Chapter 8

Your Brand, Your Show

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

As You Like It

My parents often reminisced fondly about their childhood family gatherings around the fireplace on a Sunday evening. Glasses of warm milk in their hands and their tummies still full from lunchtime’s Sunday roast, as their parents tuned-in to the early evening’s line-up of entertainment on the radio.

"

The popular shows of the time included Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Easy Aces, and Ethel and Albert in the United States, and The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour across the pond in England, where my parents both grew up.

“There was something special about the radio. Something about the listening,” my father told me. “It allowed us to use our imaginations to paint pictures. Television has deprived us of that gift.”

From the White House to the Moon

But the times they were a-changing, and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s saw the rapid invasion of a new form of media through the evolution of television networks and the types of program they were starting to present. By the turn of the swinging ’60s, television sets were becoming a commonplace addition in the home, and exciting new changes began taking place in program content and production techniques. ...

Get Follow Me! Creating a Personal Brand with Twitter now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.