1961 in Television - Events

Events

  • January 20 – John F. Kennedy is the first U.S. president to be sworn in, in a color telecast. NBC covers the inauguration in color.
  • February 19 – CFTM-TV, future flagship of Quebec's TVA network, opens in Montreal.
  • April 29 – Westward Television, the first ITV franchise for South West England, goes on air.
  • May 5 - Alan B. Shepard, the first U.S. astronaut in space aboard the Freedom 7 spacecraft in a 15-min. suborbital flight. The launch is watched by 45 million U.S. viewers.
  • May 9 - Newton Minow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gives the "vast wasteland speech" to the National Association of Broadcasters, telling them that they could do a better job of serving "the public interest."
  • July 1 – The soap opera The Brighter Day airs its first episode after moving taping locations from New York City to Los Angeles. As a result, key character Babby Dennis and her love interest are mysteriously written out of the show; the actors who played them didn't want to move.
  • September 1 – Border Television, the ITV franchise for the English-Scottish Border and Isle of Man, goes on air.
  • September 30 – Grampian Television, the ITV franchise for North East Scotland, goes on air.
  • September – NBC begins its long-running NBC Saturday Night at the Movies participating, with an airing of the 1953 Marilyn Monroe picture How to Marry a Millionaire.
  • 1 October – CTV is launched in Canada, the first privately owned network in the country.
  • November 4 – RAI's second television channel (now called Rai Due) first airs to 52% of the available households in Italy.
  • December 15 - Sam and Friends airs their last episode, it didn't air on TV (according to Muppet Wiki).
  • December 31 – RTÉ starts television broadcasts, bringing television to the Republic of Ireland for the first time.
  • January 25 – John F. Kennedy holds the first live televised Presidential press conference.
  • Danger Man (UK) (1960–1961, 1964–1966) is cancelled due to lack of interest from Australian broadcasters. The series would be revived and revamp
  • May 29 – Dave Garroway announces his decision to leave the Today show.
  • November 19 – Lucille Ball marries Gary Morton.
  • WBNB brings television to the Virgin Islands for the first time. (It would be destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989.)

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Famous quotes containing the word events:

    “That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
    —John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    “By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.”
    —C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)

    “The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
    —John Ashbery (b. 1927)