TV History

Remember The Letterman-Gumble Feud? Here’s Where It Started! In May of 1985, ‘Today’ Executive Producer Steve Friedman and NBC President Larry Grossman announced that the famous morning show would present a live, one hour ‘Today Primetime’ special in August. What no one on the ‘Today’ staff knew was that Friedman had also invited David…

Vin Scully…65 Season With The Dodgers, From Brooklyn To LA His 65 seasons with the Dodgers (1950–present) is the longest tenure of any broadcaster with a single team in professional sports history, and he is second by one year to only Tommy Lasorda in terms of number of years with the Dodgers organization in…

Heartwarming In So Many Ways…HUGE SURPRISE ENDING! Must See! This is a three minute clip of Bill Cosby hosting a special tribute to Art Linkletter that aired on CBS on February 6, 1995. ‘Art Linkletter’s House Party’ was on CBS radio and television for 25 years. Interviewing kid was one of Art’s specialties and…

RARE VIDEO! RCA TKP 45 Color Portable Camera Introduction Our thanks to James Murphy Tinsley for finding this great RCA clip from 1974. Not only do we see the intro of their new portable color production camera, but near the end, we see a prototype of the famous RCA TK76 ENG camera. It looks…

47 Years Ago…ABC Debuts ‘The Joey Bishop Show’ On April 17, 1967, Joey Bishop and his sidekick Regis Philbin went head to head with Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon on NBC, and in some markets, Merv Griffin’s syndicated Group W show. (Merv’s CBS late night show did not come along till ’69.) As a…

Varotal Mark III Field Lens…The Grandaddy Of Remote Zooms At 30 pounds, this is quite a big boy and took a bit of lead weighing on the pan handle to help balance this. I think the lever on the side of the lens is the back focus. Having never seen one of these in…

Network Television’s First Evening News Anchor…Douglas Edwards This is thought to be the earliest known photo of Douglas Edwards telecasting the news, shortly after the May 3, 1948 debut of ‘CBS Television News’. Edwards joined CBS Radio in 1942, eventually becoming anchor for the regular evening newscast ‘The World Today’ as well as ‘World…

Early Video Tape Delay + The 7 Forbidden Words… When certain “blue humor”comedians and “colorful personalities” were on live network shows, producers would sometime hedge their bets with a 6 second tape delay and this is how they did it. Until sometime in the mid 1960s, this is the way you got a 6…

May 8, 1945, Victory In Europe To celebrate the defeat of Germany, and it’s Axis ally Italy, WNBT broadcast hours of live news coverage and celebrations on the end of World War II in Europe with remotes from around New York City. Here, we see an RCA Orthicon camera atop the marquee of the…

Two Mothers Of Invention…Steve Allen And Frank Zappa! You may have thought the story of Frank Zappa, “playing a bicycle” on Steve Allen’s show was just an old wives tale. Not so! Here it is! If you remember, Allen had gone with NBC in 1953 to do a local late show on WNBT and…

The Vinten Merlin Like in the ‘Tonight’ story just posted, I occasionally mention the Vinten Merlin. In case you have never seen one, here you go. This one is on the ‘Today’ set in 1A, but as I understand it, all of NBC’s large studios in New York have one. Beautifully compact and extremely…

Eyes Of A Generation EXCLUSIVE! Unseen Late Night History! Thanks To Glenn Mack for making this available to us just in time for a Sunday morning look back at the start of late night television. This great 9 minute clip, hosted by Conan O’Brien shows us many rare scenes, including NBC’s Pat Weaver who…

Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night! With yesterday’s posts of the great time compressed video and the camera crew listing, I felt the need to take another peek into NBC’s legendary Studio 8H. Above is our friend Eric Eisenstein, who in addition to being an SNL cameraman, is also a sports director. In…

‘Today’…The Transition From Studio 8G to 3B, June 1990 This is a great clip and shows the last minutes in 8G and the first minutes in 3B. Although Bryant Gumble say’s, in a slip if the tongue, his goodby to 8H, he meant to say 8G. Due to the demands of SNL production, a…

Just For Fun…One Of The Best Jonathan Winters Bits Ever When Jack Paar left the ‘Tonight’ show in the summer of 1962, he took a few months off, but returned to NBC in primetime with a weekly Friday night show. ‘The Jack Paar Show’ debuted on September 20, 1962, about three weeks before Carson’s…

NBC Brooklyn, Not The Only Vitagraph Studio To Go Television! In the photo above, we are seeing a 1956 broadcast of ‘The Lawrence Welk Show’, which made its national debut on July 2, 1955. It was initially produced at the Hollywood Palladium, but moved to the ABC studios at Prospect and Talmadge shortly afterwards.…

Video Tape’s Unintended Consequences…Agony & Ecstasy This is a story you have never heard. It is about the advantages and headaches caused by the introduction of video tape. We’ll start on the hard part…The Agony. When video tape use began to really take off with network use in 1957, it caused what was then…