OLD-TIME TELEVISION

Speaking of getting up early, I used to love to stay up late. No more. I might not sleep, but I shut down about 9:30 and move off to bed. In my growing up years, though, I thought that staying up late was the best treat in the world.

When I was about 12 (in the 1960 timeframe, let’s say), my mother began to let me stay up to watch the Saturday “late late show” on television, especially in the summer. Imagine if you will -- We could actually watch a full-length movie out of old Hollywood on our t.v. sets, and this was the stuff of dreams. Mother said she and Fairly used to talk about how one day they would be able to watch a movie in their own living room. And that day had arrived.

I think the movie began at 11:00 – maybe 11:30 after the news -- and was over about 1:00, give or take. Of course, there were commercial interruptions, most of them amateurish – because the movie was a presentation through the local station (Spokane) and not the network. All three of our network stations came through Spokane, and that’s all there were. Yes – just three channels for most of us.

It was such fun just getting to stay up and see an old movie. Today I might not even consider watching that same movie. Some of them weren’t so good, others were oldies but goodies. I remember seeing Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice – still two of my all-time favorites – for the first time on the late late show, and I was thrilled because I had read the books.

And what happened when the movie was over? Well, obviously we went to bed, but I mean, What happened with television? The television station went “off air.” No, I’m not kidding you. They played the national anthem and the announcer intoned, “This is KHQ-TV, Spokane, signing off. Join us again at 6:00 a.m for the ‘grain report.’” If you checked the other two stations, you would likely find that they were already off-air. Your screen went blank. Then you had “snow.” And you would say, “There’s nothing on,” because there was nothing on – literally.

When my kids were still at home – in the ‘90s -- they would surf through 30 channels and say, “There’s nothing on,” meaning there was nothing on that they wanted to watch. When I was growing up, I don’t believe I thought in those terms. We checked TV Guide and turned t.v. on to watch something we wanted to see.

I suppose we look back now and think of that old-time programming as simplistic and valueless. I probably wouldn’t watch it now if I had the chance, but I still think of those early years of television fondly. And television went on that way for a long time – mostly series (sitcoms, variety shows, westerns, detective shows). We’ve watched “Pioneers of Television” on PBS in recent years, and to me they just don’t capture the essence of those first 25 or 30 years when television was truly in infancy. I have to stretch to think of programming out of the ‘70s and ‘80s as pioneering, but maybe it’s all in the way one thinks of it. KW