Robert Blake, who died March 9 of heart disease at the age of 89, almost didn’t get to be Baretta. The gritty cop series, which ran on ABC from 1975-78, began a season earlier when it was called Toma. That series was based on a real-life New Jersey police officer named David Toma, who was
You could not cover television in Canada for the past 40 years without encountering the great Gordon Pinsent. Thank God. Pinsent, who died in his sleep Feb. 25 at 92, was a towering figure in film and television. In his native Newfoundland, he was much more than that. I was out in St. John’s, Nfld.,
I never, ever watch The Masked Singer but last week I was flipping around and paused long enough to see the prime time broadcast TV highlight of the year — TV legend Dick Van Dyke unmasked! The 97-year-old Tony, Emmy and Grammy winner became the oldest and most decorated Masked Singer participant ever. The judges
Richard Belzer is primarily known to TV viewers as Detective John Munch. And no wonder. He played the sardonic cop character for 23 seasons on 11 different shows across six different networks. The two main shows were Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but Belzer also played Munch on
Charles Kimbrough looked like a local news anchor. He had the hair and the tight smile and looked good in a suit in that middle-aged white man tradition found on Eyewitness newscasts in dozens of North American TV markets. His ten season stint on Murphy Brown as anchorman Jim Dial cemented that impression. The series,
North America was certainly ready for Laverne & Shirley when the series premiered in 1976. It arrived as the ABC network soared from perennial also-ran status become the No. 1 US network for several years. Powering them there were the breezy comedies created by Garry Marshall, including Happy Days, the series that introduced the characters
When I was a young lad in the 1960s growing up in the wilds of Etobicoke, Bobby Hull was the greatest thing on skates. He passed away Monday at 84. The muscular left winger was power personified on ice, lifting you out of your seat with end-to-end rushes and a cannonating slapshot. It was an
Probably the only time you ever wish you were a bit older is when you are in Grade Seven. That’s where I was in 1969. That summer, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played their second-ever gig — at Woodstock. I was not at Woodstock. I was in Etobicoke. At Our Lady of Peace elementary school