Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot Airs on American TV (1961): Starring Burgess Meredith & Zero Mostel — openculture.com

1961 saw the television debuts of The Bob Newhart Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Yogi Bear, and …um, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, famously described by theater critic Vivian Mercier as “a play in which nothing happens, twice.” Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel, both trying to salvage careers after being blacklisted in the McCarthy period, starred as Vladimir and Estragon, in WNTA-TV’s Play of the Week series’ no-frills production. In contrast to the recent Broadway revival starring grizzled,  grubby  knights of the realm, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, Meredith and Mostel make a pretty harmless—and apparently unharmed—team. Vladimir’s prostate trouble was scrubbed from the shooting script, along with some 40 minutes of the stage version, five years after its disastrous American premiere. 

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