Welcome to the November 2009 edition of Way Back Wednesday!  One of the big changes that you will see is that we will be bringing you entries on a Monthly edition basis.  So as each moth passes, we will bring you a new theme.  This month we are going to talk about the golden age of television, and television shows that changed the face of the television landscape.

The first regularly scheduled television service in the United States began on July 2, 1928. The Federal Radio Commission authorized C.F. Jenkins to broadcast from experimental station W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It  was not until 1947 that the first regularly-scheduled TV programs began to appear. The first was Puppet Playhouse, a children’s program which later became The Howdy Doody Show. By 1948, both CBS and NBC featured regularly-scheduled television programs. The first to be broadcast during early evening or “prime-time” that year was Texaco Star Theater starring Milton Berle. 

Texaco Star Theater was an American comedy-variety show, which ran from 1948 to 1956. It was one of the first successful examples of American television broadcasting, remembered as the show that gave Milton Berle the nickname “Mr. Television”.

With Berle at the helm, Texaco Star Theater was credited heavily with driving American television set sales. The number of TV sets sold during Berle’s run on the show was said to have grown from 500,000 his first year on the tube to over 30 million when the show ended in 1956. Texaco Star Theater was also the highest rated television show of the 1950-1951 television season, the first season in which the Nielsen Ratingswere used.  In  1953, the show’s name changed to The Buick-Berle Show. Two years later, it became, simply, The Milton Berle Show, its title until its run ended at last in June 1956, when Berle felt that there was no other good material out there. It didn’t help that the sponsors decided to move to Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners either.

So enjoy a little Mr. Television.

Texaco Star Theater 1950 Theme Song- Milton Berle Show

Actor Basil Rathbone hams it up with Milton Berle 1951

Elvis Presley Milton Berle Show 5 Jun 1956: Hound Dog

And that’s this week’s edition, Part I of our salute to the Golden Age of Television.  See you next week for Part II, and a show that helped invent the idea of the rerun.

~Build Tomorrow.