Thursday, February 28, 2008

Praise for a deceased TV program

This is an excellent story from The New York Times on William F. Buckley's long-running TV show, "Firing Line"--so different from the mindless shoutfests that litter TV today. It was a dialogical program, enlivened by Buckley's relentless intelligence, sesquipedalians, and charm. I wonder if there is a DVD of these programs.

3 comments:

  1. Here is a youtube showing of William Buckley being interviewed by Charlie Rose, also an excellent interviewer/conversationalist.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Har3ByGiCI

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  2. I am about to post something about this on my own blog, but I tried to find out last year how I could order a DVD of the great Firing Line debate on political correctness--probably the greatest debate I have ever heard. I discovered that all the recordings for Firing Line our housed at the Hoover Institute. A few of them are digitized however, and available to view using Real Media. Others are available on VHS. They are inviting people to give them input on which ones to digitize.

    Some of the best of them are still not available in any format.

    It looks to me like they need a grant or something to get this work done. Here is the link:

    http://hoohila.stanford.edu/
    firingline/programView.php?
    programID=1385

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  3. Anonymous2:29 PM

    I'm glad the Hoover Institution is the repository for the Firing Line archives, and I trust it will make good use of the material over time. Let's also remember WFB's 533-page Life on the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures (Random House, 1989).

    Here's the inevitable link to Amazon:

    http://tinyurl.com/2txjd8

    Here too is a link to Abe Books:

    http://tinyurl.com/2vosa8

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