BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: TELEVISION

WHEN JIM HENSON (1936-1990)
 GOT HIS FIRST TELEVISION SET

“I was probably about thirteen or fourteen. I badgered my parents until we got one – I mean, it was a real campaign. We bought as big as my cupped hands. I thought it was
Incredible. I still do. It is amazing to see a live picture that comes to you from somewhere else. I’ve always been in love with television.”

Interview with Jim Henson in GEO (January1983)
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Cheers (1982-1993)

"It’s the place where everybody knows your name, and just about everyone in the country tuned in when Cheers aired the last of its 275 episodes. “One for the Road” received a Nielsen rating of 45.5, meaning 45.5% of all American televisions were tuned to the episode, with a total viewership of some 93 million. To this day, M*A*S*H is the only series finale to be seen by more people — even massive hits such as Seinfeld (76 million), Friends (52.5 million), and Game of Thrones (13.6 million) didn’t come close."

History Facts (May 25, 2024)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQVwnRrJjSMMnDhMFXGNCmHRlzl
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"You can learn more about America by watching one half-hour of Let's Make a Deal than you can by watching you can by watching Walter Cronkite for a month."
             Monty Hall
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WRITING FOR TELEVISION FROM THE EARLY 1950’s to the 1970’s

“Minimum payment  for a low-budget half hour television script was $650 in 1953 and $2,144.00 by the seventies. There are also residual payments for reruns, but with over three thousand members enrolled in the Writers Guild West, one need not consult a pocket computer to figure out how many would be starving if everyone relied  on full-time work.”

Gary Grossman. Superman:  Serial to Cereal (New York:
Popular Library, 1977)

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A PSYCHIATRIST WHO WORKED AT ST. ELIZABETH'S
HOSPITAL IN WASHINGTON., D.C. TELLS A STORY TO OSCAR LEVANT ABOUT EZRA POUND 

"...while he was there, Pound won the Bollingen Prize for poetry. It was a cash award of a thousand dollars. All the patients became very excited; they thought Pound would use part of the money to buy them a televidsion set. Pound refused."

Oscar Levsant. The Unimportance of being Oscar (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1968)
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SAMUEL JOHNSON & TV COMMERCIALS

"Only a man seated before a television set watching a cigarette carton perform a tap dance can extract the full relish from Dr. Samuel Johnson's pronouncement of nearly two hundred years
ago: 'The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement.'"

 E.S. Turner.The Shocking History of Advertising (New York: E.P.Dutton & Company, 1953)

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FAVORITE LINE OF DIALOGUE 

Perhaps my favorite line from a TV series is
from John Le Carre's The Night Manager. A man passes
a room where the door is open. He peers in and sees a
nude woman seated on a bed and she is crying. He
discreetly moves on. The next day he meets the woman 
and he tells her that he had seen her in her room when she
was crying. She says: "I do not care who sees me naked; I
care who sees me cry."
                                        LJP
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John Glenn, America's first astronaut., appeared on the television show "Name That Tune" in 1957 and won $25,000.
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"Years ago, one day in his room at King's College, Cambridge, E.M. Forster said to me: 'My furniture rather let me down when the television people came."
                      V.S. Pritchett

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AFTER TELEVISION, THE INTERNET 

“ Television was just radio with pictures – visual radio. No one saw it for what it became: the most powerful instrument of social transformation in the latter half of the 20th century.”
                          Todd Brewster in Life (January 1999)
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ON STARS IN TV SIT-COMS

“ With sitcoms, audiences don’t want to think that their favorite personalities as acting at all: that’s why Lucille Ball played a character called Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore played a character called Mary, and today Roseanne and Roseanne.”
                   Mark Stein in The Spectator (December 1995)

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NOEL NEILL PLAYING LOIS LANE ON TV'S
SUPERMAN SERIES

"Noel  Neill had never read a Superman comic book,
never had heard of the radio show nor had seen the'
movie serials when she took over the part of 'Lois Lane' 
on the TV series. In the comic strip,' Lois Lane' was a
brunette. Ms.Neill is a redhead."
  "...Says Noel of the character she portrayed, 'Lois
Lane' was a strange type of reporter. She never carried
a pencil or notebook, never wrote a thing, never saw a
press.'"

Richard Lamparski. Whatever Became Of....? Seventh in
the series of Whatever Became of....? Books (New York:
Bantam Books, 1977)

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TV PERSONALITIES

Jackie Gleason
Was very rarely the voice of reason.

Wally Cox
Was not built like an ox.

DREAMING OF BARBARA FELDON

In my dreams, Barbara Feldon
Told me if I felt one
Of her breasts, I should feel the other.
Just the woman I wanted to take home to mother.