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May 31: This Day in TV History

S

Stanislav

Just a few random TV related events that happened on May 31. (Yeah, I'm a few hours early, but I plan to be busy tomorrow...) Discuss or comment as you please……

1943: Actress Sharon Gless (Cagney and Lacey) is born in Los Angeles.

1954: Winnipeg’s CBWT begins broadcasting. It was slated to be the first TV station in Western Canada, but delays caused CBUT Vancouver to steal that honor by about six months.

1971: CBKST Saskatoon acquires 1,144 episodes of the British soap opera Coronation Street. The deal remains recognized by Guinness as the largest number of TV shows ever purchased in a single transaction.

1983: Buffalo Bill, a quirky sitcom starring Dabney Coleman, premiers on NBC. Despite developing a cult following and winning critical praise, low ratings cause the show to be canceled after 25 episodes air over 2 seasons.

1985: The unsuccessful spin-off AfterMASH broadcasts its final episode on CBS.

1992: NBC broadcasts the final original episode of Night Court.

1998: A tornado tears through the studios of Binghamton, New York’s ABC affiliate WVIT, causing much damage and toppling its tower. Although they quickly restore feeds to area cable providers, their UHF signal remains off the air for several months.

2000: Survivor, the first highly-rated and profitable “reality” show on American TV, premiers on CBS.

2001: TV personality Arlene Francis, best known for her long run on the panel of What’s My Line?, dies in San Francisco at the age of 93.

(Just a little featurette I hope to do as time permits…..don’t expect it every single day. 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…..) ;)
 
You've got a good bunch of factoids there! Now, going by the number of episodes, I'm to assume that Coronation Street was a daily show? As for Buffalo Bill, I actually remember that show. It costarred a then-largely unknown Geena Davis. I never watched After M*A*S*H, so no opinion there. Night Court was a fun show to watch though! Man, if people only knew about the glut of reality TV that Survivor would bring! Ugh! Lastly, the Binghamton, NY station is WIVT-TV channel 34. WVIT-TV/DT (NBC) channel 30/digital 35 is licensed to my home town...NEW BRITAIN, CT.
 
KML-224 said:
Lastly, the Binghamton, NY station is WIVT-TV channel 34. WVIT-TV/DT (NBC) channel 30/digital 35 is licensed to my home town...NEW BRITAIN, CT.
Click to expand...

Damn....hate it when my fat fingers transpose letters like that. :( I thought this board allowed editing of a post, but I don't see that option, so we'll just let your correction clear it up for everyone.....
 
KML-224 said:
I'm to assume that Coronation Street was a daily show?
Click to expand...

At the time of the CBKST transaction, Corrie was seen on ITV twice a week; it wouldn't expand to three times a week until 1989; it's now seen 5 times a week, though still not daily, on ITV. I don't know how the CBC handled it back in the 1970s, whether they showed it twice weekly like ITV, or showed it daily with a backlog of episodes.
 
Stanislav said:
KML-224 said:
Lastly, the Binghamton, NY station is WIVT-TV channel 34. WVIT-TV/DT (NBC) channel 30/digital 35 is licensed to my home town...NEW BRITAIN, CT.
Click to expand...

Damn....hate it when my fat fingers transpose letters like that. :( I thought this board allowed editing of a post, but I don't see that option, so we'll just let your correction clear it up for everyone.....
Click to expand...

You only have a severely limited time to edit posts - 30 min? - and then they're committed to eternity. Like you, I hate when lysdexia of the digits strikes and you can't go back and change history. :)
 
dhett said:
Stanislav said:
KML-224 said:
Lastly, the Binghamton, NY station is WIVT-TV channel 34. WVIT-TV/DT (NBC) channel 30/digital 35 is licensed to my home town...NEW BRITAIN, CT.
Click to expand...

Damn....hate it when my fat fingers transpose letters like that. :( I thought this board allowed editing of a post, but I don't see that option, so we'll just let your correction clear it up for everyone.....
Click to expand...

You only have a severely limited time to edit posts - 30 min? - and then they're committed to eternity. Like you, I hate when lysdexia of the digits strikes and you can't go back and change history. :)
Click to expand...

Well, looking at the time stamps, I guess I missed the "magic window" by about 3 or 4 minutes. Oh, well...(shrug)...if that's the worst thing that happens this week, I'm in pretty good shape... ;)
 
Another question for Russell: wasn't it on this day
in 1970 that WAPI/13 became Birmingham's exclusive
NBC affiliate, and WBMG/42 the CBS one (along with
WCFT/33 Tuscaloosa and WHMA/40 Anniston)?
 
bpatrick said:
Another question for Russell: wasn't it on this day
in 1970 that WAPI/13 became Birmingham's exclusive
NBC affiliate, and WBMG/42 the CBS one (along with
WCFT/33 Tuscaloosa and WHMA/40 Anniston)?
Click to expand...

Indeed it was!
-RW
 
Also born on this date in history:

1894: Fred Allen (d. 1956)--also appeared on "The Big Show" (1950-52) and "What's My Line" (1954-56).

1908: Don Ameche (d. 1993)--This venerable radio celebrity ("Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy", "The Bickersons") also host/commentator on NBC's "International Showtime" (1961-65), sitting in the grandstand of a different European resident circus each week. Also directed "Julia" (NBC, 1968-73).

1930: Clint Eastwood

1943: Joe Namath--"Broadway Joe" also starred in the short-lived NBC comedy "Waverly Wonders" (Sept.-Oct. 1978).

1950: Gregory Harrison--Played Gonzo on "Trapper John MD" from 1979-85. Also appeared in the final season of "Falcon Crest" during 1989-90.

1961: Lea Thompson--Also starred in "Caroline in the City" (1995-99, NBC)

1965: Brooke Shields--Her venerable career included stardom on NBC's "Suddenly Susan" (1996-2000), earning People's Choice and Golden Globe awards. Per Wikipedia, she also was the youngest guest host for both the "Muppet Show" in 1980, and ABC's "Fridays" in 1981.
 
Tim from Springfield said:
Also born on this date in history:


1908: Don Ameche (d. 1993)--This venerable radio celebrity ("Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy", "The Bickersons") also host/commentator on NBC's "International Showtime" (1961-65), sitting in the grandstand of a different European resident circus each week. Also directed "Julia" (NBC, 1968-73).
Click to expand...

Don Ameche did a lot of work up until his death - playing eccentric grandpas, and so forth. He played Mortimer Duke, a villainous businessman in Eddie Murphy's Trading Places (1983) - a good Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd comedy in which we also got to see Jaimie Lee Curtis's breasts for the first time. The veteran actor Ralph Bellamy played his villainous brother. He reprised the Mortimer Duke role in Murphy's Coming to America in 1988.

Ameche was also famous for playing Alexander Graham Bell in the 1939 biopic...so much so that there were jokes about the telephone being invented by Don Ameche.
 
Lkeller said:
[Don] Ameche was also famous for playing Alexander Graham Bell in the 1939 biopic...so much so that there were jokes about the telephone being invented by Don Ameche.
Click to expand...

...in fact, Ameche played so many real-life characters in movies around this time that Fred Allen once joked that one of these days Don Ameche would find himself playing Don Ameche. This was about a year before Allen took one of his rare trips to Hollywood to appear in a United Artists release titled It's In The Bag!, wherein one of his supporting cast members was Don Ameche indeed playing Don Ameche ;D ...
 
Tim from Springfield said:
May 31, 1986: After years of being shown on tape-delay for evening broadcast, ABC airs the first live, flag-to-flag coverage of the Indianapolis 500. Won by Bobby Rahal (who later teamed with David Letterman as owners of Rahal-Letterman Racing), the '86 "500" was moved to Saturday morning after two rainouts on May 25-26.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_Indianapolis_500
Click to expand...

Here's a TV Guide close-up description for it: http://vintagetoledotv.squarespace.com/picture/tvg860525a37.jpg?pictureId=5158515&asGalleryImage=true
 
Toledo Eleven said:
Tim from Springfield said:
May 31, 1986: After years of being shown on tape-delay for evening broadcast, ABC airs the first live, flag-to-flag coverage of the Indianapolis 500. Won by Bobby Rahal (who later teamed with David Letterman as owners of Rahal-Letterman Racing), the '86 "500" was moved to Saturday morning after two rainouts on May 25-26.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_Indianapolis_500
Click to expand...

Here's a TV Guide close-up description for it: http://vintagetoledotv.squarespace.com/picture/tvg860525a37.jpg?pictureId=5158515&asGalleryImage=true
Click to expand...

Toledo,

The link isn't working (I got a Page Not Found notice when trying to link to the description).
 
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