August 19, 2016

Around the dial

bare-bones e-zine has another installment of "The Hitchcock Project," this one on the seventh-season drama "The Woman Who Wanted to Live," which for some reason sounds to me like it should be the title of an Outer Limits episode. This is another one I've yet to see, and they don't make it any easier by not having released this season in DVD, but - they have in England, and since I have a region-free DVD player...

I tend to think of the 1972 Munic Summer Olympics primarily in terms of the massacre of the Israeli athletes, but there were other things that happened - as Classic TV Sports Blog reminds us with this clip of Howard Cosell interviewing American track coach Stan Wright about the controversial disqualification of U.S. runners. My, but that was a troubled Olympics on so many levels.

A nice piece from Carol at Vote For Bob Crane on how the Hogan's Heroes actor got along with his fans. Among other things, he almost always answered his own fan mail, and was unfailingly nice to fans when they came up to him. I think one of the reasons why the circumstances surrounding his death carried such shock value was that he'd projected this image so thoroughly, but as Carol points out in her book, both sides of Bob Crane happened to be true.

Reviews of two British series I'm not familiar with: British TV Detectives writes about New Tricks, which ran for 12 seasons on the other side of the pond, while Cult TV Blog focuses on the gritty early '70s drama Man at the Top.

The Twilight Zone Vortex looks back at an episode I well-remember, Still Valley, a Civil War story first broadcast in 1961. It's an uneven but still compelling story of black magic and the horror of war, done the Rod Serling way.

At Comfort TV, David takes a look back at an actor I always liked, William Windom. His long run on Murder She Wrote leads one to overlook the wide variety of roles in which he appeared over a very successful career, going from heroes to villains to the downtrodden with ease. His presence could have improved a lot of shows that are on today.

And finally, I think this headline from The Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland speaks for itself. The future - can you possibly imagine it?

As far as our short-term future is concerned, I'll be back tomorrow—will you? TV  

1 comment:

Thanks for writing! Drive safely!