Telly Savalas took the world by storm as the eponymous hero in one of the most successful cop programmes ever made for television. Bald-headed, hard-talking (but with a soft heart), for 5 years and more school playgrounds were filled with youngsters with lollipops sticking out the side of their mouths and saying:
"Who loves ya, baby"
The series aired between
1973 and
1978 and there were 115 episodes produced by
CBS in that time. Many of today's clichés about TV cop shows come from Kojak: the embittered,
cynical sergeant, constant arguments with the
sympathetic but
overworked police chief, officers who occasionally
bend the law to get results. These may be the stuff of
irony today but when Kojak hit the TV screens it turned around everyone's ideas of what a police show should be like.