1973 in Television - Events

Events

• January 4 – The record breaking, long-running comedy series in the UK and the world "Last of the Summer Wine" starts as a 30-minute pilot on BBC1's Comedy Playhouse show. (The 1st series started on November 12 the same year). This programme is still active 37 years later with a 31st series due in 2010.
• January 13 – The Lawrence Welk Show airs its Salute to Mexico episode where Anacani makes her debut with the Champagne Music Makers. That episode also marks the final time Sandi Griffiths and Sally Flynn appear together as the act of Sandi & Sally
• January 14 – Elvis Presley's Aloha From Hawaii - Via Satellite television special is seen around the world by over 1 billion viewers.
• March 8 – The TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders airs on CBS. This serves as the pilot for the iconic crime drama series Kojak, which returns as a weekly series in October 1973.
• March 21 – Are You Being Served? begins first regular series (pilot aired September 8, 1972).
• March 23 – The longest running daytime game show to date — NBC's Concentration — airs its 3,796th and final show, after a run of fourteen years and seven months. The record will be eclipsed in 1987 by The Price is Right; today, Concentration ranks fourth in continual longevity among all daytime/syndicated game shows.
• March 25 – The pilot episode of Open All Hours airs as part of Ronnie Barker's series Seven of One on BBC1.
• April 1 – Prisoner and Escort, the pilot episode of Porridge, airs as part of Seven of One.
• April 16 - James Paul McCartney airs on ABC (and on ITV in the U.K. on May 10).
• May 17 – U.S. daytime television is interrupted by the Watergate hearings, which would continue until August 7. Each network aired coverage in rotation every third day (ABC was first, then CBS and NBC).
• July 2 – US game show "Match Game" debuts its 1970s version; it soon becomes the #1-rated daytime television program for 1973, 1974, and 1975, as well as #1 game show from 1973–77.
• August 6 – James Beck, who stars as Private Joe Walker in the popular UK sitcom Dad's Army, dies of a burst pancreas at the age of just 44. Although the series continues until 1977, the part of Walker is not recast and the show carries on without him.
• August 11 - Programme One airs the first part of the Soviet television miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring, which would run until the 24th. With an audience of between fifty and eighty million viewers per episode, it became the most successful television show of its time in the USSR.
• August 17 - CBS presents an adaptation of David Rabe's play Sticks and Bones...but only to about half of its affiliates.
• September 15 — Betty White makes her first appearance as Sue Ann Nivens in The Mary Tyler Moore Show's fourth season opener, "The Lars Affair".
• October 8 – Patricia Phoenix leaves the role of Elsie Tanner on Coronation Street after thirteen years, when she felt that specific length of time was enough to play one character continuously.
• October 20 – George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) makes his first appearance on All in the Family, at his brother Henry's goodbye party, though he has lived next door to Archie Bunker for the past two years.
• November 12 – The record breaking, long-running comedy series in the UK and the world "Last of the Summer Wine" starts as a series on BBC1 (the pilot had aired on 4 January 1973). This programme is still active 37 years later with a 31st series due in 2010.
• November 20 - A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving airs on CBS for the first time.
• November 23 – Julie on Sesame Street, starring Julie Andrews, airs on ABC.
• November – Color television is launched in New Zealand. (It will go full-time in November 1975).
• December 12 - Kojak's trademark lollipop makes its debut in the episode "Hot Sunday".
• December 19 – After reading a news item that said the federal government had fallen behind in getting bids to supply toilet tissue, Johnny Carson inadvertently triggers an unprecedented three-week panic when he announces, on "The Tonight Show", that there is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the U.S.