Stars hitched to the Wagon
QUESTION Was M*A*S*H the first TV show to feature celebrity guest appearances?
THERE is a long tradition of American TV shows, particularly westerns, featuring guest stars.
Wagon Train, which ran from 1957 to 1965, told stories of life on a huge wagon train as it left post-Civil War Missouri on its way to California, through the plains, deserts and Rocky Mountains.
The first episode, The Willy Moran Story, featured Ernest Borgnine in the title role — a drunk, but heroic, wagon driver. He had won the Best Actor Oscar for Marty the previous year.
The role was revived in season two of the show and Borgnine played other characters in two additional episodes, The Estaban Zamora Story and The Earl Packer Story.
Double Oscar-winner Bette Davis appeared in three episodes of Wagon Train as different characters: Ella Lindstrom and Madame Elizabeth McQueeny in 1959, and Bettina May in 1961.
Claire Trevor, who won the best supporting actress Oscar for Key Largo in 1948, played the title role in The C.L. Harding Story, which also featured country music star Johnny Cash.
Other stars of the silver screen who appeared in Wagon Train included: Debra Paget, Ann Blyth, Dane Clark, Charles Bickford, Forrest Tucker, Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Dan Duryea, Jane Wyman, Virginia Mayo, Lee Marvin, Mickey Rooney and Lou Costello, one half of the comic act, Abbott and Costello.
Future U.S. President Ronald Reagan turned up as Captain Paul Winters.
Other westerns, such as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Laramie, Bonanza and The Virginian, had guest stars in the saddle.
And it wasn’t uncommon to see Clint Walker of Cheyenne, James Garner and Jack Kelly of Maverick, Ty Hardin of Bronco and Will Hutchins of Sugarfoot, all under the Warner Bros banner, moseying on to the sets of each other’s shows.
Terry Cutts, Birchington, Kent. NIELSEN ratings, an audience measurement system developed in the Twenties by Arthur C. Nielsen, are assessed in a process called sweeps, which take place in November, February, May and July.
A strategically placed guest star can boost ratings and affect how much the network can charge for advertising.
Over its 11 seasons, from 1972 to 1983, M*A*S*H churned out more than 250 episodes, which meant that a large number of nurses, soldiers and patients passed through the tents of the 4077th.
Memorable faces to look out for include Leslie Nielsen, James Cromwell, Pat Morita (Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid), Ron Howard, Brian Dennehy, Shelley Long, Patrick Swayze and Laurence Fishburne. My favourite was George Wendt (later Norm from Cheers) as Private La Roche, who got a pool ball stuck in his mouth at Halloween.
Andrew Moles, Durham.
QUESTION When was the concept of nostalgia created?
THE Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined this term in his 1688 medical dissertation, from the Greek nostos, or homecoming, and algos, pain.
Though the term suggests homesickness, it was a diagnosis for a specific disease among soldiers. Hofer’s nostalgia was a chronic debilitating disorder where the sufferer became manic with longing.
He was giving a name to a disorder that had been recognised during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War (1618 to 1648), when it was called el mal de corazon, which means ‘trouble of the heart’.
It was particularly associated with Swiss soldiers, who were reportedly so susceptible to falling ill when they heard the traditional milking song Khue-Reyen that its playing was punishable by death.
By the 1850s, nostalgia was seen as a symptom or stage of a pathological process, a form of melancholia, rather than a particular disease, though it was still being diagnosed as late as the American Civil War (1861 to 1865).
From the late 19th century, it came to be considered as a benign and even positive feeling. We now consider it as something that reminds us of an event or item from our past, and the resulting emotion might be sorrow or pleasure.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Was there a citycentre public clock in London before the Victorians built Big Ben?
FURTHER to the recent answer about Thomas Harris’s 1671 clock in Fleet Street, figures of mythical giants Gog and Magog were also found in an alcove over the 1840s Sir John Bennett clock shop in London’s Cheapside.
During street improvements in 1929, the building’s frontage was sold to U.S. industrialist Henry Ford. Gog and Magog were re-erected in a modified facade in his museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
My great uncle, Herbert Morton, brokered the sale on behalf of Ford and supervised the dismantling.
In his unpublished book, Spend Me Ten Millions (the sum Ford was willing to pay during his spending spree collecting British artefacts), Morton says: ‘I advised that Bennett’s premises should be erected in some shady angle outside... the main Edison Institute building...but Mr Ford thought otherwise and I could not dissuade him from erecting the slender, three-storied building on an open site . . . of brand new brick work [where] it lost all its ancient appearance . . .’
Over five years, Morton spent many thousands of pounds on antiques and works of art on Ford’s instructions, and ‘took down and later set up again in America many great engines and some historic buildings’. Pete Skellon, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Scottish Daily Mail, 20 Waterloo Street, Glasgow, G2 6DB; fax them to 0141 331 4739 or email them to charles.legge@dailymail. co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.