“We ran six years,” Dawson once quipped, “a year longer than Hitler.” 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. Despite its unlikely premise, the show made the ratings top 10 in its first season, 1965-66, and ran until 1971. The British-born actor already had gained fame as the fast-talking Newkirk in “Hogan’s Heroes,” the CBS comedy that starred Bob Crane and mined laughs from a Nazi POW camp whose prisoners hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves. “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.
FAMILY FEUD HOSTS TV
Dawson 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. After dating for a decade, she and Dawson wed in 1991. It was on “Feud” that Dawson met contestant Gretchen Johnson, who appeared on the show teamed with members of her family. 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. 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.
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. Peter Newkirk on “Hogan’s Heroes,” died Saturday night from complications related to esophageal cancer at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, his son Gary said. Dawson, also known to TV fans as the Cockney POW Cpl. A day later, staff discovered Combs in his room, having taken his own life at the young age of 40.Associated Press NEW YORK (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 admitted to Glendale Adventist Medical Center on a 72-hour mental evaluation hold. The friend called police, who found Combs at his ransacked home, bleeding profusely from his head, which he'd been repeatedly banging against the wall. In June 1996, he reportedly told a friend he was so mad at his wife that he was going to "hurt her and destroy" their house. He closed two Cincinnati comedy clubs he owned due to financial problems, and he and his wife filed for divorce. He tried to host a new game show called The Love Psychic, but it flopped. Thought I was a loser until you walked up here, and you made me feel like a man." Combs waved goodbye to viewers and instead of hanging around chatting with players as the credits rolled, walked right off the set and out of the studio.Ĭombs' termination set off a two-year downward spiral. After a contestant in the final round got straight zeroes with his lackluster responses, Combs darkly quipped, "You know, I've done this show for six years and this could be the first time that I ever had a person who actually got no points, and I think it's a damn fine way to go out.