The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican is an animated miniseries that first aired on ABC (US) in 1950. The show is notorious for a variety of factors including its unprofessional voice acting, simplistic animation, and inconsistent appearances of the title character.
Riley worked in an aircraft plant in California, but viewers usually saw him at home, cheerfully disrupting life with his malapropisms and ill timed intervention into minor problems.
Highway Patrol was a syndicated, fictional police action series produced from 1955 to 1959, concerning the activities of the highway patrol and their leader, Dan Matthews (who held no rank). Although filmed in and around the Los Angeles area, the state setting for the stories was never identified, and city and street names were fictionalized.
In 1950s Milwaukee the Cunningham family must contend with Fonzie, a motorcycle riding Casanova.
Get Some In! is a British comedy series set in the 1950's that focused on the Royal Air Force National Service. The show was broadcast between 1975 and 1978 by Thames Television. Scripts were by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, the team behind the BBC TV sitcom The Good Life.
The programme drew its inspiration from late 1950s/early 1960s National Service situation-comedy The Army Game, and from nostalgic BBC TV sitcom Dad's Army, but the RAF setting gave it enough originality not to seem formulaic. Thirty-four half-hour episodes were made.
The series has never been repeated in full on terrestrial TV, although the UKTV Gold cable channel has aired the episodes uncut.
Laverne & Shirley is an American television sitcom that ran on ABC from January 27, 1976 to May 10, 1983. It starred Penny Marshall as Laverne De Fazio and Cindy Williams as Shirley Feeney, single roommates who worked as bottlecappers in a fictitious Milwaukee brewery called "Shotz Brewery."
The show was a spin-off from Happy Days, as the two lead characters were originally introduced on that series as acquaintances of Fonzie. Set in roughly the same time period, the timeline started in approximately 1958, when the series began, through 1967, when the series ended. As with Happy Days, it was made by Paramount Television, created by Garry Marshall, and executive produced by Garry Marshall, Edward K. Milkis, and Thomas L. Miller.
The story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stretching from his days as a Southern Baptist minister in the South of the 1950s until his assassination in Memphis in 1968.
Bless Me Father is a British sitcom starring Arthur Lowe, Daniel Abineri, Gabrielle Daye, Patrick McAlinney, David Ryall, Derek Francis and Sheila Keith. It was aired on ITV from 1978 until 1981 and described the adventures of an Irish Catholic priest, Father Charles Duddleswell and his young curate in the fictional parish of St. Jude's in suburban London. 21 episodes, written by Peter De Rosa, were aired. De Rosa wrote the books on which the series was based using the pseudonym of Neil Boyd which was also the name of the young curate character; Boyd also served as the narrator in the series of novels upon which the series was based. It was made for the ITV network by London Weekend Television.
The series was set in 1950 and 1951 and marked a departure from the middle class 'bank manager' roles associated with Lowe such as that in Dad's Army. The other regular characters included Mrs Pring, the housekeeper, the hard-drinking Dr Daley, the non-religious neighbour Billy Buzzle, and abbess Reverend Mother Stephen.
Hi-de-Hi! is a British sitcom set in Maplins, a fictional holiday camp, during 1959 and 1960, and was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, who also wrote Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum amongst others. It aired on the BBC from 1980 to 1988.
The series revolved around the lives of the camp's management and entertainers, most of them struggling actors or has-beens.
The inspiration was the experience of writers Perry and Croft: after being demobilised from the army, Perry was a Redcoat at Butlin's, Pwllheli during the holiday season.
The series gained large audiences and won a BAFTA as Best Comedy Series in 1984. In 2004, it came 40th in Britain's Best Sitcom and in a 2008 poll on Channel 4, 'Hi-de-Hi!" was voted the 35th most popular comedy catchphrase.
Boone is a dramatic television series which was broadcast on NBC from 1983 to 1984. It starred Tom Byrd and Barry Corbin. Byrd played teenager Boone Sawyer, who aspires to a career in rock and roll music, despite the advice of his stern father, Merit Sawyer, played by Corbin, who wants Boone to join him in the automobile repair business. The setting of the series is Tennessee in the early 1950s, when great changes began to occur in popular music, with the rise of Elvis Presley.
Ten weekly episodes began airing on September 26, 1983, and three remaining segments were broadcast in the summer of 1984, the last on August 11. The series was created by Earl Hamner, Jr.
Ronnie Claire Edwards, an Oklahoma City native who played Corabeth Godsey, the bossy wife of storekeeper Ike Godsey in The Waltons, portrayed Aunt Dolly Sawyer in Boone. William Edward Phipps played her husband Link Sawyer, the owner of Link's Orchid Lounge, where Boone and his friend, Rome Hawley, sometimes performed.
Other stars included Elizabeth Huddle as Boone's mother, Faye, who wanted Boone to commit to the ministry, as his older brother, Dwight, had done prior to Dwight's death in World War II. Julie Anne Haddock was cast as Amanda; Robyn Lively, Banjo; and Amanda Peterson, Boone's young sister, Squirt Sawyer.
One By One is a British television series made by the BBC between 1984 and 1987.
The series, created by Anthony Read, followed the career of international veterinarian David Taylor and his work caring for exotic animals at zoos in Britain, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Each series was set during a different decade, with exteriors filmed at Dudley Zoo, Chester Zoo and Knowsley Safari Park. Thirty-two episodes were made in total.
Rob Heyland starred as Turner, while other major cast members included James Ellis, Sonia Graham, Peter Gilmore, Heather James, Catherine Schell, Peter Jeffrey, Andrew Robertson and Christina Nagy.
A three part series about women working in the British film industry during the 1950s.
Ann, a former chorus girl marries above herself into a rich society family, but her mother-in-law regards her with great suspicion from the start. When Ann shoots her husband dead, claiming she thought he was a prowler, the older Mrs. Grenville decides to back the woman she despises, to protect the family image.
Private Eye is an American crime drama that aired from September 13, 1987 until January 8, 1988.
The True Believers is a 1988 Australian mini series which looks at the history of the Australian Labor Party from the end of World War Two up to the Australian Labor Party split of 1955.
It was co-written by Bob Ellis who focused on three characters "Chifley, the unlettered man of great dignity; Menzies, who used to stand for something but eventually stood only for Menzies; and Evatt, the grand idealist... It's almost like Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. It's a chunk of national history during Australia's great era of change after the war."
An idyllic picture of 1950's rural England as seen through the lives of the Larkins, a farm family living in Kent. The show revolves around Pa Larkin, a man of a kind and mischievous nature with a penchant for getting into scrapes and talking his way out of them with equal equanimity; and his daughters, as they deal with growing up and discovering the joys and sorrows of young love.
Brooklyn Bridge is an American television program which aired on CBS between 1991 and 1993. It is about a Jewish American family living in Brooklyn in the middle 1950s. The premise was partially based on the childhood of executive producer and creator Gary David Goldberg.
Brooklyn Bridge won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy Award as for outstanding television series in 1992, after its first season.
The cast was led by Marion Ross; Art Garfunkel performed the theme song, which was titled "Just Over The Brooklyn Bridge."
In 1997, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" was ranked #46 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
I'll Fly Away is an American drama television series set during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in an unspecified Southern U.S. state. It aired on NBC from 1991 to 1993 and starred Regina Taylor as Lilly Harper, a black housekeeper for the family of district attorney Forrest Bedford, whose name is an ironic reference to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. As the show progressed, Lilly became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement, with events eventually drawing in Forrest as well.
I'll Fly Away won two 1992 Emmy Awards, and 23 nominations in total. It won three Humanitas Prizes, two Golden Globe Awards, two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Drama Series, and a Peabody Award. However, the series was never a ratings blockbuster, and it was canceled by NBC in 1993, despite widespread protests by critics and viewer organizations.
After the program's cancellation, a two-hour movie, I'll Fly Away: Then and Now, was produced, in order to resolve dangling storylines from Season 2, and provide the series with a true finale. The movie aired on October 11, 1993 on PBS. Its major storyline closely paralleled the true story of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. Thereafter, PBS began airing repeats of the original episodes, ceasing after one complete showing of the entire series.