January 28, 2022

Around the dial




What with the raft of deaths we've had in the last couple of months, it's kind of nice to celebrate the career of someone who's still alive, don't you think? That's where we'll start this week, with David's retrospective at Comfort TV on the top TV moments of the lovely and talented Teri Garr.

It's a pretty good chance that an episode with the title "You'll Be the Death of Me" has a double meaning, and comes to no good. Head over to Jack's latest Hitchcock Project at bare-bones e-zine and see if that's the case with William D. Gordon's ninth-season story, starring the great Robet Loggia.

At Cult TV Blog, John looks at the first television effort of the British radio comedian Tony Hancock, his eponymously named 1956 sketch comedy show, with the show's fourth episode. I'm always interested by these British shows, even (or especially?) the ones where both the show and the star are a mystery to me. I have to take the time to further my collection; maybe after I'm retired?

RealWeegieMidget's Odd-or-Even Blogathon has wrapped up; I wish I'd had time to take a crack at this one, but Gill promises there'll be more opportunities coming up, and hopefully I'll be in a better position to be part of them. And speaking of which, at A Shroud of Thoughts, here's Terence's entry: the 1967 heist film The Jokers, starring Michael Crawford and Oliver Reed, which sounds like a winner.

From Television Obscurities, something to think about if you're available on February 10: the UCLA Film and Television Archives will be streaming "The Sty of the Blind Pig," a play presented as part of the PBS series Hollywood Television Theatre in 1974, directed by Ivan Dixon and starring Mary Alice, Maidie Norman, Richard Ward, and Scatman Crothers.

One of the news stories that I remember vividly from my childhood was August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman took a rifle to the observation deck of the tower at the University of Texas in Austin and used it to murder 16 people. (I particularly remember the eerie scenes of television cameras trembling slightly as they focused on the tower while Whitman was shooting.) At Drunk TV, Paul recalls the event while reviewing the 1975 telefilm The Deadly Tower, starring Kurt Russell as Whitman.

Finally, ending on an upbeat note, at The Lucky Strike Papers Andrew has been sharing some pictures of his mother and father; he wrote about his mother, singer Sue Bennett, in the delightful The Lucky Strike Papers: Journeys Through My Mother's Television Past, which I reviewed hereTV  

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for your post. What you label as the link to the Drunk TV post is the same link to the NBC News report just above it instead of to the Drunk TV post. I've read the Drunk TV post, and I loved his take on the movie.

    ReplyDelete

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