TV

When we were growing up, my parents only allowed us one hour of TV a day. They felt, as many people did then, that though TV could be a good thing it should be something experienced in moderation, especially for kids.

We were never exactly happy about this arrangement of course but like any other rule we grumbled then went on with our lives. Besides, we were often able to get away with up to two hours with various techniques.

We could usually get away with watching a little PBS after school (“Zoom!” “The Electric Company”) without it adding to our TV hour. We might have been able to pull off some more free TV time by watching PBS during prime time but who wanted to? Nature shows, politics, science... -meh

Did you ever notice that as a kid, you would turn off a documentary on PBS faster than you could say “sugar high” but if the same material—or more likely of much lower quality—was in the film projector was set up when you came back to your six grade class from lunch you were psyched and relished every frame?

For instance, my brother might want to watch one show at one time and I would choose a show at a later time. The end result was often that both of us would watch the other's show. Since our house had a large L-shaped living area that incorporated essentially everything but the bedrooms, it was difficult to ban one kid from the glowing TV without restricting them to their own room. We sometimes picked different shows at different times just for this reason. This also worked for the before-bedtime shows my parents wanted to watch. Even if we didn't like it, it was still TV.

As a result of my parents' favorites I saw some pretty good shows in the end: “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Rhoda,” “M*A*S*H”, “The Bob New Hartshow, and later on it's apparent dream-quel “Newhart.”

Sometimes our parents called us on our little 'tricks', sometimes not.

We played the odds.

One did what one could to score as much as possible of the all-important childhood opiate. I think if Fagan, from Dicken's “Oliver Twist”, had TV to dangle over the heads of his parent-less rabble, those pick pockets could have evolved into the most notorious and successful crime syndicate in England.

There was a quasi truce on Saturday mornings. Since my parents couldn't varify when we started watching (what, we were gunna tell 'em?) We could often get from Bugs Bunny all the way to Fat Albert without being banished from the house sentenced to play outside in an idyllic country neighborhood in perfect weather. When Soul Train came on around noon we would shut the thing off ourselves rather than watch strangely-dressed adults dance. The animated train in the opening credits fooled me into thinking another cartoon was coming on, on a surprising number of occasions though.

Call it wishful thinking.

The entire priority of TV was played-down in other ways besides the restriction. Till I was in my teens we had one TV in the whole house: A thirteen inch black-and-white Panasonic with a propensity to loose horizontal sync.

Cable TV? Don't make me laugh. Even if it had been available nine miles outside of town as we were we would have known enough not to even ask for it.

We didn't mind about those things though. We didn't know any different...

UNTIL...

We began staying over at a certain friend's house who:

A. Had a color TV

B. And cable, enhanced cable with the good channels.

C. That they could watch as much as they damn pleased -and not get in trouble for saying “damned” by-the-way.

D. ALL IN THE PRIVACY OF THEIR OWN DAMN ROOM!!!!!

It was like being locked in a candy story. When it was time to go home there was at least that sad and wonderful self pity, believing that starving kids in India must have a better TV-watching childhood than poor, poor us.

There was one occasion, once a year, that we got to watch TV in our bedrooms. My parents would often have friends over for New Year's Eve. It wasn't hard to bribe us out of sight and mind with a bowl of chips, some, otherwise, banned soft drinks and best of all, the TV placed, like a fatted calf, for one night, in one of our rooms!

Every year, the same movie played and every year we loved watching it. When else but everyone-is-staying-up-late New Year's Eve can you get away with running the three hour long “It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? The commercials were the perfect time to run out and raid the party food out on the table.

It wasn't until the '90s when I purchased my own VHS copy of the classic movie that I realized it was shot actually in color.

Another great tradition was on Sunday nights when, not only was the one hour limit loosely interpreted, but another ban was temporarily lifted: eating dinner in front of the TV.

My parent's (thank God) were also sticklers about eating a proper meal at the dinner table with everyone present. However, on Sunday evenings we would get out our folding TV trays, set them up in a semi-circle around the glowing box and turn on Mutual of Omaha's “Wild Kingdom”. It wasn't our favorite show but it filled the time climatically to what was coming while my Dad cooked one of the following Sunday dinners: Pancakes, French Toast, Waffles, or Corn Fritters.

Mutual of Omaha's Marlin Perkins and... that sedated monkey he always had.

Backwards suppers: Every so often, maybe a couple times a year we would wear our clothes backwards, sit backwards in our chairs at the table and eat dessert first, then the main course. Without fail, my Dad would announce during desert with the most serious face he could muster (not very): “Alright kids, if you don't finish your ice cream, you can't have any broccoli. I swore that I was going to test him on that and leave some ice cream in my bowl, but every time, before I knew it, I would look down and it had somehow been completely finished.

About the time the pancakes hit the plates it was time for 'Waltz Dizzy' (“Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom). One of us had mispronounced it as a toddler and as we all continue to say it that way to this day.

If I posted a Disney pic the 'rat' would have it lawyered out in an hour.

While gobbling up pancakes the on my fork, we watched Disney cartoons and specials though those weren't my favorite. I loved the live action movies like: “Old Yeller,” “Tom Sawyer,” “Mary Poppins,” and “Uncle Remus Stories”. There was nothing better, however, than those hormone-stirring Haley Mills movies like “Pollyanna”, “The Parent Trap” and my favorite “That Darned Cat.”

Oh Haley, all you had to do was say something like: 

“Oh reaaaally...” or “that's just terrrible,” 

and wrinkle your nose, and I was yours!

…

…

…

Um, what were talking about?

Oh right, Sunday night TV.

As I got to stay up later and my hormones outgrew Haley a little, Sunday night TV seemed to respond on the next level and offered “James Bond” movies at nine O'clock on one of the other channels. but that's another story. Let me tell you, some intense negotiations occurred when the clock chimed ten and I was asked to turn off James Bond midway through; and just when the bikini-wearing Bond girl was...

See what I mean?

A few of our classic must-sees during the week were: “The Brady Bunch,” “The Partridge Family,” “Emergency” “The Waltons.”

By-and-large TV during week the was usually kept to an hour and for the most part we were fine with that. I felt it was some sort of badge of courage and would brag about it at school.

Much the way I'm doing right here.

There was a price to pay. There are so many shows I never saw; shows that when I hear people talk TV I often can only say, “Um, actually, I've never seen a single episode of 'Starsky and Hutch',” and wait for their jaw to drop.

In college there was this crazy kid who would jump off our deck and land on his butt on the the roof of his car, the reference was completely lost on me.

Could my parents' strategy backfire? What if they had created such hunger and lust for the TV drug that I would go out and OD on HBO my first opportunity.

I did.

During my high school years I was asked to house sit by a friend's parents. They had HBO so I turned it on and settled in to drink up all that I had been missing. Even though the violence I was witnessing in those late night movies they ran in the eighties made me ill, I couldn't seem to look away, turn the thing off or sleep no matter how tired I got.

I emerged from that weekend a freaked-out twitching sleep-deprived zombie. I might have been better off if I had simply raided the liqueur cabinet and passed out early on, but my thirst for HBO and cable TV at least had been cured.

When I left home to be an alleged adult, I suppose it was just poverty that kept me from owning a TV. But when I still hadn't purchased one four years later perhaps it was also in some part because of my parents' policy.

Yet in recent years when work was slow and I was home for weeks at a time, I found myself watch quite a lot of television. Remember, we don't have cable, so if we weren't in the mood for soaps, day-time talk shows or “I Love Lucy” we were left with those low-budget independent stations that ran either run old reruns, truly horrible movies or chat-line infomercials.

We loved the reruns. For a while it became tradition that my wife and I would watch “Hawaii Five-O and “Magnum PI” back-to-back. Sometimes “Quincy” before, sometimes “Hogan's Heros” afterwords.

The price paid for this otherwise dandy, if campy, entertainment was the quality of the commercials.

There was a surprisingly small variety of intelligence insulting schemes.

There were the: Hoverround-you-cannot-be-refused-life-insurance-denture-prepaid-cellural senior commercials, the paycheck-loan-we-buy-gold-bailbonds-lottery-lump-sum poverty commercials, and of course the get-a-goverment-loan-and-learn-medical-billing-and-construction-managment-even-thoug-there-are-no-jobs-or-think-your-learning-to-be-a-cop-when-you're-really-just-going-to-end-up-as-a-prison-guard-not-really-college college commercials.

As a result we referred to our daily viewing time as “Loservision”.

By the way, if you happen to go to any sort of trade or online college, I don't mean to knock it. You're doing something positive and proactive, and that is to be commended.

Eventually, I got steady work but even when I had had a weekday off and we attempted to renew our tradition those commercials, made it all feel kinda dirty, and not in the good way.

During good times and bad in the evenings we're more likely to be watching a movie from our modest library, a Netflix DVD or streaming. We have followed some of the better cable shows on DVD as well. I don't know much about what is currently on TV but MST3K will always rock.

If you need me to explain MST3K, you need to look it up.

We'll let everyone else sort out the crap for us and we'll rent/stream it later.

Not having kids and it being, as they say, a different time (should it be that different?) I am not sure what my TV/Internet/video game policy would be exactly.

Backwards suppers however, would be a common occurrence.