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Guiding Light is an American television program credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the longest-running soap opera in production and the longest running drama in T.V. and radio history. The 15,000th episode aired on September 7, 2006.

The program was created by soap writer Irna Phillips and began as an NBC radio serial on January 25, 1937 before moving to CBS on June 30, 1952 as a televised serial. The show’s title refers to a lamp in the story of The Rev. Dr. John Ruthledge, a major character when Guiding Light debuted in 1937, that family and residents could see as a sign for them to find help when needed. The show has been broadcast from three locations: Chicago, Illinois, from 1937 until 1946, Hollywood, California, from 1947 until 1949, and New York City, from 1949 until the present.

In the 71st season, the show changed its look to a more “realistic” experience. The new look of Guiding Light includes hand-held camerawork and less time in traditional studio sets. Also new are the shooting of outdoor scenes that take place in actual outdoor settings. CBS and the show’s producers hope that the new look can help reinvent the show and raise ratings, making it a model for the future of daytime.

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Richard Pryor was an American comedian, actor and writer. He was known for unflinching examinations of racism and customs in modern life, as well for his frequent use of colorful, vulgar and profane language, and racial epithets. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations. Pryor’s body of work included concert movies, recordings, and numerous films as an actor, usually in comedies.

Pryor was born in Peoria, Illinois and grew up in his grandmother’s brothel where his mother practiced prostitution and his father was her pimp. Pryor was expelled from school at age 14 and from 1958 to 1960, he served in the United States Army, but spent virtually his entire stint in an army prison. When he was 19, he worked at a Mafia-owned nightclub as the MC. In 1963, he moved to New York City and began performing regularly in clubs alongside performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen.

Soon, Pryor began regularly on television variety shows like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In 1969, he moved to Berkeley, California and recorded several comedy albums. Pryor wrote for T.V. and appeared in several popular films in 1970s and early 1980s, including The Mack, Silver Streak, and Bustin’ Loose. In 1983, he signed a five-year, $40 million contract and resulted in softer, more formulaic films like Superman III and The Toy. In 1991, he announced that he had been suffering from multiple sclerosis and died of cardiac arrest on December 10, 2005.

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Richard “Dick” Cavett is a former American television talk show host known for his conversational style and in-depth discussion of issues. He was born in Gibson, Nebraska and directed a live Saturday-morning radio show in eighth grade. Before leaving for college, he worked as a caddy and began doing magic shows for $35 a night.

Cavett attended Yale University, appearing in and directing dramas on the campus radio station. He was a copyboy at Time when he wrote some jokes and gave them to Jack Paar, then host of The Tonight Show, and was hired as a talent coordinator. Cavett continued as a writer after Johnny Carson took over. Cavett began a brief career as a stand-up comedian in 1964 and went on to host a special that received good reviews.

This led to the morning version of The Dick Cavett Show in 1968 which he hosted intermittently in various formats and on various TV and radio networks. Cavett has been nominated for 11 Emmy Awards and won three. His most well—remembered talk show incarnation aired on ABC form 1969 to 1974. His show often featured controversial interviews on taboo subjects that most other talk show hosts avoided.

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Dennis Miller is an American stand-up comedian, political/sports commentator, and a television/radio personality. He rose to fame as a cast member of Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s and subsequently hosted several of his own talk shows on HBO, CNBC and in syndication. He currently hosts a daily, three-hour, self-titled talk radio program.

Miller was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was raised by his mother after his parents separated. In the 1970s, while working as a standup comedian in Pittsburgh’s emerging comedy club circuit, he submitted a winning joke for Playboy’s “joke of the year.” In the early 1980s, Miller began performing standup in New York City comedy clubs as well as in Los Angles at The Comedy Store.

Miller’s big break came in 1985 when he was discovered by Lorne Michaels at The Comedy Store and landed a spot on Saturday Night Live succeeding Christopher Guest as the Weekend Update anchor. In 1988, Miller released a standup comedy CD, The Off-White Album, based on an HBO special, and left SNL in 1991. In 1992, he launched a late night TV talk show, The Dennis Miller Show, featuring cutting-edge musical groups and other groundbreaking guests not seen on other late night programs of the time. It was canceled the same year it premiered due to poor ratings. Beginning in 1994, he hosted Dennis Miller Live, a half-hour talk show on HBO that ran until 2002. In 2000, he was a color commentator on ABC’s Monday Night Football for two seasons and known for his obscure popular culture references.

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In 1974, NBC Tonight Show host Johnny Carson requested that the weekend broadcasts of “Best of Carson” come to an end so that he could take two weeknights off. To fill the gap, the network drew up some ideas and brought in Dick Ebersol to develop a 90-minute late-night variety show. He hired Canadian producer Lorne Michaels to be the show-runner.

When the first show aired on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin as its host, it was called NBC’s Saturday Night, because ABC featured a program at the same time titled Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. After the Cosell program was canceled in 1976, the NBC program changed its name on March 26, 1977. The original concept was for a comedy-variety show featuring young comedians, live musical performances, and short films by Albert Brooks.

Rather than have one permanent host, Michaels elected to have a different guest host each week. The original repertory company was called the “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players” and featured Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Garrett Morris. The original head writer was Michael O’Donoghue, a writer at National Lampoon, and the original theme music was written by Howard Shore.

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Monty Python’s Flying Circus is a BBC sketch comedy program from the Monty Python comedy team. the show was noted for its surreality, risqué or innuendo-laden humor, sight gags, and sketches without punchlines. It also featured the iconic animations of Terry Gilliam which were often sequenced or merged with live action.

The first episode was recorded on September 7, 1969 and broadcast on October 5 on BBC One, with 45 episodes airing over four seasons. The show often targeted the idiosyncrasies of British life and was at times politically charged. The members of Monty Python were highly educated: Terry Jones and Michael Palin are Oxford graduates, while Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman are Cambridge graduates, and American-born member Terry Gilliam is an Occidental College graduate.

Their comedy is often pointedly intellectual by way of numerous references to philosophers and literary figures. Monty Python followed and elaborated upon the style used by Spike Milligan in his series Q5, rather than the traditional sketch show format. The team intended their humor to be impossible to categorize and succeeded so completely that the adjective “Pythonesque” had to be invented to define it, and later, similar material. The series’ famous theme song is the first segment of John Philip Sousa’s Liberty Bell, chose because it was in the public domain.

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Bonanza is an American television series that ran on NBC from September 12, 1959 to January 16, 1973. Lasting 14 seasons, it is among the longest running Western TV series and continues to air sporadically on stations across the country.

Bonanza got its name from the Comstock Lode which was a very large deposit of silver. Virginia City was founded directly over the lode and was mined fro 19 years. The pilot was written by David Dortort, who also produced the series. For most of its 430 episode run, the main sponsor of Bonanza was Chevrolet and the stars occasionally appeared in commercials endorsing the company’s automobiles. Bonanza was one of the first series to be filmed and broadcast in color. RCA owned NBC (and the series) and wanted to use it to spur sales of color receivers.

The Saturday night ratings were dismal and Bonanza was soon targeted for cancellation. The show was moved to Sunday nights and the ratings soared, and it eventually reached number one by the mid-1960s. It established itself as the single biggest hit TV series of that decade. After being cancelled, the show has been very popular in syndication on cable networks like TV Land, ION, and the Hallmark Channel.

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Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) is an American cable television network dedicated to broadcasting and producing sports-related programming 24 hours a day. It was founded by Scott Rasmussen and his father, Bill, and launched on September 7, 1979, under the direction of Chet Simmons.

ESPN’s signature telecast, SportsCenter, debuted with the network and aired its 30,000^th episode on February 11, 2007. The network broadcasts primarily out of its studios in Bristol, Connecticut with offices in New York City, Seattle, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Los Angeles. Most programming on ESPN is composed of live or tape-delayed sporting events and sports-related news programming with the remainder filled by sports-related talk shows and documentaries.

The roots of ESPN can be traced to Bill Rasmussen who was hoping to create the first national sports network. In 1977, he and his son Scott sought a new business venture. Bill’s original idea was for a cable TV network that focused on covering sporting events in the state of Connecticut. He found out that it was cheaper to buy a continuous 24-hour satellite feed than buying several blocks of only a few hours a night. ESPN started with the debut of SportsCenter with a pro slow pitch softball game on afterwards. The network broadcasts 65 sports, 24 hours a day in 14 languages in more than 150 countries.

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American Bandstand was a television show that aired in various versions from 1952 to 1989, hosted by Dick Clark, who also served as producer. The show featured teenagers dancing to Top 40-type music introduced by Clark and at least one popular musical act that, over the decades, ran the gamut from Jerry Lee Lewis to Run DMC. They would usually appear in-person to lip-sync one of their latest singles.

The program premiered locally as a live show, Bandstand, on Philadelphia TV station WFIL-TV on October 7, 1952 and was hosted by Bob Horn, with Lee Stewart as co-host until 1955. The series originally featured Horn hosting two collections of filmed musical performances but this was soon changed to the familiar format of having kids dance to hit records. On July 9, 1956, Horn was fired after a drunk driving arrest and was replaced by Dick Clark.

In late spring of 1957, Clark decided to pitch the show to ABC and after some badgering, the program was picked up nationally, becoming American Bandstand on August 5, 1957. The show was broadcast “live” weekday afternoons and in early 1963 all five shows for the upcoming week were videotaped the preceding Saturday. Clark would often interview teens about their opinions of the songs being played, most memorably through the “Rate-a-Record” segments. American Bandstand’s popularity helped Clark become an American media mogul and inspired other similar long-running music programs, such as Soul Train and Top of the Pops.

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William Henry Cosby, Jr. was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is an American comedian, actor, television producer, and activist. A veteran stand-up performer, he got his start at various clubs then landed a vanguard role in the 1960s action show I Spy. He later starred in his own series, The Bill Cosby Show, in the late 1960s.

Cosby was one of the major characters on the children’s television show The Electric Company for its first two season, and created the humorous educational cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, about a group of young friends growing up in the city. During the 1980s, Cosby produced and starred in what is considered one of the decade’s defining sitcoms, The Cosby Show, which lasted eight seasons from 1984 to 1992, and is still in syndication. The sitcom highlighted the experiences and growth of an upper middle-class African-American family. It was an immediate success, debuting near the top of the ratings and staying there for most of its long run.

In the 1990s, Cosby starred in Cosby, which first aired in 1996, hosted Kids Say the Darndest Things, which began in 1998, and appeared in a number of movies. His good-natured, fatherly image has made him a popular personality and garnered him the nickname of “America’s Dad.” He has also been a sought-after spokesman for products like Jell-O Pudding.

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