TV and Me: A Secret History of Cable TV

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

In 1973 or so I went back from Cambridge to Greensburg to visit my parents and family.  My old bedroom had been converted to a den a few years before, and the huge console television set there was now on its last legs, with an uncertain purchase on color (the picture tended to be dark pink and white.)  But there was new element to it: it was hooked up to something called cable.

 Cable was so new there that there wasn’t much on—it kept repeating the same movie, Stormy Weather with Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway and an all Black cast, including the fabulous dance team of the Nicholas Brothers. Evidently the cable was being tested with this apparently out-of-copyright film.  Lucky for me--I must have seen parts of it at least six times.

Cable came with a lot of publicity about its potential, but for Greensburg, cable had one major appeal: reception.  Television had always been prey to the vagaries of rooftop antennas and rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil on top of the set, and their interactions with weather, geography, electrical disturbances and interference.  Some distant stations drifted in and out, but for us even the Pittsburgh stations weren’t entirely reliable, especially the educational (or now public) TV station WQED on channel 13.

 But the perils of broadcasting over the air disappeared when the signal reached the TV set directly through wires and cables.  A few additional stations were more of a bonus at that point.

 Later in the 70s, there were more channels on cable, though few of them were actually new.  For the major beneficiary of this technology turned out to be the small UHF stations.  The VHF (Very High Frequency)  signals were stronger.  They occupied the first 13 channel positions, though two adjacent channels were often considered too close to allow stations to broadcast successfully on both.  The rest of the channels (14 to 83) were for UHF (Ultra High Frequency) stations—that signal was innately weaker, so these stations had problems transmitting across the topography of hills and valleys, especially in a place like Pittsburgh that had plenty of both.   Nationally UHF stations struggled to survive.

 But then came cable, which presented the UHF stations with a level playing field—their signal was just as strong as the bigger VHF stations when it went directly through the cable. The UHF stations could now be seen—but could their programs compete?  They didn’t have much money for production, nor were many network affiliates.  What they had however was syndication. 

Usually a station could make money on a syndicated network series if it had at least five years of episodes.  But there was a show just coming onto the syndication market that had only three years of shows before being cancelled by NBC in 1969.  Some UHF channels took a chance on it, perhaps noticing that since 1972 enthusiastic crowds had been showing up for conventions honoring it, even when it was no longer on the air. 

That show of course was Star Trek.  By programming it every day (opposite the six p.m. news was a favorite time) syndication gave viewers an opportunity to immerse in the particular Star Trek universe, and see its characters every day, like friends or family.  It became an immense hit and a national phenomenon, often playing on multiple channels in the bigger cities (including some VHS channels), and definitely competing for audience share.  By 1976, Star Trek was being seen in 148 television markets in the U.S., and on 54 stations in other countries.

 Star Trek became a joyful sensation and an immediate part of the culture.  In 1975 I was the arts section editor of an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C. (and later its editor.)  The staff was mostly young and the office could get chaotic.  I was somehow seen as a voice of reason, and a calm presence—so my office nickname became Spock.  Once when two staff members were arguing heatedly in the center of the room I walked up behind them, applied the Vulcan neck pinch, and they both immediately fell to the ground.  That was the Star Trek effect in the 1970s.

 More than a half century after it first aired, Star Trek has several live action and animated TV series on the Paramount streaming network, several decades after three live action series ran for seven years and another for four years on cable TV in the 80s and 90s. The original Star Trek cast made six feature films beginning in 1979, and other casts have so far made seven more.  Star Trek had the intrinsic qualities that has supported its popularity and longevity, but this ongoing empire really began because of the technical coincidence that the original series went into syndication at pretty much the precise moment that UHF stations got onto cable TV systems. 

Cable’s potential was vast, partly because transmissions through the cable system weren’t restricted to the limited number of channels that could come over the air, using the available frequencies.  Cable could deliver an almost unlimited number of channels, eventually with an additional device that also freed you from being tethered to your set if you wanted to switch: it was called the remote. 

 But even if your main reason for hooking up to cable was to improve your reception, the primary change cable brought about was this: you had to pay to watch television.  Not just to buy the TV set, which until then was all you ever had to pay for to watch TV. (Well, the antenna cost a few bucks.)  But to get the programs, including everything you used to get free, you now had to pay a fee, every month, to the company that hooked you up. And it’s been like that ever since.

 It’s probably long been forgotten that, in addition to the promise of better reception for on-air stations, the argument used to lure users was that cable would provide lots of new channels unique to cable—and since you were paying a monthly free, the programs on those stations would be without commercials.  Advertising was only necessary to pay for programs when they were free.

 Commercials!  This far into this series on early television and this singular phenomenon of the TV commercial is only now appearing.  Yet the commercials are what television viewers are likely to recall (whether they want to or not), even more than the programs. 

 For me, growing up with television meant watching on Howdy Doody the simple drawings of Happy Tooth being threatened by Mr. Tooth Decay, before the application of Colgate Dental Crème (It cleans your breath—what a toothpaste—while it cleans your teeth!) or hearing the Halo jingle (Halo, everybody, halo! Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair) sung in its entirety by Frank Sinatra on the Jimmy Durante Show.

 My contemporaries may not recall Playhouse 90 but start the jingle You’ll wonder where the yellow went, and they’ll finish it: when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.  Even Winky Dink or Soupy Sales may have faded from memory before the quartet in the bathtub singing Ajax, the foaming cleanser (baba baba ba ba bom) floats the dirt right down the drain!  Or Speedy Alka-Seltzer crooning Plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief it is!

 The repetition of commercial phrases burns into the brain (You never outgrow your need for milk, Only you can prevent forest fires, that’s a speesy spicy meatball, where’s the beef?)  We saw live pitches by the stars of the show (Commander Corey of the Space Patrol leaving the Terra V in jeopardy to join Cadet Happy in extolling the merits of Nestles Crunch or cocoa) evolve into shorter special effects fantasies, and then even shorter ones.  There might a cascade of four, five or six frenetic, intense, boldly absurd and insistent messages in a row.  

 So by the 70s there were so many commercials bunched together in the breaks that it was more than possible to lose the thread of the show—or to lose interest in it.  From their 1950s beginnings, when they either presented serious arguments for why this product is better, or appealing little fantasies like Speedy Alka-Seltzer. But all too soon they became boldly false hyperactive scenarios championing the trivial--they set the template of disingenuous television lying that's been followed ever since, by infomercials, certain cable news channels and certain politicians.

The experience of being subjected to commercials became more than distraction—this loud, relentless grinning assault was demoralizing.  (Although there were—and are—aficionados who care more about commercials than what they sponsor.  Witness the immense attention to the TV ads on the Super Bowl, often eclipsing the ink on the game itself.)

Sure enough, once viewers were hooked, commercials began to creep onto cable shows, as indeed they began to appear on public broadcasting.  The template for what happened later on the Internet (with YouTube, for example) and streaming was set: create a market, establish market share with ad-free programs or sites, and quickly buy up the competition. Then when alternatives have faded and the customers are hooked into the habit, start up the ad machines. 

 Another promise of cable was that it could—no, that it would—bring very different kinds of programs into the American home.  There were so many potential cable channels that they didn’t all have to be used for common denominator programs—they could bring true variety and specialized programs that didn’t require a mass audience.  There could be a channel for classical music, and for plays, and for more in-depth documentaries and discussions of public issues than the networks could find time to broadcast.  There could be a channel for every sport, channels for hobbies and games—a chess channel!  A knitting  channel!

 Each new communications medium arrived with the same promise of bringing culture, information and education to the public. That included television itself, and to some extent, the networks tried. NBC had its own orchestra (though a holdover from radio days), and there was more opera, classical music and dance on early TV than there was by the 1970s, especially outside PBS.  Even in the 60s and 70s, talk shows routinely had prominent writers and a few artists and scientists as guests. 

 In the beginning, cable seemed like it might even succeed where network TV had failed.  One of the first production companies for cable, an outfit called Home Box Office, showed at least its New York audience a series of complex lectures on a Jungian approach to myth by Joseph Campbell. Needless to say, HBO moved on from there. (A decade later Bill Moyers would provide better context and production values to his PBS version of The Powers of Myth with Joseph Campbell.)  

 Cable saw innovations that changed culture, such as Ted Turner’s news channels and MTV. But instead of expanding choice to include arts and intelligence, these subjects were blithely labeled as elitist, and television expanded on its previous path.  

An early national cable channel called itself Arts and Entertainment, and for awhile the arts actually were represented.  When A&E faltered, a new channel called Bravo! took up the slack to focus on performances.  The Discovery channel was to focus on science, the History Channel on history, the American Movie Channel showed old movies, and so on.

 By now they have all largely succumbed to the same lowest common denominator competition as the broadcast networks, especially the latest form of crass "reality"shows.  A&E and Bravo became mere corporate names without identity, Discovery began to specialize in sharks and the pseudo-science equivalents of conspiracy theories, and the History Channel became better known as the Hitler Channel.  Eventually most became either amorphous holdings of larger conglomerates, or the sponsoring conglomerate itself.

 Some specialized channels and programs did result, especially in areas of sports and recreation.  The great dream of competitive skydiving and skateboarding on TV was realized.  But even this was mostly more of the same.  Thus the Bruce Springsteen song: 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On.)  (He has since increased the number of channels in performance.) 

Yet another potential of cable hyped at the beginning was the possibility of two-way communication on television through the cable.  In the late 70s, the corporate entity then known as Warner Communications wired the city of Columbus, Ohio with a two-way system they called Qube.   I researched and wrote an article about this experiment, which involved spending a week or so in Columbus observing the system and how it was used.  I also reviewed another two-way system and delved into the history and politics of cable up to that point.

 The Columbus experiment centered on the Qube console, precursor to the remote, though more the size of a Star Trek tricorder.  Its buttons were color-coded: blue for regular broadcast television channels, red for premium channels (concerts, movies and the world’s first but not last 24 hour channel of softcore porn),  and green for so-called Community programming, all produced by Warner just for this experiment.  But the innovative attractions were the five buttons on the far right: the response buttons, used for the green channels.

 When a response is requested by somebody on the screen for a yes/no question or something more like multiple choice, with the magic words “Touch now!”  the viewer makes a selection and within six seconds that response is received, then tabulated with others and the results instantly appeared. 

 The questions could be from town planners asking if there is enough small-unit housing (Strongly agree/ Agree/ Neutral/ Disagree/Strongly disagree) or a publishing survey asking which face you’d like to see on the cover of Us Magazine, with five choices.

 But mostly they were the kind of questions I witnessed during the afternoon teen show, in which five female high school students at a local swimming pool peeled back a bit of their swimsuits, and the host asked viewers at home to vote on who had the best tan line.  As well as what kind of bathing suit female viewers wore (the result: one piece 54%, two piece 46%.)  I also watched the Columbus equivalent of the Gong Show, with viewers at home anonymously—and liberally-- wielding the gong.

 And a talk show with an insurance agent as guest, who viewers could contact through their Qube box.  But unlike guests on normal TV talk shows who were paid a fee or appeared for free, it turned out that unbeknownst to viewers the insurance man was paying to be on the show.  He was his own secret commercial. This stealth precursor to the “infomercial” turned out to be a routine Qube practice. When I mentioned the paying “guest” to a viewing couple they weren’t really surprised.  A lot of products were being named. When I questioned Qube officials about this subterfuge, they were puzzled that anybody might object, but suggested corporate might reconsider the practice.

 Qube did construct an Electronic Town Meeting for one municipality in the Columbus area, but it was more sterile gloss than substance, heavily controlled by the regular evening talk show duo, whose questions to viewers normally were on the level of naming the studio cat.

 Meanwhile, another experiment was ongoing in Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania in a different kind of participatory television, organized by the Alternative Media Center at New York University. It started by linking senior centers and grew to encompass the entire system.  Programs were generated by the users themselves.  I read the NYU report and spoke with Eileen Connell, who worked with participants, training them on how to use the equipment and listening to what they wanted the system to do, which determined how the system was designed.

  It was a long and apparently fascinating process, and eventually yielded surprising results. For example, a  participant in one program mentioned labor troubles in Reading fifty years before, and it struck a chord—seemingly for the first time, many people shared their recollections, and teachers and younger people got in touch, because this was local history that had never been written down.  Contrast this with Qube’s attempt at a pre-fab nostalgia program about Columbus, which became one of its first programs to be cancelled. 

The Qube system demanded what has come to be regarded as professional television, and though it decried the mediocrity of broadcast TV, it replicated it. The Reading system set out to prove that effective use of television—and specifically interactive TV--didn’t have to be all that professional.

 I watched a tape of one such program, a community meeting from Reading: there was sweat, fits of temper, tears, boring monologues, fierce debates, ambushes of humor, and large dollops of something rare on polished TV: sincerity.  The program wasn’t about a process—it was the process.   

 “It’s a very down-home system,” Connell told me. “It’s not snappy but it’s remarkably effective.  It had an extraordinary effect on how people saw themselves.”  The Reading system did silly entertainment programs and programs with a very local character (“Tell It To Eben and Herb”) but their interactive programs were serious, yet no more technically sophisticated than someone asking a question on a split screen with someone answering it: “The noun and the verb of the system,” Connell called it. 

 That was the key, and the major problem with the Qube response system and all subsequent iterations everywhere: “People in the Qube system can answer what’s asked of them, but they aren’t in control of the questions,” Eileen Connell observed. “It’s even more important who asks the questions than who answers.”

  When I visited Qube in Columbus, the executives there expressed the desire for “a bigger universe,” a bigger city or cities in which to demonstrate Qube’s capabilities.  One such city about to make a decision on a cable system was Pittsburgh, and Warner wanted it. 

But Pittsburgh had a number of suitors, and there was a process. This is another feature of cable that has slipped into history: local control.  From the beginning, each municipality had to decide on one cable company to provide service.  There couldn’t be competing cable providers in the same area, the argument went, because having more than one was technically difficult, expensive and confusing, as supposedly discovered in the days of competing telephone systems, each with its own wires. 

 In the early days of cable, I learned in my research, the awarding of cable contracts was sometimes, perhaps often, accomplished by the tried and true system of bribery and graft.  There were so-called “whiskey franchises,” in which officials got a case of Canadian Club in exchange for the sole right to wire their municipality.  Others were reputedly more expensive—like a cool million.  Some local officials went to jail for graft, others learned to have themselves hired as “consultants” for hefty fees.  

 Local professional reporters told me that as far as they could determine, the Pittsburgh process was clean. Pittsburgh had a cable ordinance and a committee to evaluate suitors.  I spoke to the chair of that committee who was suspicious of Qube, its expense and its insistence on control.  “But this is Pittsburgh—our neighborhoods, our hills, our winters,” he said. “We know our city better than any company does.  I think we know what we need.”

 A sticking point was the public access channels.  Cable systems were required to have them, since they were considered “common carriers” under the law, owned by everyone. (That same NYU Alternative Media Center was largely behind the adoption of this practice.)  But Qube didn’t want to cede control of any of its channels.

That negotiation went on past the time I finished my story and I’m not sure how it turned out. But in a way it didn't matter--soon the Supreme Court decided that cable systems weren’t common carriers after all--they were corporate persons who could do what they liked.  Congress hurriedly passed a new telecommunications law which said that municipalities “may” require public access channels, with public control of them.  

 In the years since, increasingly large cable companies have managed to convince some municipalities that pubic access isn’t necessary.  Where they exist, these channels aren’t often lively or creative, and certainly not interactive.  They cablecast city council meetings and other official events open to the public, which public officials tend to like, partly for the same reason that the only truly public television nationally are C-Span channels that mostly give air time to Senators and Representatives: politicians love to be on TV. 

 While there used to be debates in some municipalities before franchises were awarded and even when they were up for renewal in 10 or 12 years (when companies can be held accountable for not living up to their promises), I haven’t noticed any public discussion of renewal requirements for years.   Renewals seem depressingly automatic. 

Though Warner succeeded in wiring larger cities with the Qube promise in subsequent years—including Pittsburgh—Qube itself never quite caught on.  There were privacy concerns (people were quaintly resistant to their two-way responses being stored in the Qubemasters’ computer) and continuing high costs.  Its system of two-way television faded away.

 Meanwhile, the Alternative Media Center’s Reading experiment yielded what is now called Berks Community Television, thriving in the 21^st century.

  Aspects of Qube did influence cable television. It refined how pay-per-view might work, and it developed programs—especially the shows for children-- that later cable channels adapted. It also presaged commerce-driven shopping channels and program-length commercials styled as talk shows.  But in several ways it was more of a dress rehearsal for the Internet. 

For example, shopping from home.  A few years after my visit to Columbus I was in Las Vegas covering an International Council of Shopping Centers convention, where I attended a session on electronic shopping.  Qube was mentioned but the presentation focused on an experimental system in France that used a device hooked up to the telephone system.

 These retailers knew that electronic shopping was coming, they just didn’t know when or how.  A few years later there were home computers, and over the next decade or so the question was answered.  By showing how home shopping might work, Qube was a kind of proof of concept for Internet commerce.

 The public access interactive part of the Reading experiment didn’t influence subsequent cable television much, but it did produce one dry run for Internet systems like Zoom. That Berks experiment modeled the possibility of local, small scale, face-to-face participation, if not participatory democracy, which may have mitigated the vicious incivility that became the norm in anonymous and faceless Facebook and other online venues. 

 In any case, cable television’s potential to be much more than centralized, corporate television has largely failed.  Its fading legacy in this regard seems bequeathed to the corporate giants battling for streaming market share. The small screen (which is not so small anymore) is one big Marvel movie.    

By the 1980s, cable assumed the shape it maintained for decades. The local cable system—more and more part of a conglomerate—offered packages of local broadcast channels (UHF and VHF) and a few from afar, the growing number of cable channels, and the premium channels like HBO that ran recent movies and the occasional big name pop concert.  There might be a public access channel, often with little programming on it.  There were a few cable news channels—mostly just CNN Headline News at first (Lynn Russell was mesmerizing) and a couple of channels that told you what was on the other channels.

   The premium channels became known for softcore porn and for surprising Hollywood by making some of its theatrical rejects into hits. I discovered a few myself (for example, the lovely Jane Seymour/ Christopher Reeve Somewhere In Time, and the paradigm of this category, Eddie and the Cruisers), and was glad for the opportunity.  However, my most enduring cable memory of this early period is falling asleep one night to a movie I’d turned on halfway through, until I was awakened by a familiar voice: it was an old friend and actor from college, Ric Newman. By the time the voice registered, he was gone from the screen.  I had to stay awake for the credits to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating. (I hadn’t.)  

 I had cable when I moved to Pittsburgh, and it enabled me to watch Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls games on a Chicago channel.  I watched C-Span, especially the heroic Brian Lamb and Book TV.  I think it was a public access channel that showed a lengthy and enlightening discussion on adult children of alcoholics by a couple of those adult children.   I didn’t have premium channels but didn’t miss them. 

 In our corner of California, corporate cable became more and more expensive and oppressive, and like many others, I cut the cable.  So I didn’t see the run of “viral” HBO series around 2007, though I wasn’t really interested.  I saw a few episodes of AMC’s Mad Men, and that was enough—I could see it was going to be an endless soap opera.  I even passed on The Sopranos—it seemed an extension of The Godfather, and by then I was angrily tired of seeing Italians portrayed only as Mafia gangsters.  Mostly what I missed were new Doctor Who episodes, by then on BBC America.

  Eventually the cable company got its vengeance, as Internet providers folded or were bought up, and there were only two left: our old friends The Phone Company ( AT&T) and The Cable Company (itself bought up and its name changed twice.) 

 Then once the cable company—eventually called Suddenlink for awhile, now Optimum—dominated Internet market share as well as the waning cable monopoly, it boosted prices into the stratosphere, and its customer service is nonexistent.  No one can get them on the phone (not that this is too unusual in dealing with today’s corporate barons.) It deals with customers with sarcastic arrogance.

  For most viewers, cable is the source for streaming, which at the moment is undergoing a shakeout that has the potential of reducing its offerings dramatically.  Monopoly cable could well be the future. 

 Despite all this, television in the 70s and beyond helped me through some dubious times, which is the subject of the next and last episodes.