I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"
Radio personality Dave Garroway moves to TV, as the host of one of television's
earliest musical-variety shows. Garroway at Large was one of the two
most important series to be made in Chicago, along with Kukla, Fran &
Ollie, during the city's brief period in the late 1940s as an important
production center for network programs. Garroway at Large ran until
1951.
Dave Garroway started out
as a page at NBC and worked his way up to the position of radio announcer for
various NBC programs. From 1944 to 1948, he announced for the NBC radio series The
World's Great Novels. The show featured dramatic readings of classic novels
and later evolved into NBC University of the Air, which offered
accredited radio-assisted degrees in literature. Garroway also hosted his own
radio talk show with music, which aired under various names from 1946 to 1955.
Starting
in 1952, Garroway became the longtime host of NBC's Today show. He
continued some prime-time work, though, and when Garroway at Large
ended, he tried another show, called The Dave Garroway Show, in 1953.
The second show, however, didn't take off, partly because of stiff competition
from the other networks, which were airing popular programs Mama and
Ozzie and Harriet.
April 18, 1929
First Our Gang film with sound debuts.
Small Talk,
the first Our Gang picture with sound, debuts on this day in 1929.
Producer Hal Roach had started producing the Our Gang short comedies in 1922.
The series' mischievous band of kids, later known as the "Little
Rascals," quickly caught on with the public, especially after characters
Spanky, Alfalfa, and Darla were added in the early 1930s. In 1938, Roach sold
the Our Gang rights to MGM, which produced the shorts until 1944. In total,
more than 100 Our Gang films were made.
April 18, 1979
Real People premiered.
Real People had the format of a comedy talk show
taped in front of a large studio audience. Each segment featured a news report
consisting of visits to people with unique occupations or hobbies, occasionally
bringing some of them in-studio to interact with the audience. In its early
seasons, Real
People was
NBC's most popular series, often scoring at the top of the ratings, and was a rare hit
for the network at a time when NBC was a distant
third in the ratings and struggling with numerous flops. Segments included
"funny pictures" and funny newspaper errors sent in by viewers, who
were awarded a Real
People T-shirt.
According to a 2008 interview with producer George
Schlatter, who also co-created Rowan & Martin's
Laugh-In for NBC, the show had covered serious topics like war heroes.
If you don't hop aboard the change train, you're gonna get derailed.
-Joe Flaherty
Joseph Flaherty
June 21, 1941 – April 1, 2024
Joseph O'Flahertywas born inPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eldest of seven children. His father was a production clerk at Westinghouse Electric and of Irish heritage and his mother was of Italian descent.
Flaherty served in the United States Air Force for four years. He then got involved in dramatic theatre.
Flaherty moved to Chicago, where he started his comedy career in 1969 with the Second City Theater as Joe O'Flaherty, where he would work with future stars such as John Belushi and Harold Ramis, He dropped the O as there was another Joseph O'Flaherty registered with Actors Equity.Along with several other Second City performers, he began appearing on the National Lampoon Radio Hour from 1973 to 1974.
After seven years in Chicago, he moved to Toronto to help establish the Toronto Second City theatre troupe.During those years, he was one of the original writer/performers on SCTV, where he spent eight years on the show, playing such characters as Big Jim McBob (of Farm Film Report fame), Count Floyd/Floyd Robertson, and station owner/manager Guy Caballero, who goes around in a wheelchair only for respect and undeserved sympathy.
Other memorable Flaherty characterizations included emotional talk-show host Sammy Maudlin, seedy saxophonist-private eye Vic Arpeggio, aggressive elocution lecturer Norman Gorman, myopic public-television host Hugh Betcha, and "crazy as a snake" ex-convict Rocco.
SCTV ceased production in 1984. The same year, Flaherty played Count Floyd in a short film that was shown at concerts by the rock band Rush before the song "The Weapon", for their tour in support of Grace Under Pressure (and can be seen in the home video, Grace Under Pressure Tour).
Flaherty appeared in a number of cult-favorite films, for example, playing the part of the Western Union postal worker who delivers Doc Brown's 70-year-old letter to Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II (1989), as well as the crazed fan yelling "jackass!" who secretly works for antagonist Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore. In season eight of Family Guy, Flaherty once again played the Western Union man in "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side". He likewise satirizes his Back to the Future Part II character in "The Big Bang Theory", this time playing a Vatican worker whose role is essentially identical to that of his Western Union character.
In 1989, Flaherty played a guest role in Married... with Children in the season-four episode "Tooth or Consequences", as a recently divorced dentist who must repair Al Bundy's teeth.
During 1997–1998, Flaherty starred in the television adaptation of Police Academy (Police Academy: The Series) as Cmdt. Stuart Hefilfinger. The series lasted for only one season.
In 1999, Flaherty joined the cast of Freaks and Geeks, an NBC hour-long dramedy set in the 1980–1981 academic year, in which he played Harold Weir, the irascible father of two teens. Despite a dedicated cult following, the show only lasted one season. In the third episode, "Tricks and Treats", he dons a cheap vampire costume reminiscent of his "Count Floyd" character of the depicted era.
Flaherty made appearances on the CBS sitcom The King of Queens as Father McAndrew, the priest at the Heffernans' church. He starred on the Bite TV original program, Uncle Joe's Cartoon Playhouse, and served as a judge on the CBC program The Second City's Next Comedy Legend.
In 2018, Flaherty participated in a cast reunion at Toronto's Elgin Theatre filmed by Martin Scorsese for a yet to be released Netflix special.
Beginning in 2004, Flaherty was a member of the faculty at Humber College, where he taught a comedy-writing course. He was also on the program's advisory committee.
Flaherty was married to Judith Dagley for 22 years until their divorce in 1996. They had two children, Gudrun, who is also an actress and writer, and Gabriel. His brothers, Paul and Dave, are comedy writers. He died on April 1, 2024, at the age of 82 after a short illness.
While David Niven was introducing Elizabeth Taylor to
present the award for Best Picture, a streaker named Robert Opel ran out from backstage,
causing spontaneous laughter. David Niven tookcontrol of the situation by
saying, “Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man
will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”
April 3, 1924
Doris Day is born Doris
Mary Ann Kappelhoff.
Day began her career as a big band singer in 1939. Her popularity began
to rise after her first hit recording, “Sentimental Journey“, in 1945. After leaving Les Brown & His Band of Renown to try a solo career,
she started her long-lasting partnership with Columbia Records, which would remain her
only recording label. The contract lasted from 1947 to 1967, and included more
than 650 recordings, making Day one of the most popular and acclaimed singers
of the 20th century. In 1948, after being persuaded by Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne and her agent at the
time, Al Levy, she auditioned for Michael Curtiz, which led to her being
cast in the female lead role in Romance on the High Seas.
When
third husband Martin
Melcher died
on April 20, 1968, a shocked Day discovered that Melcher and his business
partner Jerome Bernard Rosenthal had squandered her earnings, leaving her
deeply in debt. Rosenthal had been her attorney since 1949, when he
represented her in her uncontested divorce action against her second husband,
saxophonist George W. Weidler. In February 1969, Day filed suit against Rosenthal and won the
then-largest civil judgment (over $20 million) in the state of California.
(She later settled for about one-quarter of the amount originally awarded.)
Day
also learned that Melcher had committed her to a television series, which
became The Doris Day Show.
Best
known as the lead singer of the group Tony Orlando and Dawn in the early 1970s.
Discovered
by producer Don
Kirshner,
Orlando had songs on the charts in 1961 when he was 16, “Halfway to Paradise” and “Bless You”. Orlando then became a producer himself, and at an
early age was promoted to a vice-president position at CBS Records, where he was in charge of
the April-Blackwood Music division. He sang under the name “Dawn” in the 1970s,
and when the songs became hits, he went on tour and the group became “Tony
Orlando and Dawn”. They had several songs which were major hits including “Candida“, “Knock Three Times“, and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree“.
April 3, 1949
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis debuted on radio in
an NBC program that ran until 1952.
April 4, 1969
The CBS Television Network firedThe
Smothers Brothers because the brothers failed to submit an episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to
network executives before its broadcast.
The network claimed the second to last show of the season was turned in
late, and claimed that their tardiness constituded a breach of contract
justifying their dropping of the series. The network ultimately refused to run
the episode anyway because they said it "would be considered irreverent
and offensive by a large segment of our audience". That episode is on the Smothers Brothers: The Best of Season 3 DVD.
The variety show was well known
for its censorship battles with the network. The network executives often
objected to the brothers' selection of controversial, outspoken, left wing, and
antiwar guests, including:
Pete Seeger, who had been
invited to appear on the Smothers' second season premiere to sing his anti-war
song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” Seeger would later apear on the show
and sang that song.
Harry Belafonte was scheduled
to do a calypso song called "Don't Stop the Carnival" with images
from the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention behind him. The Song
was cut and the time was sold to the Nixon campaign but can now be seen on the
season 3 DVD.
Joan Baez wanted to dedicate a
song to her draft-resisting husband who was about to go to prison for his
stance. The dedication to her husband made the air but the reason for the
dedication did not.
Dr. Benjamin Spock, noted baby
doctor and anti-war activist, was prevented from appearing as a guest of the
show because, according to the network, he was a "convicted felon."
Under the category of
irreverent and offensive, we have:
David Steinberg’s satirical
sermonettes caused controversy for being sacrilegious. His second sermonette
was in the episode that never aired.
Leigh French created the
recurring hippie character, Goldie O'Keefe, whose parody of afternoon advice
shows for housewives, "Share a Little Tea with Goldie," was actually
one long celebration of mind-altering drugs. (Tea" was a counter culture
code word for marijuana, but the CBS censors seemed to be unaware of the
connection). Goldie would open her sketches with, "Hi(gh)– and glad of
it!"
Elaine May wrote a skit about
censorship that featured Tom and Elaine who playing motion picture censors
trying to find a more acceptable substitution for unacceptable dialogue. The
skit ended up being censored.
Tom
and Dick Smothers assembled the old Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour gang in February 1988 for a 20th reunion special on
CBS. Now the network wanted the brothers and company to be edgy and
controversial but no one associated with the show was interested. After all
when the establishment tells you something is cool... It's no longer cool.
In 1968 when it came time to submit the names of the writers for Emmy
considerations, Tom refused to include his name for fear that he had become too
controversial and it would hurt the show’s chances of winning. The show won the
Emmy for outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy Variety that year.
Almost 40 Years later (Sunday, September 21st 2008) during the
live television broadcast of the 60th Annual Emmy Awards, Tom Smothers received
an Emmy acknowledging his contributions as a writer on “The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour”. Steve Martin, who was one of the Emmy winning writers on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,
presented Tom with a commemorative Emmy acknowledging his role in the writing
of a variety show.
April
5, 1949
Fireside Theatre starts. Fireside
Theatre, one of TV's first dramatic series to be filmed rather than
broadcast live, debuts.
The show ran
until 1958 and was revived for one year in 1963. For the first year, each film
was only 15 minutes long, but later the time slot expanded to 30 minutes. Jane
Wyman, who was married to Ronald Reagan between 1940 and 1948, served as host
from 1955 to 1958 and during the 1963 revival.
I believe the gift of acting is a gift from God, my oath to God, and I want to make sure on a daily basis that it is honed and deeply spiritual... I want to believe that the audience believes that my acting comes from this special place.
-Louis Gossett, Jr.
Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. May 27, 1936 – March 29, 2024
The Rockford Files is an American television drama series which aired on
the NBC
network between September 13, 1974 and January 10, 1980. It has remained in
regular syndication to the present day. The show stars James Garner as Los Angeles-based private
investigatorJim Rockford and features
Noah Beery,
Jr. as his father, a retired truck
driver.
The show was created by Roy Huggins and Stephen J.
Cannell. Huggins had created the
television show Maverick (1957–1962), which had also starred Garner, and he
wanted to try to recapture that magic in a "modern day" detective
setting. He teamed with Cannell, who had written for Jack Webb productions such as Adam-12 and Chase (1973–1974, NBC), to create Rockford.
The show was credited as "A Public Arts/Roy
Huggins Production" along with Universal Studios and in association with Cherokee Productions.
Cherokee was the name of Garner's company, which he ran with partners Meta Rosenberg and Juanita Bartlett, who doubled as story editor during most of Rockford's
run.
Producers Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell devised
the main character to be a rather significant departure from typical television
detectives of the time, essentially Maverick as a modern detective. Rockford had served time in
California's San
Quentin Prison in the 1960s due to a
wrongful conviction. After five years, he received a pardon. His infrequent
jobs as a private investigator barely allow him to maintain his dilapidated mobile home (which doubles as his office) in a parking lot on the
beaches of Malibu,
California.
The show's title sequence began with someone leaving a
message on Rockford's answering machine, which were still novel in 1974. A
different message was heard in each episode. These frequently had to do with
creditors to whom Rockford owed money, or deadbeat clients who owed money to
him. They were usually unrelated to the rest of the plot. As the series went
on, this gimmick became a burden for the show's writers, who had to come up
with a different joke every week. Suggestions from staffers and crew were often
used.
In contrast to most television private eyes of the
time, Rockford wears low-budget "off the rack" clothing and does his
best to avoid fights. He rarely carries his Colt
Detective Special revolver, for which
he does not have a permit, preferring to talk his way out of trouble. He works
on cold
cases, missing persons
investigations, and low-budget insurance scams, and he repeatedly states in the
series that he does not handle "open cases" to avoid trouble with the
police.
In early episodes of the show's first season,
Rockford's trailer is located in a parking lot alongside the highway (address
2354 Pacific Coast Highway) and near the ocean; for the rest of the series, the
trailer is at Paradise Cove (address 29 Cove Road), adjacent to a pier and a
restaurant ("The Sand Castle", now known as the "Paradise Cove
Beach Cafe").
In the series of television movies from 1994 to 1999,
Rockford is still living in a trailer, but it has been extensively enlarged and
remodeled.
In an interesting piece of homage, the trailer serving
as a home for Mel Gibson's "Martin Riggs" character and his
girlfriend, shown near the beginning of Lethal Weapon IV, appears to be located
at nearly the exact same spot.
The show went into hiatus late in 1979 when Garner was
told by his doctors to take time off because of his bad knees and back, as well
as an ulcer. He sustained the former conditions largely because of his
insistence on performing most of his own stunts, especially those involving
fist fights or car chases. Because of his excruciating physical pain, Garner
eventually opted not to continue with the show a number of months later, and
NBC cancelled the program in mid-season. It was also alleged that Rockford became
extremely expensive to produce, mainly due to the extensive location filming
and frequent use of high-end actors as guest stars. According to some sources,
NBC and Universal claimed the show was generating a deficit of several million
dollars, a staggering amount for a nighttime show in those days, although
Garner and his production team Cherokee Productions claimed the show always
turned a profit.
A pilot for a remake of the series was written and
produced for NBC by David Shore in 2010, with Dermot Mulroney playing the title character, but was not picked up by
the network due to complaints that it was not written well and the lead was
miscast. NBC then gave it to Peter Berg to rewrite and produce. As of January 2011, the
project is still in development at NBC.
March 30, 1964
Jeopardy
debuted on NBC-TV.
March 30, 1994
First episode of Ellen (originally titled These Friends of Mine for season
one).
Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres'
popular show about single thirty-somethings in Los Angeles, premieres. The show
quickly became one of the country's Top 15 most watched shows and drew even
more attention when, in April 1997, the gay title character "came
out" to her friends in a high-profile episode featuring cameos by Oprah
Winfrey, k.d. lang, Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton, and Dwight Yoakum. Some 42
million viewers watched the special hour-long program. Ellen became the
first prime-time sitcom to feature a gay leading character. However, the show
was not renewed the following season.
The show was one of
television's 25 most highly rated shows for seven of its nine seasons. When
series star and executive producer Michael
Landon decided to leave the show in
1982, the show's title changed to Little House: A New Beginning and focused on
character Laura Ingalls Wilder (Melissa Gilbert)
and her family. The show lasted only one more season. Three made-for-television
movie sequels followed: Little House:
Look Back to Yesterday (1983), Little
House: Bless All the Dear Children (1983), and Little House: The Last Farewell (1984).
The hit reality-based television show COPS premieres on the Fox television
network, and audiences hear the reggae beat of its distinctive theme song,
Inner Circle's "Bad Boys," for the very first time.
Created by the producing team of John Langley and
Malcolm Barbour, COPS placed cameras and production crews in the car
with real patrol officers around the country as they went on raids and did
whatever was necessary to catch the perpetrators of various drug-related
crimes. The pilot episode, like the rest of that debut season, was based in
Broward County, Florida, and followed members of the Broward County Sheriff's Office. The
actor Burt Lancaster provided the voice-over for the pilot episode, but the
rest of the show, shot documentary-style, was not accompanied by any narration.
At the time, Fox was only a fledgling television
network, having launched in October 1986. The network took a chance on COPS
after other major networks passed on it, leaping on Langley and Barbour's idea
in the middle of a five-month-long strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA)
during the summer of 1988. A reality-based show was ideal for the network at
the time, as it would require no writers and was relatively inexpensive to
produce.
COPS
surprised the industry by becoming a hit; it is now one of the longest-running
TV shows in history, with more than 700 episodes airing between 1989 and 2008.
Its success spawned an entire new genre of reality programming that would gain
traction during the 1990s and become a major cultural phenomenon by the next
decade. Like any touchstone of popular culture, COPS has inspired
numerous imitators--including the John Langley-produced series Jail and Street
Patrol--and has been parodied extensively, most notably by the Comedy
Central series Reno 911!
In February 2008, producers released a special
two-disc DVD set to celebrate the 20th anniversary of COPS.
March 12, 1974
Wonder Woman debuted on
ABC-TV. The show later went to CBS-TV.
Wonder Woman's first
broadcast appearance in live-action television was a television movie made in
1974 for ABC. Written by John D. F. Black, the TV movie resembles the Wonder Woman of the
"I Ching" period. Wonder Woman (Cathy Lee Crosby) did not wear the comic-book uniform, demonstrated no
apparent super-human powers, had a "secret identity" of Diana Prince
that was not all that secret, and she was also depicted as blonde (differing
from the brunette image established in the comic books). This 1974 film follows
Wonder Woman, assistant to government agent Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas) as she
pursues a villain named Abner Smith (Ricardo Montalban) who has stolen a set of code books containing
classified information about U.S. government field agents. Along the way, she
has to outwit Smith's chief assistants: the handsome yet dangerous George
(Andrew Prine) and a rogue Amazon, Angela (Anitra Ford), who Smith has taken on
as a bodyguard; a brief duel between Wonder Woman and Angela is the film's only
significant action sequence, which occurs during the final third of the story.
March 16, 1949
Henry Enrique
"Erik" Estradais born.
Actor and reserve police officer, known for his co-starring lead role in the
1977–1983 United States police television seriesCHiPs.He later became known for his work in
Spanish language telenovelas, and in more recent years, his appearances in reality
television shows and infomercials and as a regular voice on the Adult Swim series Sealab 2021.
Lawrence had success on the record charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s with such hits as "Go Away Little Girl" (U.S. No. 1), "Pretty Blue Eyes" (U.S. No. 9), "Footsteps" (U.S. No. 7), "Portrait of My Love" (U.S. No. 9), and "Party Doll" (U.S. No. 5). "Go Away Little Girl" sold over one million copies and was awarded a Gold record.[6] However, much of Lawrence's musical career was centered on nightclubs and the musical stage.
Lawrence played Mark McCormick's father, Sonny Daye, in two episodes of Hardcastle and McCormick. He appeared on The Nanny several times — first as himself in season 2, episode 14, and then as the much-talked about, but never really seen, Morty Fine, father of Fran Fine in a few of the final episodes of the show. In 2011, he portrayed Jack, a wealthy love interest of Betty White's character, Elka Ostrovsky, on Hot in Cleveland. In 2014, he guest-starred in an episode of Two and a Half Men on CBS, and sang the theme song to the parody miniseries The Spoils of Babylon.
In June 2019, following public speculation about his health, Lawrence announced that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and that treatment to slow its progression had so far been successful.
Lawrence died from complications due to Alzheimer's disease in Los Angeles, on March 7, 2024, at the age of 88.
April 16, 1949
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