Hey there to all my USM friends and also to the 435 of you here that
pooled your funds and took out a contract on me!
It has been a slow weekend and the TV has been blaring away in a couple
of the other rooms while I try to quietly do my crossword puzzles.
I'm listening to the shows and I'm really feeling some deep remorse for the television industry.
My TV viewing days span over fifty years and I've seen some great stuff come and go but lately,
all that I see is junk and a small smattering of well conceived documentaries and sitcoms.
I don't really care much about the exploits of swamp exterminators nor does watching
a financial guru save some overspending princess from her own fiscal clumsiness get my viewing juices flowing.
So, while I was just sitting here in my own little world, thinking back through the years, I got inspired.
Not heavily inspired mind you because that would take some effort.
I made a few little things to help convey my thoughts.
Different eras, different technologies, different values.
2000 to date
Yep, there are concubines, hog chasers, ill-mannered celebrity chefs and thrift store owners to name
but a few of the exciting topics available for you to watch while the kids build a bomb in the other room.
You spend a truckload of cash on the highest tech and go for the biggest screen and here's what you get:
Too many commercials, politics have become travelling circuses and what is out there makes you want to jump off a high building.
Still, you have five billion channels to choose from so there must be SOMETHING worth watching.
Was it really that much better in the past? Let's take a look.
1980's and 1990's
Televisions started getting fancy in these years. Electronic bells and whistles to entice even the most reluctant buyer.
You could now watch two shows at a time and the set would wake you up in the morning if you fell asleep
watching the complete run of video masterpieces such as Bowling for Dollars or The Newlywed Game.
WOW!
Still, there were quite a lot of good shows to be found and sensationalism hadn't yet hogged the airwaves.
In the next examples I show, some of you may argue that some of the fare I depict are not reality shows.
I defend my choices in that there is more reality in these shows than what you get these days.
Unfortunately, with all those features and lowered quality controls, your picture tube usually went south after
a couple of years and you ended up watching something like what is shown above.
Let's travel a little further back in time.
1960's and 1970's
If you're old enough, you'll remember sitting around the set on a Sunday night with the whole family watching Walt Disney.
In our home, it was a ritual not to be missed.
These were the days when television as a medium matured and started testing how far it could go.
There was some weird stuff out there during this period and some really high quality shows too.
Alas, I rarely got to watch what I wanted because Batman and Star Trek
came on just about the same time as my Dad's Jeopardy.
In retrospect, I believe that I may have gotten more out of Jeopardy.
Televisions got pretentious. They wanted to be fine furniture.
Hop in the time machine...we'll go back to the time of my youth.
Here is where I begin to date myself.
We had this thing called a BLACK AND WHITE TV.
There was no colour. Colour was what you got if someone punched you in the eye.
Everybody on TV smoked in those years and the cigarettes back then must have been truly wonderful because
the stars on all the shows hawked them during the commercials.
That Winston or Marlboro was close to making them explode with ecstasy.
The big drawback in these days was that cable TV service hadn't even become a dream in anyone's mind.
Reception was generally poor, your antenna being a wire coat hanger attached to the VHF screws on the back of the set.
If you came from a well-to-do family, you had a set of rabbit ears.
Only the rich people had roof-mounted antennae or towers.
This was the Golden Age of Television
I guess it was called that because there were actually televisions.
Prior to televisions being available for home use, reality shows looked like this:
You looked out the window to see what was going on.
Some of you younger people are probably wondering how the human race survived.
It gets worse!
I've heard tell that a long time ago, believe it or not,
there were these things made from paper and they called them BOOKS.
The had type on PAGES and you had to flip the pages as you made your way through the story.
This is what a book may have looked like:
THANK GOD FOR TELEVISION !
