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"
In Los Angeles, California, police surround a home in Compton where the leaders
of the terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) are hiding
out. The SLA had kidnapped Patricia Hearst, of the fabulously wealthy Hearst
family publishing empire, months earlier, earning headlines across the country.
Police found the house in Compton when a local mother reported that her kids
had seen a bunch of people playing with an arsenal of automatic weapons in the
living room of the home.
The
LAPD's 500-man siege on the Compton home was only the latest event in a short,
but exceedingly bizarre, episode. The SLA was a small group of violent radicals
who quickly made their way to national prominence, far out of proportion to
their actual influence. They began by killing Oakland's superintendent of
schools in late 1973 but really burst into society's consciousness when they
kidnapped Hearst the following February.
Months
later, the SLA released a tape on which Hearst said that she was changing her
name to Tania and joining the SLA. Shortly thereafter, a surveillance camera in
a bank caught Hearst carrying a machine gun during an SLA robbery. In another
incident, SLA member General Teko was caught trying to shoplift from a sporting
goods store, but escaped when Hearst sprayed the front of the building with
machine gun fire.
Although
law enforcement officials began talking about the SLA as if they were a
well-established paramilitary terrorist organization, the SLA had only a
handful of members, most of who were disaffected middle class youths.
On
May 17, Los Angeles police shot an estimated 1,200 rounds of ammunition into
the tiny Compton home as six SLA members shot back. Teargas containers thrown
into the hideout started a fire, but the SLA refused to surrender. Autopsy
results showed that they continued to fire back even as smoke and flames were
searing their lungs; they clearly chose suicide and martyrdom over jail.
Randolph Hearst, Patty's father, remarked that the massive attack had turned
"dingbats into martyrs." The raid left six SLA members dead,
including leader Donald DeFreeze, also known as Cinque. Patty Hearst was not
inside the home at the time. She was not found until September 1975.
Patty
Hearst was put on trial for armed robbery and convicted, despite her claim that
she had been coerced, through repeated rape, isolation, and brainwashing, into
joining the SLA. Prosecutors believed that she actually orchestrated her own
kidnapping because of her prior involvement with one of the SLA members.
Despite any real proof of this theory, she was convicted and sent to prison.
President Carter commuted Hearst's sentence after she had served almost two
years. Hearst was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.
May 17, 2004
Tony Randall died.
Best known for his role as Felix Unger in the television adaptation of Neil Simon‘s play, The Odd Couple.
May 19, 2009
The pilot episode of Glee aired.
"Pilot" is the pilot episode of
the American television series Glee, which premiered on the Fox network
on May 19, 2009. An extended director's cut version aired on
September 2, 2009. The show focuses on a high school show choir, also known as a glee club, set within the fictional
William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. The pilot episode
covers the formation of the club and introduces the main characters. The
episode was directed by series creator Ryan Murphy, and written by Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Murphy selected the music featured in the episode, with the intention
of maintaining a balance between showtunes and chart hits.
The
episode achieved 9.619 million viewers on first broadcast, and 4.2 million
when the director's cut version aired.Critical response was mixed,
with The New York Times's Alessandra Stanley
highlighting the episode's unoriginality and stereotyped characters, but
praising the showmanship and talent of the cast. The Daily News's David Hinckley opined
that the show was imperfect and implausible but "potentially
heartwarming," while USA Today's Robert Bianco noted casting and tone problems,
but commented positively on the show's humor and musical performances. Mary
McNamara for the LA Times wrote that the show
had a wide audience appeal, calling it: "the first show in a long time
that's just plain full-throttle, no-guilty-pleasure-rationalizations-necessary
fun."
Spanish
teacher Will
Schuester (Matthew Morrison) learns that Sandy Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky), the head of William McKinley High School's glee club has been fired for
inappropriate sexual behavior toward male student Hank Saunders (Ben Bledsoe). The school principal,Figgins (Iqbal Theba), gives Will permission to
take over the club, and he plans to revitalize it, naming the group New
Directions. The club consists of fame-hungry Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), diva Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), flamboyant countertenor Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), paraplegicelectric guitar
player Artie
Abrams (Kevin McHale) and stutteringgothTina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz). Will's efforts are
derided by Sue
Sylvester (Jane Lynch), head of the school's
successful cheerleading team, the Cheerios
who soon plans to abolish the Glee club to restore her money funded towards the
spoilt Cheerios. His wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) is also unsupportive,
suggesting that Will become an accountant to increase their income and give up
teaching. Rachel threatens to leave the club if Will cannot find a male
vocalist with talent comparable to hers. When the school's football coach Ken Tanaka (Patrick Gallagher) allows Will to try to recruit football team members, in return that
he put a good word for Emma for him (because Ken likes her), he discovers
that quarterbackFinn Hudson (Cory Monteith) is secretly a talented
singer. He plants marijuana in Finn's locker, and
blackmails him into joining New Directions. Finn, determined not to disappoint
his widowed mother, complies.
Raymond Burr wins
the Best Actor in a Dramatic Series Emmy for Perry Mason, in which he
plays a crime-solving attorney.
The popular show, which debuted in 1957,
ran for nine years. Derived from mystery novels by Earl Stanley Gardner, the
character of Perry Mason had made his radio debut in 1943 and the show
continued until 1955. The sleuthing Perry Mason character was revived in a
series of TV movies from 1985 to 1993.
May 6, 1984
Spinal Tap stages a "comeback" at CBGB's in
New York City
Almost
20 years and who knows how many drummers into their unique career in rock, the
surviving members of one of England's loudest bands had reached yet another low
point in the spring of 1984. Only two years removed from a disastrous 1982
world tour that not only failed to turn the album Smell The Glove into a
comeback hit, but also led to the group's breakup, Spinal Tap now had to suffer
the indignity of seeing the Marty DiBergi-helmed behind-the-scenes film of that
tour gain widespread theatrical release. Would the numerous embarrassments
catalogued in the hard-hitting rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap provoke
public sympathy for and renewed interest in the band that Nigel Tufnel, David
St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls began back in 1964 as The Originals? Or would the
group behind such familiar classic-rock hits as "Give Me Some Money"
and "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" be consigned once and for
all to obscurity? In this atmosphere of uncertainty, Spinal Tap elected to go
back to their roots, kicking off a tour of small American rock clubs with an
appearance at New York City's legendary CBGB's on May 6, 1984.
Of
course, almost none of the above is true, strictly speaking. A group calling
itself Spinal Tap did play CBGB's on this day in 1984, but that group was the
fictitious invention of director Rob Reiner and the comic actors Michael
McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer—St. Hubbins, Tufnel and Smalls,
respectively. Reiner's directorial debut was the aforementioned This Is
Spinal Tap, a film that launched the mockumentary mini-genre as well as a
thousand catchphrases, from "These go to 11" to "None
more black." It was during the film's first week of release that
McKean, Guest, Shearer and one of their many doomed drummers played their gig
at CBGB's, which one attendee recalls as drawing "every professional
musician in the city of New York."
This
live appearance by Spinal Tap was the first, but certainly not the last step in
an ongoing effort by the McKean et al. to blur the line between fiction and
reality. In the years since their live debut, numerous bootleg recordings and
early television appearances have "surfaced," and one full-length
album—1992's Break Like The Wind—has been released. At last report,
Nigel Tufnel was working on a pony farm, David St. Hubbins was producing
hip-hop records out of a former colonic clinic and Derek Smalls was in rehab
for an Internet addiction. But do not be surprised if one day you encounter a
salesman resembling Christopher Guest on a visit to a hat shop, or if next
year's lineup of Broadway openings includes the long-awaited St. Hubbins rock
opera, Saucy Jack
May 6, 2004
Final episode of Friends
airs on NBC
At 9:00 p.m. Eastern and
Pacific times on this day in 2004, that familiar theme song (“I’ll Be There For
You” by the Rembrandts) announces the beginning of the end, as an estimated
51.1 million people tune in for the final original episode of NBC’s long-running
comedy series Friends.
Created and executive-produced (with Kevin S. Bright) by Marta Kauffman and
David Crane, Friends debuted 10 years and 236 episodes earlier, on
September 22, 1994. Shot at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank, California,
the show was set in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where six friends
struggled with the ups-and-downs of young adult life in the big city--albeit
while living in an impossibly large, cushy apartment, apparently without the
burden of having to spend much time working actual jobs. Almost from the
beginning of its decade-long run, Friends was a cultural phenomenon,
winning six Emmy Awards (including one for Outstanding Comedy Series), sparking
hairstyle trends (“the Rachel”), spawning catch phrases (“How you doin?”)
and turning its six principal cast members into household names.
Preceded by a maelstrom of hype and publicity, the hour-long Friends finale
drew approximately two-thirds of the audience garnered by the finales of two
other long-running sitcoms, Cheers (80.4 million) in 1993 and Seinfeld
(76.2 million) in 1998, according to a Fox News report. The most-watched TV
series finale ever, M*A*S*H, was viewed by some 105 million people when
it aired in 1983. According to the New York Times, NBC charged
advertisers an average of $2 million for every 30 seconds of ad time during the
finale--a record amount for a sitcom and only $300,000 less than what CBS
charged during that year’s Super Bowl.
In the finale, the long-running on-and-off relationship between Ross (David
Schwimmer) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), which over the years included a
drunken Las Vegas wedding and a baby, Emma, born in 2002, ended as most of the
show’s fans hoped: They got back together, presumably for good. Meanwhile,
Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Monica (Courtney Cox-Arquette) had become
suburbanites and parents of twins, Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) was married, and Joey
(Matt LeBlanc) was headed off to L.A. to pursue his acting career. (A spin-off
sitcom, Joey, followed LeBlanc’s character to Hollywood; the show failed
to attract a significant audience, and was canceled in 2006.)
Throughout the show’s run, its six stars maintained a famously unified
front, ensuring that no one of them emerged as a dominating force onscreen and
even negotiating their salaries together. In the spring of 2000, each member of
the cast signed a two-year, $40 million contract that netted them each a
staggering $1 million per episode. Broadcast in some 100 countries, Friends continues
to earn good ratings for its syndicated rerun episodes.
May
8, 1984
Soviets announce boycott of
1984 Olympics
Claiming
that its athletes will not be safe from protests and possible physical attacks,
the Soviet Union announces that it will not compete in the 1984 Olympics in Los
Angeles. Despite the Soviet statement, it was obvious that the boycott was a
response to the decision of the United States to boycott the 1980 games
that were held in Moscow.
Just
months before the 1984 Olympic games were to begin in Los
Angeles, the Soviet government issued a statement claiming, "It is known
from the very first days of preparations for the present Olympics the American
administration has sought to set course at using the Games for its political
aims. Chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in
this country." Russian officials went on to claim that protests against
the Soviet athletes were likely to break out in Los Angeles and that they
doubted whether American officials would try to contain such outbursts. The
administration of President Ronald Reagan responded to these charges
by declaring that the Soviet boycott was "a blatant political decision for
which there was no real justification."
In
the days following the Soviet announcement, 13 other communist nations issued
similar statements and refused to attend the games. The Soviets, who had been
stung by the U.S. refusal to attend the 1980 games in Moscow because of the
Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, were turning the tables by
boycotting the 1984 games in America. The diplomatic impact of the action was
quite small. The impact on the games themselves, however, was immense. Without
competition from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other communist nations,
the United States swept to an Olympic record of 83 gold medals.
May 8, 1984
"Well,
what can I say? Both of our children are married now and they’re starting out
to build lives of their own. And I guess when you reach a milestone like this
you have to have to reflect back on, on what you’ve done and, and what you’ve
accomplished. Marion and I have not climbed Mount Everest or written a great
American novel. But we’ve had the joy of raising two wonderful kids, and
watching them and their friends grow up into loving adults. And now, we’re
gonna have the pleasure of watching them pass that love on to their children.
And I guess no man or woman could ask for anything more. So thank you all for
being, part of our family… ToHappy Days."
Last
"Our Gang" film released. Dancing Romeo, the last "Our
Gang" film, is released on this day in 1944.
The first film, featuring a band of mischievous
youngsters, was produced in 1922 by Hal Roach. Roach produced the short films
until 1938, when he sold the rights to MGM. In all, more than 100 Our Gang
films were made. Later, they were shown as TV comedies under the name "The
Little Rascals."
April 30, 1939
NBC began regular
U.S. television broadcasts, with a telecast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
opening the New York World's Fair.
Programs were transmitted from the NBC
mobile camera trucks to the main transmitter, which was connected to an aerial
atop the Empire State Building.
Ten days prior to the Roosevelt speech, David Sarnoff,
President of RCA (The Radio Corporation of America and NBC's original parent
company) made a dedication speech for the opening of the RCA Pavilion at the
New York World's Fair. Staging this event prior to the World's Fair opening
ceremonies ensured that RCA would capture its share of the newspaper headlines.
The ceremony was televised, and watched by several hundred viewers on TV
receivers inside the RCA Pavilion at the fairgrounds, as well as on receivers
installed on the 62nd floor of Radio City in Manhattan. Back then, the programs
included operas, cartoons, cooking demonstrations, travelogues, fashion shows,
and skaters at Rockefeller Center along with numerous live telecasts relayed
from within the fair itself.
April 30, 1964
The FCC ruled that
all TV receivers should be equipped to receive both VHF and UHF channels.
In
the late 1980s and 1990s, he reprised the role of Steve Austin in a number of
TV movies, and appeared in a number of supporting, recurring and cameo roles in
feature films and TV series, and lent his voice to a number of animated TV
series andvideo games.
April 23, 1989
NBC aired the pilot
episode of Baywatch.
April 26, 1989
Lucille Ball dies. Comedian Lucille Ball dies at age 78.
During her career, she and husband Desi Arnaz
transformed TV, creating the first long running hit sitcom.
Ball was born in 1911
near Jamestown, New York, to an electrician and a concert pianist. Her father
died when Ball was two. By age 15, Ball had decided to become an actress and
attended drama school. However, the shy, skinny teenager received little
encouragement and was rejected at least four times from Broadway chorus lines,
although she eventually joined one in 1926. In 1933, she was hired as the
Chesterfield cigarette girl and was featured in all the company's
advertisements. Attracting attention with her Chesterfield ads, she finally
began playing bit parts in Hollywood movies in 1933. By the late 1930s, the
starlet had graduated to comic supporting roles. In 1940, she met Cuban
bandleader Desi Arnaz while shooting Too Many Girls. The couple married
the following year.
Ball continued to land
movie roles that didn't fully showcase her talent. Frustrated, she turned to
radio and starred as a ditzy wife in My Favorite Husband from 1948 to
1951. CBS decided to launch the popular series on the relatively new medium of
TV. Lucy insisted Desi be cast as her husband in the TV version, though the
network executives said no one would believe the couple were married. Desi and
Lucy performed before live audiences and filmed a pilot, convincing network
executives that audiences responded well to their act, and CBS cast Desi for
the show.
I
Love Lucy became one of the most
popular TV sitcoms in history, ranking in the top three shows for six years and
turning the couple's production company, Desilu, into a multimillion-dollar
business. Ball became president of the company in 1960, after she and Desi
divorced. She also starred in several other "Lucy" shows, including The
Lucy Show, which debuted in 1962 and ran for six seasons, and Here's
Lucy, in which she starred with her two children until the show was
cancelled in 1974. A later show, Life with Lucy, featuring Lucy as a
grandmother, was cancelled after only eight episodes. Ball worked little in the
last years of her life. She died of congestive heart failure following
open-heart surgery earlier in the month.
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.
