So they resettled in Britain and started a new radio program 1951, in a show reminiscent of THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET, in which they played broadly comic versions of themselves, and their children did the same. This movie, and THE LYONS ABROAD, was a segue into turning the radio program into a TV show. It was successful, and they didn't retire from regular broadcasting until 1961.
I can see why. It's an easy, comfortable sort of movie, one in which they pull a few sight gags that wouldn't have played on radio -- Steven Hill, as a singing cowboy, enters they foyer on his horse; a chandelier doesn't work, and when Ben rewires it, the radio plays, and the chandelier flickers in sympathy with the door bell. Bebe plays her role midway between Gracie Allen and Penny Singleton, and Ben is the confident bumbler. It's not great comedy, but as a visual version of the radio show, and a try-out for the TV show, it works just fine.
