Today is...Alan Alda's Birthday

To anyone over 40, M*A*S*H* was one of the most loved television series and almost always makes an appearance in the list of TV critics best ever shows.
The show may be over 40 years old but it still appears regularly on TV stations still today which is testament to the amazing writing and strength of the characters in the series.
My favourite was always Hawkeye Pierce played by the very underrated Alan Alda and Harry Morgans character Colonel Sherman Potter but all the characters, even the minor ones, were great to watch and it always amused me to see some actors cutting their acting teeth in the show who would become big names such as Patrick Swayze, Ron Howard, Leslie Nielsen and Shelley Long.
As the show was around from 1972, most of the shows actors are now sadly no longer with us but Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Loretta Swit) is still alive and kicking as is  Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), Radar (Gary Burghoff), BJ Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell) and and Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) who willbe blowing out 88 candles on his Birthday cake today.
He was always one of those  actors that I thought deserved to go on and do more things but sadly faded out of my sight after the end credits of the last show of the DVD box set although his Wikipedia page does show an impressive amount of further TV and movie work although most seems to have bypassed me.
At Christmas the long running television shows usually do a Christmas special or an episode that includes Christmas but there is one that i first saw when i was a child that has always stuck with me, the MASH 'Death Takes A Holiday' episode.
It's Christmas, and there's a truce on and everyone in the camp is preparing for the Christmas party for the orphanage but despite the truce a wounded solider is brought in and Hawkeye, BJ, and Margaret decide to take the case, and keep it secret from everyone else so the Christmas party is not ruined.
The young soldier is mortally wounded and his life rapidly away but the doctors see a picture of the young mans family in his wallet and decides to continue working on him, determined to keep the man alive long enough so that he doesn't die on Christmas Day and his kids 'won't have to remember Christmas as the day their Daddy died'.
BJ keeps the mans alive for a few hours by pumping oxygen into him by hand but he is fighting a losing battle and he finally dies at 11.25pm Christmas Day.
Hawkeye then walks to the clock on the wall, and moves the hands to past midnight, declaring 'Look, he made it. Time of death 12.05 December 26th' and in the silence that follows, Hawkeye opens the door and the the sound of the orphans singing Silent Night in the tent next door enters the room.
Beautiful, emotional and poignant and i watch it every year and every year i end up swallowing a lump in my throat.