Remember when there were only THREE channels?

Do I ever remember this...When I was told we were getting a Televsion I was more exicited than Christmas morning. While they were installing the antenna we sit in front of it watching what was called snow and the antenna had a motor to turn toward different stations. It had to be one of the most exciting events ever at our home. I always stayed up on Friday and Saturday nights untill the stations signed off. Life was so much simplier then and a lot of water has gone under the bridge of life since the black n white set. I also remember the first time I saw a televison show, it was on Halloween, a the family let us kids come into their house and watch a show and they served us pop corn. I can still visually picture that televison and night in my mind. Wow a good trip down memory lane.......:hug:
 
RadishRose said:
Holy smokes. I remember that theme song with my dad in front of the tv, too! Gillette blue blades, yes.

But wasn't there another one with the same song, when someone announced: "The Wednesday night fights are on the air!" And there was a loud "BONG"!
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I still shave...when I shave... with a gillette, now they are triple edge and cost 20 times more. lol
 

The Hoffman

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Mid ‘50s

We may have been the first to have a TV in the old country neighborhood

Bobby Clem’s dad would stop by on the way home to pick up Bobby

He hated TV. Thought it was of the devil.
But stayed fixated to it while Bobby got his things together
My folks would talk to him, but he’d be in some sorta UHF trance

Whatever night the fights were on, my dad was there

Gillette blue blades and Pabst Blue Ribbon
Gene Fullmer vs Spider Web or Carmen Basilio
Madison Square Garden, or The Cow Palace
Always wondered why they called it that

Here’s me and Dad
He groomed me for my boxing career early on

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Anyway, on Saturday night, we watched the dynamic duo of Have gun will travel, and Gunsmoke, and kept watching everything until the white dot disappeared
Those were the days…the nights
The TV repairman ranked above the doctor
Right up there, next to God
What a satchel of tools
We’d watch his face glow while he did his magic all crouched down behind the Hoffman with the back panel off


The biggest frustration

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Amazing how long we would stare at it….waiting

Standing, sitting by
 
I remember The Edge of Night as well. At first it was 15 minutes long and the rest of the half hour was The Secret Storm. Then the Edge of Night went to the full half hour. At one point the main character, Sara died. You would have thought a family member had passed away the way my Mom and I carried on. Dad thought we were crazy.
Seeker said:
I remember our first TV..

Black and white.

One of my very first memories was me sittin' under the ironing table.

While my moma ironed, watching "The Edge of Night"

After that I remember Red Skelton.
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We had a tiny little black-and-white that sat on a metal TV tray. My mom was always afraid one of us would turn it over on us, so we weren't allowed to change the channels or get too near to it.

My grandparents had a huge upright cabinet that had a tiny little oval screen in it. I've never found out what brand of TV that was, but it broke shortly after they got it, but for some reason, it sat in the living room for years afterward. When they got a larger black and white TV, grandma put a contraption that looked something like one of those metal Christmas tree color wheels pointed toward the set. It was supposed to make the black and white set look like a color set. It didn't.

I didn't have a color set until 1980 or 1981 when I bought one from a hotel that was selling their old sets. $50 and it weighed at least a ton. We were delighted! Unfortunately, I knocked over a large glass of iced tea that was sitting on top of the set and it all poured down into the innards. When it dried out a few days later, we had a black and white set, no color. I was heart-broken. However, gradually over the next couple of weeks, the color came back and we used that set for many more years.
 
Seeker said:
I remember our first TV..

Black and white.

One of my very first memories was me sittin' under the ironing table.

While my moma ironed, watching "The Edge of Night"

After that I remember Red Skelton.
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My mother always watched The Edge of Night too. It was her "program," and if you interrupted her watching it it better be because the house was on fire or you were bleeding profusely.
 
Furryanimal said:
yeah-and in some places you needed two aerials to get both BBC and ITV.
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So true....

This is similar to the first TV I remember having, I think I was about 5 years old...
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My granny had one like this... which I think she got in the early 50's... and she kept it right into about the 70's I think...

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..and it used to sit on top of a chest of drawers...


All Black & White of course ..and we ( my parents) got our first colour tv in the early 70's.. which looked like this..., by then we had 3 channels...


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Now we have over 500 channels... and barely anything better to watch than when we just had 3 channels... but it's costing us a whole lot more to not watch them...
 
I remember well.........Remember when cable TV was commercial free?.......Now we pay through the nose for it, AND we get commercials about 25% of the show..........which isn't worth watching in the first damn place.
 
chic said:
And tv was FREE. :love_heart:
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Unfortunately TV has never been free to watch in the UK , we pay an annual TV licence to watch TV, and risk imprisonment if we don't have a licence. This is a very real threat, people do go to prison for it.. It's disgraceful, and appalling , but it's the law of the land!!

So..now we pay a TV licence still, but on top of that we have to pay to receive satellite channels as well... so we get hit twice now...

However, we at least have 3 Channels ( BBC).. which are commercial free.. basically that's what the TV Licence is supposed to pay for as well as radio ..not all the commercial TV channels. However even if somehow we could choose not to watch the non commercial channels.. we would still have to pay for a TV licence...
 
I remember only having 1 channel on our first TV - not long before ITV came along. In the early days, at the end of a day's broadcasting, the announcer would say 'Goodnight', pause a few seconds and then say 'Goodnight' again. This allegedly was to allow the viewers to say 'Goodnight' too. Although it's now largely dedicated to TV, the BBC programme listings magazine is still called "Radio Times".

Now, we still only have 1 TV, though on occasions I have watched it on my Laptop. We get about 50? free to view digital channels - mostly rubbish.
 
Capt Lightning said:
I remember only having 1 channel on our first TV - not long before ITV came along. In the early days, at the end of a day's broadcasting, the announcer would say 'Goodnight', pause a few seconds and then say 'Goodnight' again. This allegedly was to allow the viewers to say 'Goodnight' too. Although it's now largely dedicated to TV, the BBC programme listings magazine is still called "Radio Times".

Now, we still only have 1 TV, though on occasions I have watched it on my Laptop. We get about 50? free to view digital channels - mostly rubbish.
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we get over 500 channels (with Sky) but of course we have to pay for those in a bundle with our landline and mobile phones .. the freeview channels are just not worth watching ...
 
I just remembered when I was young and they advertised Bra's on TV. They weren't on a person just a image of a body. Whenever that came on my Dad would get embarrassed and leave the room until the commercial was over. I can't imagine what he would do now with all the sexual commercials on TV today.
 
I remember watching Captain Kangaroo, Superman, Lassie, and The Mickey Mouse Club. The TV repairman was a frequent visitor, and the worst event was when he couldn't repair the set on site but had to remove the guts of it and take it "to the shop." That meant no TV for the better part of a week!
 
TV shows were all live. There was a mystery program on one night when a man was murdered and he lay on a morgue table under a sheet. Just before the program closed for a commercial off came the sheet and the man got up and walked away.
 
I remember when the BBC was the epitome of British correctness. Now it reflects the general decline in standards in all areas of society. ITV was regarded as the poor relation.
 
I was 10 years old and I still screamed when The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan show.
I remember watching Walter Cronkite when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969. I was 15 years old.
I remember watching my favorite TV show The Partridge Family and having a huge crush on David Cassidy when I was around 16-17 years old.
 

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