TV TIME

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Television watching today can be quite a technical affair. What with digital this and hi-def that, VCRs, DVDs, surround sound systems, satellite receivers and video games; coffee tables around the country are collapsing under the weight of all the remote controls needed to assist us in our daily viewing. There was a time when an evening of television watching required a set of skills quite different from knowing which button to push on which remote.
I can (just barely) remember a time when there were no TVs at all on the Islands. I’m not sure who had the first set on Brier Island, but I can recall the excitement caused by the fact that someone actually had one of these amazing gizmos that we had up to now only read about in Life Magazine or The Star Weekly.
The first people to get TV sets suddenly found themselves at the centre of the Island’s social scene. Neighbours would drop by after supper and spend the rest of the evening staring at the snowy images on the small black and white screen. Not that there was a whole lot to look at in the beginning. Programming didn’t start until four o’clock in the afternoon, up until then, all there was to look at was the “test pattern” which, for some reason, was the profile of an Indian Chief centred in a bulls-eye. Some people would sit and stare at the test pattern, thrilled to see any image at all. At midnight the National Anthem would play and your programming day would be concluded.
At first, channel selection was limited to just one station; CHSJ from Saint John, N.B. A couple of years later a second channel could be picked up from the Yarmouth area. To receive these channels, you needed an antenna. These antennas were usually placed on the end of a wooden pole or metal pipe, the higher the better, then it was rotated until an image materialized through the snow on the TV screen. This feat was accomplished with much yelling back and forth between the antenna adjuster on the roof and someone watching the TV, “OK, Ok you’ve got it, oh, you went too far, go back, OK, right there, that’s good”. Once maximum picture quality was attained, the antenna was locked in place. When the Yarmouth station was added, you either had to go out and rotate the antenna every time you wanted to change channels or install a second antenna and a switch so you could flip from one antenna to the other as you changed channels.
Of course every time we got a big wind storm, all the antennas on the Island would have to be adjusted again. Our antenna was on a long steel pipe located right by the living room window, all you had to do was go outside with a pipe wrench, look in the window at the TV and crank the pipe around until you had a good picture. Some people tried to avoid weather problems by putting their antennas in the attic, but usually the signal wasn’t as strong as having it outside. Occasionally, the weather would be the TV watcher’s friend. If a hurricane was due, the unusual weather conditions would make it possible to pick up some of the Maine Coast stations. Although very exciting, this would usually last only a few hours, and was then followed by the storm, which would of course knock your antenna out of kilter so you’d have no TV at all!
Within a few years almost everyone had a TV in their living room, bringing in black and white images from around the world. Then came the next big advance, colour! The first colour TVs were expensive, and of course everyone already had a perfectly good black and white set, so it was hard to justify buying a new one. But there was a way to supposedly get around this expense. My father came home one day with a sheet of plastic that you could stick to the screen and it would magically transform your dreary old black and white TV into a modern colour set. The sheet was made up of tiny prisms and if you looked at it from different angles you could see red, blue and green, but it didn’t conform to the picture behind it. You did have colour, but it was just randomly spread across the screen. There was another “instant colour” system that was also a plastic sheet that was put in front of the TV, the bottom section was tinted green, sort of amber in the middle, and blue on the top. If you were looking at scenery it gave the impression of green grass and blue sky, but it didn’t really work for anything else; people always looked like they were wearing green shirts and had blue hair!
The first colour sets were extremely temperamental. After your new TV was set up in the corner of the living room, you would have to call Edgar McDormand to come and tune it in. He would spend half the day hunched down behind the TV, adjusting and fine-tuning until the colour was acceptable. If you decided to move the set to a different corner, everything would be thrown out of whack and he would have to come back again and re-tune it. Edgar was also called whenever your TV broke down. If the picture wouldn’t stop rolling or people’s faces were a kind of sickly purple-green or the picture was squeezed down to a two-inch strip in the middle of the screen, he would show up with his suitcase full of glass vacuum tubes and spend the next hour or so switching out various tubes until he found the one that was causing the problem.
Once you got your TV working right, it was time to watch some shows! Of course, Hockey Night In Canada was popular right from the start, but Sunday night became the prime TV watching time. Right after supper there was Walt Disney for the kids, then there was something for everyone on The Ed Sullivan Show, remember Topo Gigio with his “Kees mee Eddieee”; after the kids went to bed it was time to join the Cartwright boys for some Western adventures on Bonanza. One show that was popular in our house, and I’m sure in the whole area, was Time For Juniors. This was a kind of early, low-key, East Coast version of Canadian Idol, it was produced in Saint John and featured local children showing off their talents; or in some cases, lack of talent. The host, Jeanie Wood, was something of a celebrity in the Maritimes. I remember a woman from Westport who made a trip across the Bay to visit relatives in Saint John, upon her return all she could talk about was that she had met Jeanie Wood on The Princess Helene.
The arrival of television changed Island life, some would say for the better, and others would argue that it was for the worse. Today some of the shows and events that we watched unfold on those snowy screens are considered important pieces of our social and cultural history. When I was about nine years old, I myself played a small and generally unknown role in the history of television on Brier Island.
Before we even had a TV at home, my father installed one in the store. TVs were still rare on the Island and I guess the idea was that it would attract customers. It was a big floor model that sat on four skinny legs. To raise it up so that people could see it, Dad put it on top of an iron safe that stood next to, and was about level with, the ice cream freezer. The four legs just fit on the very corners of the safe. One evening a few weeks after it was installed, a crowd of men were watching a hockey game when I dropped by for an ice cream sandwich. The ice cream freezer was the old style with hatches in the top; you folded back the hatch cover and reached down in. On this night, the freezer was nearly empty and I had to really stretch to the bottom for that ice cream, I couldn’t quite reach it and, with my head and one arm in the freezer, groped around with my other arm for something to pull myself up a bit more. My hand found a convenient grip and I used the leverage to heave myself up another couple of inches until I could reach the object of my efforts. Just as my hand closed on the elusive Ice cream sandwich, I heard a collective roar from the assembled crowd, followed immediately by a resounding crash.
I pulled my head out of the freezer to see the TV lying on the floor behind me in a heap of broken wood, shattered glass and sparking innards. My grip had been on the leg of the TV and when I pulled myself up, I pulled the set over the edge of the safe and down it went. My desire for a frozen treat had unwittingly catapulted me into the dubious position of being the first person on Brier Island to totally destroy a television set!