The RIP Famous Person Thread

[harrybarracuda]

Former Chancellor Alistair Darling has died.

Every time I heard "Baron Darling" I always thought of Blackadder.

[david44]

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

.............................

P.s

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City

of is an allusion to the gal from Belfast City lyric

[Joe 90]

RIP Sticky Vicky

May she be opening bottles in that bar in the sky

[Joe 90]

My favourite song by the Pogues..


RIP Shane…


When I was a young man I carried my pack
And I lived the free life of a rover
From the Murrays green basin to the dusty outback
I waltzed my Matilda all over
Then in nineteen fifteen my country said Son
It's time to stop rambling 'cause there's work to be
done
So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun
And they sent me away to the war
And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we sailed away from the quay
And amidst all the tears and the shouts and the
cheers
We sailed off to Gallipoli
How well I remember that terrible day
When the blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter
Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well
He showered us with bullets, he rained us with
shells
And in five minutes flat he'd blown us all to hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia
But the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we stopped to bury our slain
And we buried ours and the Turks buried theirs
Then it started all over again
Now those who were living did their best to survive
In that mad world of blood, death and fire
And for seven long weeks I kept myself alive
While the corpses around me piled higher
Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over tit
And when I woke up in my hospital bed
And saw what it had done, Christ I wished I was dead
Never knew there were worse things than dying
And no more I'll go waltzing Matilda
To the green bushes so far and near
For to hump tent and pegs, a man needs two legs
No more waltzing Matilda for me
So they collected the cripples, the wounded and maimed
And they shipped us back home to Australia
The legless, the armless, the blind and insane
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla
And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay
I looked at the place where me legs used to be
And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me
To grieve and to mourn and to pity
And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As they carried us down the gangway
But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared
And they turned all their faces away
And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving their dreams of past glory
I see the old men, all twisted and torn
The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war
And the young people ask me, "What are they
marching for?"
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda
Who'll go a-waltzing Matilda with me

[harrybarracuda]

Says something when "Teen Vogue" are the ones who have the balls to print it.

Henry Kissinger Was a War Criminal Responsible for Millions of Deaths


Henry Kissinger Was a War Criminal Responsible for Millions of Deaths | Teen Vogue

[spliff]

Hardeharhar

[S Landreth]

• Sandra Day O'Connor dies at 93: Her legacy on the bench

Sandra Day O’Connor’s legacy on the bench includes deciding votes on affirmative action, abortion

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court, has died. She was 93 years old.

O’Connor died in Phoenix, Arizona on Friday of “complications related to advanced dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and a respiratory illness,” the court announced.

President Ronald Reagan named O’Connor to the court in 1981 to fulfill a campaign promise to appoint the first female justice, according to her bio on the court’s website. Fifty-one years old at the time of her nomination, O’Connor served for more than 24 years before retiring in 2006.

While on the court, O’Connor was referred to as the most powerful woman in the country, as she served at the center of a sharply divided bench during a crucial period when abortion, affirmative action, voting rights and sex discrimination were all on the docket.

O’Connor often cast the deciding vote on a wide range of issues, including abortion, affirmative action and religion. By the time she retired, she cast the deciding vote in over 350 Supreme Court cases, the Sandra Day O’Connor Insitute reports.

Here are three landmark decisions in which O’Connor played a key role:

Preserving the right to abortion

In the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O’Connor broke with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and other conservative opponents of a constitutional right to abortion under the 14th Amendment as part of a 5-4 majority in affirming Roe v. Wade.

Reading a summary of the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Connor said that even though “some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality … that can’t control our decision.”

Instead, the court’s obligation is “to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code,” the opinion added.

In June 2022, the court overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

Striking down sex discrimination

Although O’Connor often voted with the court’s conservative bloc on cases involving race discrimination, she sided with the court’s more liberal justices on cases concerning discrimination on the basis of sex.

She cast the deciding vote in the court’s 1982 ruling in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, which set the legal test for future gender discrimination cases — and led to the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute in 1996.

The question in the case was whether MUW, a public university, could constitutionally exclude male students. A state could not, O’Connor wrote in the court’s decision, base admission decisions on “archaic and stereotypic notions” of “proper” roles for men and women.

Defending affirmative action

O’Connor defended affirmative action practices by universities to increase educational opportunities for minorities and promote racial diversity on campus in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld an affirmative action admissions program at the University of Michigan Law School.

“Affirmative action’s benefits are not theoretical, but real,” she wrote for the 5-4 majority. “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized.”

Her opinion did, however, suggest that affirmation action policies should not continue in perpetuity. “The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” she wrote.

Less than 25 years later, the court effectively ended the use of race in college admissions, ruling in June 2023 that affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that consider a student’s race for college admissions are unconstitutional.

[S Landreth]

• "Milagro Beanfield War" and "The Sterile Cuckoo" author John Nichols dies at 83

Author John Nichols began writing stories when he was 10 years old, and by the time he got to college he was writing at least one novel a year. "Never for credit, never for a class," he said. "It was just one of the things that I did to amuse myself."

Nichols went on to create more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, most centered around his adopted home of Northern New Mexico. He is best known for The Milagro Beanfield War and The Sterile Cuckoo, both of which were adapted into films.

Nichols died Monday at home in Taos, N.M., his daughter Tania Harris told The Associated Press. He had been in declining health linked to a long-term heart condition, she said.

Nichols was born in 1940 in Berkeley, Calif., and raised in New York. When he was 24 years old, he finally published a book — his eighth novel — The Sterile Cuckoo — about an eccentric teenager (played in a film adaptation by Liza Minnelli) who forces a love affair with a reluctant college student.

After he wrote The Sterile Cuckoo, Nichols took a trip to Guatemala, and was shocked by the poverty and the exploitation he found there. He described the link between that country and the U.S. as a "kind of personal satrapy," and returned from his trip "really disillusioned about being American."

Nichols moved from New York to Taos, New Mexico in 1969 where he went to work at a muckraking newspaper. In 1974, he published his best-known novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, about one farmer's struggle against the politicians and real estate developers who want to turn his rural community into a luxury resort. Robert Redford directed the 1988 film adaptation.

"He took the politics very seriously," says Bill Nevins, a retired professor of Literature at the University of New Mexico. He believes Nichols will be remembered for his clear-eyed view of human nature — and the human destruction of nature.

"I think people continue to go back to his books ... to get a sense of what it's like to live in a multi-cultural nation that's evolving," Nevins says.

In 1992, Nichols said he wanted to create literature with a social conscience, but he also wanted to create art. It was a political act, he believed, to work at keeping language vibrant and vital.

"I think that we live in such a nihilistic and almost fascist culture that anyone who contributes positively, you know, who has a love of the culture at some other level — even if they're only painting pictures of sunflowers — is committing very political, radical acts," he said.

Nichols said it was "the beauty and the tragedy and the wonder of our lives" that he wanted to capture in his work.

[helge]

"Don't you step in my spiniche, you son of a bitche"



or such

[harrybarracuda]

Glenys Kinnock, former minister, MEP and wife of hopeless Labour Leader Neil.



Baroness Glenys Kinnock from Holyhead dies aged 79 | North Wales Chronicle

[S Landreth]

• Statement from President Joe Biden on the Passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was an American icon, the first woman on our nation’s highest court. She spent her career committed to the stable center, pragmatic and in search of common ground. I did not agree with all of her opinions, but I admired her decency and unwavering devotion to the facts, to our country, to active citizenship and the common good.

Defined by her no-nonsense Arizona ranch roots, Justice O’Connor overcame discrimination early on, at a time when law firms too often told women to seek work as secretaries, not attorneys. She gave her life to public service, even holding elected office, and never forgot those ties to the people whom the law is meant to serve. She sought to avoid ideology, and was devoted to the rule of law and to the bedrock American principle of an independent judiciary. Unrelenting in her interrogations of attorneys before the Court, she was willing to learn and to change, open to the experience of fellow Americans and always conscious of the law’s real impact on their lives.

Little more in the link above

[misskit]

Denny Laine, Moody Blues and Wings Musician, Dies at 79

Denny Laine, the first frontman of The Moody Blues and co-founder of Wings with Paul McCartney, died Tuesday following a battle with interstitial lung disease. He was 79. “I was at his bedside, holding his hand as I played his favorite Christmas songs for him… My world will never be the same,” his wife, Elizabeth Hines, wrote on Instagram. McCartney also paid tribute to the music artist, saying, “Peace and love Denny. It was a pleasure to know you.” According to Rolling Stone, Laine famously sang on the Moody Blues’ 1964 cover of the soul song “Go Now,” which reached No. 1 in England. He later left the band, forming Wings in 1971 with Paul and Linda McCartney and co-writing the UK chart-topper “Mull of Kintyre.” In an interview with Billboard published in May 2023, Laine said, “Me and Paul, we had the same influences musically and had known each other since the ’60s… It was easy to get a good groove on each other’s songs.” Laine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Moody Blues in 2018.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/denny-...ian-dies-at-79

[misskit]

[harrybarracuda]

He later left the band, forming Wings in 1971 with Paul and Linda McCartney and co-writing the UK chart-topper “Mull of Kintyre.”

That alone has ensured he will spend an eternity in fire and brimstone.

[S Landreth]

• Chad Allan, founding member of The Guess Who, dead at 80

Chad Allan, a Canadian musician who founded The Guess Who and had a pivotal role in the forming of Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the early 1970s, died on Nov. 21. He was 80.

Jamie Anstey, the vice president of Regenerator Records, said the announcement of Allan’s death was delayed at the request of the musician’s family, who wanted to grieve privately first, the Winnipeg Sun reported.

Allan, a Winnipeg native who was the first singer of The Guess Who before giving way to Burton Cummings, was a singer-songwriter who was inducted into the Order of Manitoba in 2015 for his contributions to Canadian music, CBC reported.

Cummings posted a tribute to Allan on Facebook, saying his friend, who left The Guess Who in 1966, “was an inspiration to all of us in bands in Winnipeg.”

“I learned a lot from watching and listening to Chad,” Cummings wrote. “He was very talented and one of a kind. He will always be remembered.”

Bachman-Turner Overdrive started out as Brave Belt -- a band Allan co-founded with fellow Guess Who bandmate Randy Bachman, according to the news outlet. Allan had left the group by the time it morphed into Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

“I’m grateful to have known & worked with him,” Bachman wrote on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter.

Born Allan Kowbel on March 29, 1943, he adopted the stage name Chad Allan as a tribute to singer Chad Mitchell, according to his obituary. He also changed his name because he was tired of friends calling him “cowbell,” the Sun reported. He formed his first band while attending high school in Winnipeg.

The band went through several names including Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions, before adopting the name of The Guess Who, according to his obituary.

In addition to Allan’s work on CBC-TV’s “Let’s Go” in 1967, he also made appearances on “Music Hop” and “Where It’s At,” according to CBC.

[S Landreth]

• Norman Lear Dead: TV Legend Was 101

Writer-producer-developer Norman Lear, who revolutionized American comedy with such daring, immensely popular early-‘70s sitcoms as “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son,” died on Tuesday. He was 101.

Lear’s publicist confirmed to Variety that he died at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes. A private service for immediate family will be held in the coming days.

“Thank you for the moving outpouring of love and support in honor of our wonderful husband, father, and grandfather,” Lear’s family said in a statement. “Norman lived a life of creativity, tenacity, and empathy. He deeply loved our country and spent a lifetime helping to preserve its founding ideals of justice and equality for all. Knowing and loving him has been the greatest of gifts. We ask for your understanding as we mourn privately in celebration of this remarkable human being.”

Lear had already established himself as a top comedy writer and captured a 1968 Oscar nomination for his screenplay for “Divorce American Style” when he concocted the idea for a new sitcom, based on a popular British show, about a conservative, outspokenly bigoted working-class man and his fractious Queens family. “All in the Family” became an immediate hit, seemingly with viewers of all political persuasions.

Lear’s shows were the first to address the serious political, cultural and social flashpoints of the day – racism, abortion, homosexuality, the Vietnam war — by working pointed new wrinkles into the standard domestic comedy formula. No subject was taboo: Two 1977 episodes of “All in the Family” revolved around the attempted rape of lead character Archie Bunker’s wife Edith.

Their fresh outrageousness turned them into huge ratings successes: For a time, “Family” and “Sanford,” based around a Los Angeles Black family, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the country. “All in the Family” itself accounted for no less than six spin-offs. “Family” was also honored with four Emmys in 1971-73 and a 1977 Peabody Award for Lear, “for giving us comedy with a social conscience.” (He received a second Peabody in 2016 for his career achievements.)

Some of Lear’s other creations played with TV conventions. “One Day at a Time” (1975-84) featured a single mother of two young girls as its protagonist, a new concept for a sitcom. Similarly, “Diff’rent Strokes” (1978-86) followed the growing pains of two Black kids adopted by a wealthy white businessman.

Other series developed by Lear were meta before the term ever existed. “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” (1976-77) spoofed the contorted drama of daytime soaps; while the show couldn’t land a network slot, it became a beloved off-the-wall entry in syndication. “Hartman” had its own oddball spinoff, “Fernwood 2 Night,” a parody talk show set in a small Ohio town; the show was later retooled as “America 2-Night,” with its setting relocated to Los Angeles.

Lear always maintained that the basic formula for his comedies always boiled down to the essential: Keep ‘em laughing.

He said in a 2005 Onion A.V. Club interview, “Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs. It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared – we were working before, on average, 240 live people – if you could get them caring, the more they cared, the harder they laughed.”

Lear’s big-screen credits included the scripts for “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963); “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968); “The Thief Who Came to Dinner” (1971); “Stand by Me” (1986) and “The Princess Bride” (1987), both of which were directed by former “All in the Family” co-star Rob Reiner; and “Fried Green Tomatoes” (1991). He wrote and directed the tart 1971 comedy about the tobacco industry “Cold Turkey.”

In the ‘80s, Lear purchased Avco Embassy Pictures with partner Jerry Perenchio; they later sold the company to Columbia Pictures for $250 million. He became a major player in the music business with the 1999 purchase, with former Embassy exec Hal Gaba, of Concord Music Group, one of the largest independent label operations in the world, with holdings including the catalogs of such indie labels as Concord Jazz, Fantasy, Stax, Riverside, Milestone, Rounder and Vanguard.

One of Hollywood’s most outspoken liberals and progressive philanthropists, Lear founded the advocacy group People for the American Way in 1981 to counteract the activities of the conservative Moral Majority.

Lear, who was honored with a place in the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame, a lifetime achievement award from the Producers Guild of America and multiple awards from the Writers Guild of America, was the recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1999 and feted at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017. In the case of the latter honor, Lear threatened to boycott a reception in protest of President Donald Trump’s policies. Trump ultimately chose not to attend the event, and Lear told Variety, “I’m happy not to go to the White House.”

Lear was born in New Haven, Conn., on July 27, 1922. Both his parents were Jews of Russian origin; he claimed in interviews that his father and mother were the inspirations for the characters of Archie and Edith Bunker. He dropped out of Boston’s Emerson College to enlist in the U.S. Air Force in 1942, and served as a radio operator and gunner on B-17 bombers in the European theater, flying 52 missions.

After the war, Lear pursued a career as a press agent, and moved to Los Angeles to set up shop. But he moved into comedy writing after partnering with Ed Simmons, his cousin’s husband. The pair’s first major break came writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, then the country’s hottest comedy act, during a run of 1952-53 appearances on “The Colgate Comedy Hour.” Teaming with Bud Yorkin, he became an in-demand scribe for the variety shows of Martha Raye, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Celeste Holm and George Gobel.

In the ‘60s, Lear rang up credits writing and (with Yorkin, his partner in Tandem Productions) producing specials starring Bobby Darin, Danny Kaye, Andy Williams and Henry Fonda (star of a Western series, “The Deputy,” which was created by Lear).

Though Lear had scattered credits on theatrical films in the late ‘60s, he vaulted to the top rank of TV producers with Tandem’s development of “All in the Family,” which was inspired by a similarly acerbic, long-running British series, “Till Death Do Us Part.” Originally picked up by ABC, which grew skittish about its content and dropped it, the show was acquired by CBS, where it became the first U.S. sitcom to be filmed in front of a live audience.

The vibrant new series became an instant smash, riding the terrific chemistry of its four stars: Carroll O’Connor as the conservative, bigoted, foul-mouthed Archie, Jean Stapleton as his dizzy, warm-hearted wife Edith; Sally Struthers as their hard-headed daughter Gloria; and Rob Reiner as Gloria’s hippie hubby Michael “Meathead” Stivic. The show reeled in 22 Emmys over the course of its run; O’Connor collected four Emmys for his work on the show, Stapleton three, Reiner two and Struthers one. (An ABC special about the series and its spinoff “The Jeffersons,” executive produced by Lear, won a 2019 Emmy.)

The show became a cottage industry, spinning off one series after another: “Maude,” with Bea Arthur as Edith’s feisty, acid-tongued cousin (purportedly based on Lear’s second wife Frances); “The Jeffersons,” starring Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford as the Bunkers’ African American former next-door neighbors; “Gloria,” with Struthers reprising her role (following the character’s divorce); “Checking In,” with Marla Gibbs as Florence Johnston, the Jeffersons’ onetime maid; and, in the ‘90s, “704 Hauser,” a poorly-received show that was set in the Bunkers’ old house. “Archie Bunker’s Place,” a sort of spinoff of itself set in the titular character’s Queens bar, ran from 1979-83.

Bud Yorkin served as the point man on another Tandem show, based on a U.K. TV show, “Steptoe and Son,” which he had adapted into a TV movie in 1965. “Sanford and Son” pitted irascible, eruptive L.A. junkman Fred Sanford (veteran Black comic Redd Foxx) against his long-suffering son Lamont (Demond Wilson). Foxx’s salty reading of Bunker-style bigotry struck a chord, and the show had a healthy six-season run.

After the Tandem partnership split in 1975, Lear moved on to develop another innovative project, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” Designed as a daily show with a continuing narrative through-line, in the manner of daytime network soaps, it starred Louise Lasser as the pivotal title character, who served as the center of Fernwood’s darkly funny small-town dramas. “Hartman” and its successor show “Forever Fernwood” ran for more than 400 episodes and spawned the faux talk show “Fernwood 2 Night,” starring “Hartman” vet Martin Mull as host Barth Gimble and Fred Willard as sidekick Jerry Hubbard.

Though “All in the Family” and its successors changed TV forever with their sharp political edge and theretofore unseen frankness, Lear later took a cool look back on what the show ultimately achieved.

He averred, “I didn’t see it changing television at all. We had a Judeo-Christian ethic hanging around a couple thousand years that didn’t help erase racism at all. So the notion of the little half-hour comedy changing things is something I think is silly.”

Lear’s last two creations, the sitcoms “Sunday Dinner” and “704 Hauser,” both saw brief runs in the early ‘90s. While he had nothing to do with its production, he had an executive producer credit on the reboot of “One Day at a Time,” set in L.A.’s Echo Park and focusing on a Latino family, which ran from 2017-2020.

Lear’s latter-day productions included the features “Way Past Cool” (2000) and “El Superstar: The Unlikely Rise of Juan Frances” (2008). His documentary productions included “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song” (2007).

His long career was covered in the 2016 documentary “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You.” In his later years, he hosted a podcast “All of the Above With Norman Lear” and published a memoir. “Even This I Get to Experience” in 2014. He also served as executive producer on the documentary “Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided to Go For It.”

Beyond his activities in the non-profit People for the American Way, which monitored judicial appointments, challenges to the First Amendment and the activities of right-wing groups, Lear in 2004 founded Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan non-profit organization to encourage the youth vote.

He is survived by his third wife Lyn Davis, six children and four grandchildren.

[misskit]

Well done, Mr. Lear.


Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was my favorite of all his TV shows.

[misskit]

Ryan O'Neal Dead at 82

"Love Story" and "Peyton Place" star Ryan O'Neal has died.


His son Patrick posted, "So this is the toughest thing I’ve ever had to say but here we go. My dad passed away peacefully today, with his loving team by his side supporting him and loving him as he would us."


It's unclear how O'Neal died, but he's had his share of health problems, including a prostate cancer diagnosis in 2012. In 2001, he was diagnosed with chronic leukemia.

O'Neal was not only one of the hottest actors in Hollywood back in the day, but he was a major heartthrob. His credits include "What's Up, Doc?" "Paper Moon," "Barry Lyndon," "A Bridge Too Far," "The Main Event," and "The Driver."


Ryan was nominated in 1970 for a Best Actor Oscar for "Love Story."

He was famously life partners with Farrah Fawcett from 1979 - 1997, and they reconnected between 2001 and 2009, when she died. Patrick said, "Ryan never bragged, but he has bragging rights in Heaven. Especially when it comes to Farrah. Everyone had the poster, he had the real McCoy. And now they meet again."


BTW ... he shared the big screen in "Paper Moon" with his daughter, Tatum O'Neal.

Ryan is survived by 4 children and 5 grandchildren.







Ryan O'Neal Dead at 82

[Norton]

Though “All in the Family” and its successors changed TV forever with their sharp political edge and theretofore unseen frankness, Lear later took a cool look back on what the show ultimately achieved.

He averred, “I didn’t see it changing television at all. We had a Judeo-Christian ethic hanging around a couple thousand years that didn’t help erase racism at all. So the notion of the little half-hour comedy changing things is something I think is silly.”

Too modest Norman. It did change TV forever!

[harrybarracuda]

Too modest Norman. It did change TV forever!

Considering it was ripped straight off "Til Death Us Do Part", hardly innovative.

[misskit]

“Sanford and Son” was a rip off of “Steptoe and Son.”

[harrybarracuda]

So basically he was one great big plagiarist and nothing more.

[S Landreth]

Too modest Norman. It did change TV forever!

Saturday evening (for the most part) I would hear.........

from almost any home I was visiting (friends or family).

[harrybarracuda]

So basically he was one great big plagiarist and nothing more.

A bit like spamdreth when you think about it.

[S Landreth]

you don’t miss a post I make