Events
- January 21 – The first convention of Star Trek fans is held in New York City's Statler-Hilton hotel.
- Mid-February – John Lennon and Yoko Ono cohost an entire week on The Mike Douglas Show.
- February 19 – Sammy Davis Jr. makes a guest appearance on All in the Family.
- March 18 – After losing a 15-year court battle over the legality of its business relationship with The Herald-Traveler, CBS' Boston, Massachusetts affiliate WHDH-TV Channel 5 signs off the air. At 3 a.m. on March 19, WCVB takes over the Channel 5 frequency, simultaneously switching affiliations to the ABC network following CBS' loss of interest in the channel during the long legal wrangle.
- April 4 – After a three-year courtship, Emily Nugent married Ernest Bishop on Coronation Street.
- July 21 – Victoria Wyndham makes her first appearance as vixen (and later, good girl) Rachel Davis on the soap opera Another World.
- August 1 - Three years after it was first filmed, the Israel Broadcasting Authority finally agrees to screen Barricades, a controversial documentary film that offered a sympathetic portrayal of Palestinians expelled from their homes in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
- August 26 – Effective with this issue, TV Guide discontinues the practice of using a "C" to indicate color programs, and instead starts using a "BW" for monochrome, saving a lot of printer's ink in the process. At the time about half of the TV households in the U.S. had color sets.
- September 9 – The Lawrence Welk Show opens its 18th season on location in Hawaii.
- October 27 – The 5000th episode of Captain Kangaroo airs.
- November 8 – Home Box Office (HBO) is launched, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
- November 21 – In the second part of a two-part story which began the previous week, Beatrice Arthur's character, Maude Findlay, on the television sitcom Maude, decides to go through with an abortion, in a move that shocked CBS executives and Maude advertisers. (Rue McClanahan made her first appearance as Vivian Cavender in this two-parter; she would become a regular cast member the following season.)
- December 31 – ORTF 3ème Chaîne launches in France for the first time.
Read more about this topic: 1972 In Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)