TV History

February 1, 1982…”Late Night With David Letterman” Debuts On this date in 1982, Dave’s show replaced Tom Snyder’s ‘Tomorrow’ show, and at the end of the first week, the ratings were 30% better than Snyder’s. These three clips are from the debut night and show us the start, a tour of Studio 6A which…

ABC, CBS, NBC Anniversary Shows…Saturday Through Tuesday! Over the next four days, we’ll have the commercial free anniversary shows from the Big 3! Tomorrow, we start with the oldest network, NBC. On Sunday, it’s CBS and on Monday, ABC. Then on Tuesday, we’ve got Television City’s 50th anniversary show for you. Be ready for…

NBC 60th Anniversay Show…Mega Memory Tour #1 From now through Tuesday, we’ll have the NBC, CBS and ABC network anniversary shows for you here, plus a couple of surprises, but now, it’s time for tour #1. This is 2 1/2 hours of NBC’s glorious history without commercials…well, almost. Ed Herlihy is here to tell…

CBS 75th Anniversay Show…Mega Memory Tour #2 From now through Tuesday, we’ll continue NBC, CBS and ABC network anniversary shows for you here, plus a couple of surprises, but now, it’s time for tour #2. This is 2 hours of CBS’s glorious history as it was presented in 2003, and like NBC, CBS has…

ABC 50th Anniversay Show…Mega Memory Tour #3 Today and tomorrow, we’ll continue NBC, CBS and ABC network anniversary shows for you here, plus a couple of surprises, but now, it’s time for tour #3. This is 3 hours of ABC’s glorious history as it was presented in 2003, and like NBC and CBS, ABC…

January 30, 1950…NBC Studio 8H Debuts As A Television Studio Actually, “The Voice Of Firestone” radio show had been simulcast from Studio 8H on September 5, 1949, and before that, at least two simulcasts of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra were done from 8H as early as 1943. All of those broadcasts…

Inside Breaking News…Live At CNN For The Challenger Disaster On January 28, 1986, about a half hour before the Challenger space shuttle was launched, a CNN tape crew had come into the main news studio to shoot a feature on how the news is covered. What their camera recorded in Atlanta was the same…

January 27, 1991…Whitney Houston Mesmerizes America The Story Of The Best Ever Version Of “The Star Spangled Banner” Here is our national anthem sung like never before, and the backstory of how it came to be. Please watch it with the volume high and don’t be surprised if you tear up to, what most…

January 26, 1992…First Successful Super Bowl Counter Programming CLASSIC! Men On Football…’In Living Color’ This is one of my all-time favorite comedy pieces from “In Living Color”! This whole thing is funny, but it heads for the outer limits at about the 4:30 mark, so do not drink anything after that unless you want…

January 25, 1961…Television’s First Live Presidential News Conference There are three videos with this article; the embedded footage is of President Kennedy hosting the first live news conference, and notice at 10:05, a reporter asks if taking questions live is a good thing given that live there is the occasion to mis-speak and rile…

70 Years Of Billboard Magazine…Massive Memory Lane Archive At this link, are full copies of every weekly Billboard Magazine from 1940 through 2010. Although from the mid ’60s on, Billboard’s main focus was records, radio and music, the late ’40s through the late ’50s issues have a good bit of television news at the…

January 23, 1975, 1977 & 2015…Debuts And Milestones “The Bold And The Beautiful”, “Roots” And “Barney Miller” On January 23, 2015 CBS celebrated the 7000th episode of “The Bold And The Beautiful” with a special milestone episode that broke format and featured a retrospective that showcased the most iconic moments and the history of…

A Day In The WABC TV News Room…1973 In an a year that has been so tumultuous for the television news business, when even fair and accurate reporting has come under attack, I thought this would be a good time to take a look back at how the process actually unfolds at a big…

January 18, 1929…CBS Becomes A Broadcaster Until this day in 1929, the Columbia Broadcasting System was merely a program service providing radio entertainment features to a string of 16 stations connected by an AT&T line. With the purchase of the A.H. Grebe, Atlantic Broadcasting Company’s Manhattan based station, WABC…CBS itself was on the air.…

Television & The Presidential Inaugurations…Part 1 President Harry Truman’s January 20,1949 inauguration was the first to be televised to the 2,000,000 sets in use in the US, but television did not reach the west coast until Truman’s 1952 speech from San Francisco was telecast. In the photo, the raised platform is for the radio…

Television & The Presidential Inaugurations…Part 2 Today, pictures from President Eisenhower’s first and second inaugurations in 1953 and ’57, and the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961. Although the Kennedy oath and speech was in glorious black and white, the parade was the first to be broadcast in color. The first two images are…

Television & The Presidential Inaugurations…Part 3 of 3 In photos 1,2 and 3, we see images from the inauguration of President Johnson and VP Hubert Humphrey in January 1965. For NBC the anchors were Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, with help from Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. Peter Jennings was there for ABC with…

January 16, 1973…”Bonanza” & The Fake Mountain Come To An End First, the “Bonanza” part of the story: From September 12, 1959, until January 16, 1973 the men from The Ponderosa rode into our homes every week, but is wasn’t always a sooth ride. Initially the show aired opposite CBS blockbuster “Perry Mason” and…

NBC Color Kinescopes Continued…Surprises & Rare Footage Yesterday, we discussed the RCA/Eastman Lenticular Color Kinescope process here, and from that we have gained more insight as well as two interesting new color kinescopes. First, a few surprises. Surprise 1. It seems that one reason there are so few early kinescopes left is because the…