have thrown them in my face,' Dean said later, 'but they agreed to it all. So what the hell, I had to show up!'" As daughter Deana Martin recalled, after meeting the network and making his demands, Martin returned home and announced to his family, "They went for it. So now I have to do it." (The terms of employment, and not having to appear for rehearsals, allowed Martin to appear in a series of Matt Helm films concurrent with the show's run, as well as other projects such as a co-starring role in the first Airport film in 1970.) Martin believed that an important key to his popularity was that he did not put on airs. His act was that of a drunken, work-shy playboy, although the ever-present old-fashioned glass in his hand often only had apple juice in it. The show was heavy on physical comedy rather than just quips (he made his weekly entrance by sliding down a fireman's pole onto the stage.) Martin read his dialogue directly from cue cards. If he flubbed a line or forgot a lyric, Martin would not do a retake, and the mistake—and his recovery from it—went straight to tape and onto the air. The Dean Martin Show was shot on color videotape beginning in 1965 at Studio 4 inside NBC's massive color complex at 3000 West Alameda Avenue in Burbank, California. The same studio was used for Frank Sinatra's yearly TV specials in the late 1960s, and Elvis Presley's 1968 "Comeback Special". Studio 4 is currently one of two used in the production of the soap opera Days of Our Lives. Regular segments Martin sang two solo numbers per show, one a serious ballad. He would join his weekly guests in song medleys, trading lyrics back and forth. Some of these duets were deliberately played for laughs—with Liberace, for example—with special lyrics by Lee Hale to suit the performers. One recurring segment was based on Martin's club act, in which he would begin to sing a popular song and suddenly insert a gag lyric in an attempt to make his pianist Ken Lane laugh hard enough to break his concentration. The segment usually began with Martin leaping onto Lane's piano; in one episode, the real piano was secretly replaced with a phony one that collapsed when Martin tried to leap onto it. A knock on the "closet" door occurred each