Launderess ...
... I'm all about "retro", but I draw the line at less-than perfect and instant TV channels. I just can't go back.
New Yorkers have always been spoiled. For decades, ALL signals came from the Empire State Building ... and later, the World Trade Center. They didn't have to constantly change the position of either their rabbit ears (or for the more fortunate, those of us with rooftop aerials) each time they changed the channel. You see, in most cities, television stations aren't all clustered in the same geographic area. I grew up in the Pittsburgh area, where the network affiliates were scattered all over the place (the ABC affiliate in particular hidden behind a mountain).
Each channel change required the repositioning of the antenna. And as you're finding out, depending on the weather ... atmospheric conditions ... or what your neighbors were cooking for dinner ... for each station, the antenna position was almost never in the same position twice.
This is actually what gave rise to the all-important "network lead-in" for local television news programming. And why as someone who works in network television news today, I'm frustrated with local news directors hiding behind that antiquated excuse for their poor ratings numbers.
This is how it worked: It's Wednesday night in my household in Pittsburgh, 1978. There's no such thing as VCRs (at least for "regular" people like us), and certainly no such thing yet as TiVO or "On Demand". So if you miss your program, you've missed it -- F O R E V E R -- or at least until the "rerun" the following summer.
I want to watch my favorite program, "Charlie's Angels". On the "big" color TV in the living room. It's on ABC, which is carried by the notoriously weak-signalled affiliate station, WTAE. So it takes a lot of trial and error manipulating the electric rotor on top of the TV set to reposition the rooftop aerial (which moved painfully slow and only in one direction, so if you accidentally passed up the "good" position it had to do a complete 360 to get back to it).
The whole process could take upwards of a good 5-7 minutes to "tune in" the channel. You had to do it early, before the show starts, which means if you were watching something else on another channel, you had to either sacrifice the last few minutes of that program, or the first few minutes of "Charlie's Angels" (which, incidentally, was why every show always had a good minute or so of a "theme song" before the actual program started -- and why today's shows have moved away from that, because it's no longer necessary).
But it was AFTER the network programming when things started getting crucial for the local stations. I'm watching ABC on the "color" TV from 10p-11p. My parents were die-hard viewers of the 11p news on ... KDKA ... the CBS affiliate. So this meant one of two things: either I miss the last crucial minutes of my crime drama so KDKA will be tuned in by 11p, or my parents miss the top story on KDKA News while we fiddle with the rotor.
OR ... WTAE News picks up an extra household on Wednesday night, because we've decided to just keep the set tuned to WTAE for ITS 11p news.
THAT is how a strong network lead-in led to more viewers for local news.
Today, however, it's completely meaningless. We change channels instantly and effortlessly. No one "tunes in" the TV and leaves it on that same channel out of convenience anymore. And it's why local news directors can no longer blame their lousy ratings on the network programming that immediately precedes their lame-assed local news broadcasts.
And this concludes this session of Educate Me, Maybe.
