Performer and The Advent of Television
By the 1950s, television had begun to supplant radio as the main form of entertainment in American homes. In her column of October 11, 1945, Hedda Hopper wrote that Block had "mastered" radio, would likely do the same with movies, and "he'll be in a perfect position for television." Although Block attempted performing as early as 1939, it was not until the early 1950s he began in earnest. In 1951, Block was disk jockey for his own twice-a-week radio program Around the Clock on WJZ in New York City, was moderator for the short-lived television game show, Tag the Gag and hosted a show, Four to Go on WGN in Chicago. However, it was as one of the original panelists on the television game show What's My Line? from 1950–1953 which gave Block national fame. What's My Line?, a guessing game in which the show's panel tried to uncover the unusual profession of guests, became one of the most popular shows on television in the 1950s and ran for 17 seasons, making it the longest-running game show in the history of prime-time American television.
Read more about this topic: Hal Block
Famous quotes containing the words performer, advent and/or television:
“Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Not until the advent of Impressionism does the repudiation of principles set in which opened the way for the burlesque parade of the fashionable and publicity-crazed modernities of our century.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)