Blues for Richard Dawson.

Richard Dawson was great.
Right now, I can only remember him as "Newkirk" on Hogan's Heroes back
when the show was prime-time. I also remember him as the host of
Family Feud. I didn't know he was married to Diana Dors in the early
'60's.
The Newkirk character led me onto Monty Python's Flying Circus and
great appreciation of British comedy.

'Family Feud' TV host Richard Dawson has died

http://www.tv.yahoo.com/news/family-feud-tv-host-richard-dawson-died-142027262.html

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British
entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom "Hogan's
Heroes" and a decade later began kissing thousands of female
contestants as host of the game show "Family Feud" has died. He was
79.

Dawson, also known to TV fans as the Cockney POW Cpl. Peter Newkirk on
"Hogan's Heroes," died Saturday night from complications related to
esophageal cancer at Ronald Reagan Memorial hospital, his son Gary
said.

The game show, which initially ran from 1976 to 1985, pitted families
who tried to guess the most popular answers to poll questions such as
"What do people give up when they go on a diet?"

Dawson won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game show host. Tom
Shales of The Washington Post called him "the fastest, brightest and
most beguilingly caustic interlocutor since the late great Groucho
bantered and parried on 'You Be Your Life.'" The show was so popular
it was released as both daytime and syndicated evening versions.

He was known for kissing each woman contestant, and at the time the
show bowed out in 1985, executive producer Howard Felsher estimated
that Dawson had kissed "somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000."

"I kissed them for luck and love, that's all," Dawson said at the
time.

He reprised his game show character in a much darker mood in the 1987
Arnold Schwarzenegger film "The Running Man," playing the host of a
deadly TV show set in a totalitarian future, where convicts try to
escape as their executioners stalk them. "Saturday Night Live" mocked
him in the 1970s, with Bill Murray portraying him as leering and
nasty, even slapping one contestant (John Belushi) for getting too
fresh.

The British-born actor already had gained fame as the fast-talking
Newkirk in "Hogan's Heroes," the CBS comedy about prisoners in a Nazi
POW camp who hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves.

Despite its unlikely premise, the show made the ratings top 10 in its
first season, 1965-66, and ran until 1971.

Both "Hogan's Heroes" and "Family Feud" have had a second life in
recent years, the former on DVD reissues and the latter on GSN,
formerly known as the Game Show Network.

On Dawson's last "Family Feud" in 1985, the studio audience honored
him with a standing ovation, and he responded: "Please sit down. I
have to do at least 30 minutes of fun and laughter and you make me
want to cry."

"I've had the most incredible luck in my career," he told viewers.

"I never dreamed I would have a job in which so many people could
touch me and I could touch them," he said. That triggered an
unexpected laugh.

Producers brought out "The New Family Feud," starring comedian Ray
Combs, in 1988. Six years later, Dawson replaced Combs at the helm,
but that lasted only one season.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Dawson was born Colin Lionel
Emm in 1932 in Gosport, England. His first wife was actress Diana
Dors, the blond bombshell who was Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe.

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