Who were the brains behind M*A*S*H

A.� M*A*S*H - life in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, where hurried surgery was performed - was set in Korea in 1950, but was really about Vietnam in the 1970s.
The programme was devised by American Gene Reynolds and Larry Gelbart, then based in London, against the backdrop of war in 1973. It was the year of the Cold War with Iceland over fishing limits and in which�Israeli jets shot down a Libyan Boeing 727 airliner, killing 74.�

It was the first American-made series to combine tragedy with comedy - treating nothing as sacred, especially sex.� It was the unlikeliest hit comedy of the era; not only did it satirise war at a time when the US was losing the Vietnam conflict, but it foregrounded such taboo TV subjects as inter-racial marriage, adultery and homosexuality.

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Q.� How did it begin

A.� It started�with a book, written�by Dr Richard Hornberger, who operated on wounded American soldiers.�This was turned into an award-winning film by Twentieth Century-Fox, starring Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland.�Luckily, after making it Fox�didn't destroy�its collection of green army tents, including the doctors' tent with the liquor-still, nicknamed The Swamp.

Fox's President William Self was keen to try a television series, despite reservations from staff. A pilot show was made and Alan Alda, then a New York stage actor, was persuaded to take the leading role of the Martini- and nurse-loving doctor Captain Hawkeye Pierce, for $100,000. (He was to fly home from Los Angeles to New Jersey every weekend for seven years, but his salary rose tp $5 million a year).

The cast included daytime soap star Wayne Rogers, Hawkeye's irreverent colleague Trapper John; Larry Linville was pompous Major Frank Burns; Loretta Swit played bossy, busty Major Hotlips Houlihan; McLean Stevenson played Colonel Blake; and Gary Burghoff played Radar O'Reilly.

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Q.� How many episodes were there - it seems to have been around for ever

A.� There were 251 episodes made, and producers were finding it hard to come up with plots. Alan Alda was said to have grown tired of putting boot polish on his hair.

The show collected 14 Emmies, had had 99 nominations, and Alan Alda had won awards as one of its writers and directors as well as leading actor. The final extra-long episode was shown in 1983 and attracted a record 125 million viewers in America.

The song based on the M*A*S*H theme, Suicide Is Painless, became a hit... although the BBC's director-general Charles Curran banned it from BBC radio because he thought it too morbid.

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by Katharine MacColl