Television of the past: bad picture, better view

For most of my childhood years growing up, we owned exactly one television.  It was a piece of furniture that must have weighed 100 lbs and sat in the corner of our living room.  It was entirely encased in wood, the bottom half of which was THE speaker and the top half was the picture tube.  It was a black and white set and it had knobs on the front that you actually had to get up and turn: to turn it on, to adjust the volume or to change the channel.  If it malfunctioned for any reason, there was very little recourse, short of hitting the side of it and trying to stabilize the horizontal control.

My father told me that on the wood just below the knobs were indents where the finish had been worn away from my brother and I resting our little kid feet up on the set.  That would have put me at about one foot away from the flickering frames and I’m quite sure that we were forever being told to sit back from the set.  Perhaps the initial source of my failing eyesight after all! 

The channel knob didn’t go very high…probably only numbers one through nine and the picture came in via the antennae that was hoisted high above our house.  Living in the Greater Toronto Region meant that not only could we get Canadian channels, but we were a clear shot to Buffalo which brought all of the American offerings as well.

Not that I was allowed to watch it as it came on past my bedtime, but many a Sunday night at my house was a cat and mouse game of me sneaking out of bed slowly and quietly down the stairs and peeking around the corner unnoticed to watch the Ed Sullivan Show.  Every Sunday I would beg my parents to let me stay up and watch along with everyone else, and every Sunday night between 8-9 p.m. the charade of putting me to bed quickly (so as not to miss any) would ensue and the cat and mouse game began.  IF I was lucky and I heard in the intro that my beloved mouse Topo Gigio would be making an appearance, I could sometimes win my case to stay up.  Needless to say, I’m still enjoying watching reruns of this beloved show that I almost saw the first time.

It was in front of this monolithic television set that I watched the moments that would define my youth: the Vietnam War, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon and the very first Canada vs. Russia hockey series with Paul Henderson scoring the winning goal.  My first brushes with American culture came from here whether it was watching Jackie Gleason or Captain Kangaroo.  I fondly remember being allowed to have breakfast in front of the set watching the Santa Clause Parade or watching the many beauty pageants of yesteryear along with my Mother and all of us picking our favourites.  We rarely missed an episode of “I Love Lucy”.

Today, my television images come through my phone line to my feather light flat screen where I can watch more than 600 channels in high definition colour without ever having to rise from my seat. Television is no longer an event.  In the span on my lifetime it has become a never-ending rerun of flimsy, forgettable content.  No longer a place where families gather, it has instead divided families who all watch different shows in different rooms. Today, if we watch at all, we endure the 24-hour news cycle and “reality” shows that are no more real than the soap operas of the past.

As much as I enjoy watching shows now from around the world, whenever it’s convenient and recording them instantly if I can’t watch them live, I miss the singularity of it from the past.  There is no more “must see” TV.  There’s too much competing for our attention.  The picture has gotten better, but the view has gotten worse.

What’s your favourite television memory?