January 26: This Day in TV History

[Stanislav]

Just a few random TV related events that happened on January 26. Discuss or comment as you please……

1892: Actress Zara Cully (The Jeffersons) is born in Worcester, Massachusetts.

1905: The venerable character actor Charles Lane is born (as Charles Gerstle Levison) in San Francisco. Tune through the channels just about anytime and you stand a good chance of seeing Lane turn up somewhere in one of his hundreds of roles.

1915: Actor William Hopper (Perry Mason) is born in New York City.

1926: John Logie Baird gives the world's first public demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter at his laboratory in London. Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disk embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face.

1935: Sportscaster/actor Bob Uecker (Mr. Belvedere) is born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1943: Actress Kathryn Leigh Scott (Dark Shadows) is born (as Marlene Kringstad) in Robbinsdale, Minnesota.

1946: Critic Gene Siskel (Siskel & Ebert) is born in Chicago.

1958: Comedienne/talk show host Ellen DeGeneres is born in Metairie, Louisiana.

1979: The Dukes of Hazzard premieres on CBS.

1979: Strike Three for McLean Stevenson. After impetuously leaving the cast of M*A*S*H, he hit the depths in three failed sitcoms: The McLean Stevenson Show, In the Beginning, and premiering tonight, Hello, Larry. This third effort managed to limp through two short seasons and 25 episodes before getting the boot from NBC.

1987: Square One Television debuts on PBS.

1996: Meteorologist Al Roker joins NBC’s Today as the weekend weatherman.

1998: A sentence we never thought we’d hear during a Presidential press conference: “I did not...have...sexual relations with that woman....” Doesn’t quite rank up there with “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” or “Ask not what your country can do for you...” but they are probably the words everyone remembers when Bill Clinton’s name is mentioned....

(Just a little featurette I hope to do as time permits. It’s an entirely random selection based on a quick Net search, and is not meant to be comprehensive. So, don’t post nasty messages about “you forgot THIS” or “how could you not mention THAT?” Do so, and I’ll just take my keyboard and go home…..)

 

[azumanga]

1979: Strike Three for McLean Stevenson. After impetuously leaving the cast of M*A*S*H, he hit the depths in three failed sitcoms: The McLean Stevenson Show, In the Beginning, and premiering tonight, Hello, Larry. This third effort managed to limp through two short seasons and 25 episodes before getting the boot from NBC.

...but not before unsuccessfully making it into a spinoff of "Diff'rent Strokes" by making McLean's character an Amy friend of Mr. Drummond.

 

[Ultimajock]

1979: Strike Three for McLean Stevenson. After impetuously leaving the cast of M*A*S*H, he hit the depths in three failed sitcoms: The McLean Stevenson Show, In the Beginning, and premiering tonight, Hello, Larry. This third effort managed to limp through two short seasons and 25 episodes before getting the boot from NBC.

...Hello, Larry was allegedly based on a really great short suspense film titled Wednesday, which popped up on Bravo and A&E a lot as a schedule stopgap in the mid-to-late '80s. It starred Jack Lemmon as a Bill Ballance-type shock jock who has one of his on-air callers threatened by her husband; the suspense lies in whether or not the Lemmon character (who's named Jerry Murphy) will realise the threat is real rather than a disruptive stunt by a competing jock in time to alert the threatened woman. The only point of resemblance between Wednesday and Hello, Larry was the talk between the host and his board operator, but Wednesday was indeed credited in the closing credits of each episode of Hello, Larry as the basis for the series...

1998: A sentence we never thought we’d hear during a Presidential press conference: “I did not...have...sexual relations with that woman....” Doesn’t quite rank up there with “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” or “Ask not what your country can do for you...” but they are probably the words everyone remembers when Bill Clinton’s name is mentioned....

...and it does rank up there with "I am not a crook" ;D ...

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1949: Actor David Strathairn, who portrayed Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney's 2005 biopic Good Night, and Good Luck, is born in San Francisco. He has also made TV appearances in Miami Vice, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and The Sopranos.