I was watching the Collector’s Edition of “A Hard Day’s Night”, and in the director’s commentary, Richard Lester had a great line…Upon being told that he was considered the Father of MTV, He immediately asked for a blood test!
Maybe it’s true… in the sense that “Hard Day’s Night” inspired the Monkees, and Mike Nesmith later created MTV.
Yeah, I’d always heard (well, upon watching the pop up video version of “Daydream Believers: The Monkees’ Story”) that it was Mike Nesmith who was responsible for MTV.
Basically:
In 1979, John Lack, a young exec at WASEC (Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, a joint venture of Warner Communications and American Express), and Mike Nesmith pitched “popclips” (which were big in Europe) to Lack’s boss, Jack Schneider.
Schneider didn’t quite get the notion of “watching music”, Nesmith didn’t quite like the commercial and repetitive “radio playlist” quality of a popclips channel…
Although Nesmith left the project, Lack eventually won Schneider over and recruited wunderkind NYC radio director Bob Pittman…the rest became a story unto itself.
Tom McGrath’s book is a good, entertaining source on the subject.
and Mike Nesmith’s mother invented Liquid Paper and she left him 40 million when she died.
Isn’t it interesting that so few truly orignial ideas have come up in that meduim since those days of Monkee- and Beatlemania?