■ The Pop Edition
October 5: Training Day Turns 25, Python Bows
Born On This Day
Kate Winslet
BORN 1975 · TURNS 51
She was an Oscar nominee before she was 20, thanks to Sense and Sensibility, but Titanic made her a fixture of the culture rather than just the industry. She's kept working steadily across prestige TV and film ever since, from Mildred Pierce to Mare of Easttown.
Guy Pearce
BORN 1967 · TURNS 59
A Neighbours graduate who reinvented himself as one of the more precise character actors of his generation, first with Memento's backward-running amnesiac and then with L.A. Confidential's ambitious cop. He's spent the decades since favoring craft over stardom.
Bob Geldof
BORN 1951 · TURNS 75
The Boomtown Rats frontman became a household name twice over — first with 'I Don't Like Mondays,' then as the organizer behind Band Aid and Live Aid, turning rock stardom into a template for celebrity activism that's still being copied.
Steve Miller
BORN 1943 · TURNS 83
The Steve Miller Band leader spent the '70s stacking classic-rock radio staples — 'The Joker,' 'Fly Like an Eagle,' 'Jet Airliner' — into a catalog that still gets more airplay than most active artists.
Karen Allen
BORN 1951 · TURNS 75
As Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark, she gave Indiana Jones a match instead of a damsel, drinking men under the table before the opening credits even finished. It's the rare action-movie love interest that's aged better than the era around it.
OPENING WEEKEND
Training Day opened in US theaters on October 5, 2001, and the reason it landed so hard had less to do with the crime-thriller plot than with the casting. Denzel Washington had spent a decade playing men of principle — soldiers, coaches, wrongly accused defendants. As Alonzo Harris, a narcotics detective who's rotted from the inside, he flipped that entirely, and audiences weren't ready for how good he'd be at it.
The film paired him with Ethan Hawke as the rookie partner along for one very bad day, and critics at the time praised Washington's performance while treating the movie itself as a solid, unremarkable cop thriller. That read didn't survive the following March, when Washington won the Best Actor Oscar — only the second Black man to win the category, after Sidney Poitier decades earlier.
Twenty-five years on, the film's reputation has only grown. Alonzo's lines have become shorthand ('King Kong ain't got nothin' on me'), and the movie is regularly cited as the moment Washington proved he could carry menace as convincingly as he'd always carried dignity.
PRIME TIME
Monty Python's Flying Circus premiered on BBC1 on the night of October 5, 1969, and almost nobody watching that first episode had any idea what they'd just seen. There was no laugh track, no consistent characters, and sketches that ended not with punchlines but with a giant animated foot crushing the scene — the show simply refused to behave like television was supposed to behave.
The BBC scheduled it late and inconsistently, sometimes bumping it for sports coverage, and early ratings were modest. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin were, by most accounts, making a show for themselves and hoping enough people would come along.
“And now for something completely different.”
— Monty Python's Flying Circus
Fifty-seven years later, that phrase and the show's dead parrot, spam-shouting waitress, and silly walks have outlived the original 45 episodes many times over, seeding a strain of surreal, self-aware comedy that runs straight through to modern sketch television.
Meanwhile…
1962The Beatles release their debut single, 'Love Me Do,' in the UK — a modest chart entry at first that nobody yet called the start of anything.
1975Elton John releases the album Rock of the Westies, his seventh in four years, a pace that now looks unthinkable.
2001Life as a House, starring Kevin Kline, opens in theaters the same weekend as Training Day — the two couldn't be a starker contrast in tone or box office fate.
2011Steve Jobs dies at 56, one day after Apple unveils the iPhone 4S, closing out an era of consumer tech he'd almost single-handedly reshaped.