CLASSIC CLIP: Doug Marland's Daytime Emmys Acceptance Speech 1981 - ATWT, GH, OLTL, AMC Clips

When GUIDING LIGHT won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series at the 1981 Emmys, head writer Douglas Marland accepted the award on behalf of the team. It is interesting to note that he thanks Brian Frons, who was a young, hotshot exec at CBS at the time. Deidre Hall and the late Christopher Bernau presented the award.

Here is Marland's acceptance speech:

Thank you. Thank you very much. I accept this award on behalf of this writing team - Nancy (Franklin), Pete (Harding Lemay), Bob (Robert Dwyer) and myself. And I want to say being nominated by your peers, and finding yourself nominated in the same company with an Agnes Nixon and the other nominees here today is really honor enough. But we thank you.

There are some other people we would like to thank - Allen Potter, our executive producer, his wonderful staff of hard working and talented people that manage to get one one hour of good drama a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year. And do it with love, care and deep respect for the material.

We'd like to thank Bob Short and Ed Trach from Procter & Gamble Productions for their unending support and enthusiasm. And Mike Ogiens and Brian Frons of the CBS programming department who always let us know they are always behind us and were always there to encourage us when we need it.

And last, but not least, we would like to take this opportunity to thank every actor that we have ever written for and worked with in daytime television. Because we feel that the actors in daytime television are probably the most dedicated professional artists anywhere in this entertainment business. So to the actors from ANOTHER WORLD, THE DOCTORS, GENERAL HOSPITAL, AS THE WORLD TURNS and now, of course, our actors on the GUIDING LIGHT, we not only thank you, but we share this award with each and every one of you.

Marland died in 1993 while serving as head writer for AS THE WORLD TURNS. Surprisingly he never won an Emmy award for his work on ATWT. Harding Lemay, best know for his brilliant years as head writer of ANOTHER WORLD, briefly returned to AW in 1988 but the writer's strike seemed to ruin that homecoming. Nancy Franklin went on to write for CAPITOL and appeared as an actress (how she started her career) in an episode of LIFE ON MARS in November 2008.

Watch a video of the Outstanding Writing category from the 1981 Daytime Emmys below. Compared to the Daytime Emmys of recent years, it's hard to imagine taking this much time to show clips of the writers work. The writers' work shown was magnificent, as well as some of the performances.