1953 in Television - Events

Events

  • January 19 – 68% of all US television sets were tuned in to I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth to little Ricky.
  • February 1 – Japanese television goes on the air for the first time, when JOAK-TV signs on from Tokyo.

General Electric Theater Airs for the first time on CBS.

  • February 18 – Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz sign an $8,000,000 contract to continue the I Love Lucy television series through 1955.
  • February 26 – Fulton Sheen, on his program Life Is Worth Living, reads Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with the names of high-ranking Soviet officials replacing the key characters. At the end of the reading, Sheen intoned that "Stalin must one day meet his judgment". Stalin died one week later.
  • March 17 – Patrick Troughton becomes television's first Robin Hood, playing the eponymous folk hero in the first of six half-hour episodes of Robin Hood, shown weekly until April 21 on the BBC Television Service.
  • March 25 – CBS concedes victory to RCA in the war over color television standards.
  • April 3 – TV Guide is published for the first time, with 10 editions and a circulation of 1,562,000.
  • May 25 – KUHT in Houston becomes the first non-commercial educational TV station.
  • June 2 – The Coronation of Elizabeth II is televised in the UK. Sales of TV sets rise sharply in the weeks leading up to the event. It is also one of the earliest broadcasts to be deliberately recorded for posterity and still exists in its entirety today.
  • July 18 – The Quatermass Experiment, first of the famous Quatermass science-fiction serials by Nigel Kneale, begins its run on the BBC.
  • The Tonight Show begins as a local New York variety show.
  • August 30 – NBC's Kukla, Fran, and Ollie is the first publicly announced experimental broadcast of a program in RCA compatible color.
  • October 18 – A live television adaptation of the Shakespeare play King Lear starring Orson Welles is aired on CBS as part of the Omnibus series.
  • October 19 – Arthur Godfrey fires Julius La Rosa on the air.
  • October 23 – The first television station in the Philippines, DZAQ-TV of Alto Broadcasting System goes on the air..
  • November 22 – RCA airs (with special permission from the FCC) the first commercial color program in compatible color, the The Colgate Comedy Hour with Donald O'Connor.
  • December 2 – BBC broadcasts its 'Television Symbol' for the first time, the first animated television presentation symbol in the world.
  • December 17 – The FCC reverses its 1951 decision and approves the RCA/NTSC color system.
  • December 24 – NBC's Dragnet becomes the first network-sponsored television program.

Read more about this topic:  1953 In Television

Famous quotes containing the word events:

    “When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”
    —Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    “Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”
    —William James (1842–1910)

    “Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
    —Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)