He couldn’t have done it without a little help from an uncanny source—namely, the disembodied head of one Stooky Bill. And without a ventriloquist dummy named Stooky (sometimes spelled “Stookie”) Bill, Baird’s wild dreams of a televised world might never have come true. It also required a lot of light, and that’s where Stooky Bill came in. No human could have withstood that much heat, but Stooky Bill took it without so much as a word of complaint. Stooky Bill, on the other hand, is still around.