1958 in Television - Events

Events

• January 14 – TWW, the first ITV franchise for South Wales and West of England, went on the air.
• 17 February 1958 – Pope Pius XII designates St. Clare of Assisi the patron saint of television. Thereafter, placing her icon on a television set was said to improve reception.
• July 1 – The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation links television broadcasting across Canada. The CBC's microwave network between Nova Scotia and British Columbia, completed this year, makes it the longest in the world.
• August 30 – Southern Television, the ITV franchise for South Central and South East England, went on the air.
• October 17 – Fred Astaire makes his TV starring debut in the NBC special, An Evening with Fred Astaire, which goes on to win 9 Emmys and is one of the first TV specials to be preserved on videotape.
• November 30 – During the live broadcast of the Armchair Theatre play Underground on the ITV network in the UK, actor Gareth Jones suffers a fatal heart attack between two of his scenes while in make-up.
• Senator Estes Kefauver holds congressional hearings on the rising rates of juvenile crime and publishes an article in Reader's Digest called "Let's Get Rid of Tele-Violence." Kefauver held hearings on pharmaceutical companies that year. And the article cited appeared in the April 1956 issue of Reader's Digest; it was written by Don Wharton and originally appeared in Parents' Magazine. My source: I checked the actual issue in the Library of Congress's stacks.
• Ampex demonstrates their design for a color Video Tape Recorder.
• In the United Kingdom, the top-rated show of the year was the ITV game show Dotto, adapted from an American game show which in turn was based on children's Connect the dots game.
• The original American version of "Dotto" was the first game show to be implicated in the Scandals, and was abruptly cancelled in August.
• Top-rated prime-time game show "Twenty One" was abruptly dropped by NBC in October after former contestant Herb Stempel charged that the show was rigged and that he had been ordered to lose a match to the popular Charles Van Doren.
• Fall – The Scandals involving rigged network quiz shows spread, resulting in the cancellation of the original big-money game show, CBS' "The $64,000 Question", and creating havoc within the US television industry.
• DuMont sells its television manufacturing assets to Emerson. The quality drops.