Another 5 Things about TV in the 1980s
After I wrote a "5 Things" blog a week ago about How Watching TV Used to be Different I thought of a few more things. Some of them were inspired by the comment(s) on that blog. So, here are another Five Things about how TV was way different in the 1970s & '80s versus today:
1) So much smaller. In my previous blog I noted the first TV I remember watching, when I was little more than a toddler, was a set that was about 16" diagonal. I remember when my dad brought home a new TV. Not only was it color (the old set was black-and-white) but it was bigger: 19". That was kind of the living room standard for a number of years. The next set my parents bought, when that one died, was either the same size or only slightly larger. I also remember when that set died on us in the mid-late 1980s and my dad bought a 27" TV. It seemed huge! I remember watching a Sunday football game with him and remarking, "Wow, it's like we're right there in the first few rows!" Of course, even that TV is tiny by today's standards. Nowadays the 42" TV my spouse and I have in our living room is considered tiny and most people I talk to have screens of 55", 60", or larger.
2) 🎵 I want my MTV! I described in my previous blog how being a town with Community Access TV (CATV) we had an easy transition to cable TV. By the early 1980s the whole town had honest-to-god cable. One thing I didn't mention before is that one of our early cable channels was MTV. I don't recall if we had it on MTV's launch date of August 1, 1981, but if not we had it shortly after. I know that because I remember when cousins from the midwest came to visit us in summer 1982. Yes, I remember the year and the season. I remember it because it's also when I started playing D&D. My cousins brought the game and introduced me to it, and when we weren't sitting in my bedroom doing hack-n-slash, they were sitting downstairs in my parents' living room utterly transfixed by MTV. It was something they'd only heard about... and already we'd had it so long I thought it was old hat. 🤣 BTW, back then MTV was still called Music Television and it played music all day- like, 24/7.
3) Stations used to sign off for the night. While MTV ran programming 24/7 in the early 1980s it was an outlier. Up through the mid '80s TV stations would routinely stop broadcasting late at night. Like, at midnight or 1am they'd "sign off", often playing the national anthem over a loop of a waving flag, then broadcast a steady image of a color bar or go completely off the air, leaving your TV to show "snow" (the visual effect when your TV's tuner found no signal on a channel). Stations would come back on air at 5-6am with morning news. MTV actually helped move a lot of stations to 24/7 broadcasting. The sudden popularity of music videos gave stations something cheap and low-effort they could air through the wee hours o the morning. Soon taped infomercials took over the wee-hours programming.
4) TV was a shared experience. The family watched TV together- and all your friends talked about it the next day. This made TV a shared experience. After the airing of a really popular show, two-thirds or more of everybody in your peer group the next day had seen it and was excited to talk about it. Also, the concept of "spoilers" didn't really exist. Everyone would talk about the big episode the next day at school or work. There was no, "Wait a few days or a week until I catch up." If you didn't watch it when it aired, you had effectively missed it.
5) If the video store was out of it, you couldn't watch it. VCRs became popular in the 1980s. My family got its first one in 1987, and we were a bit behind the curve for working class families, IMO. While 1980s VCRs were fidgety and low quality for recording programs they were great (at the time) for airing professionally published tapes. A new category of business sprung up: the video rental store. You'd go to a store in the nearby strip mall, browse the titles, and for generally $1.99 you could rent a video until the next night. But they had to have a spare copy. Popular new-release titles and old classics were often sold out. So you always had to go in with at least a second choice, if not a third choice, in mind.
1) So much smaller. In my previous blog I noted the first TV I remember watching, when I was little more than a toddler, was a set that was about 16" diagonal. I remember when my dad brought home a new TV. Not only was it color (the old set was black-and-white) but it was bigger: 19". That was kind of the living room standard for a number of years. The next set my parents bought, when that one died, was either the same size or only slightly larger. I also remember when that set died on us in the mid-late 1980s and my dad bought a 27" TV. It seemed huge! I remember watching a Sunday football game with him and remarking, "Wow, it's like we're right there in the first few rows!" Of course, even that TV is tiny by today's standards. Nowadays the 42" TV my spouse and I have in our living room is considered tiny and most people I talk to have screens of 55", 60", or larger.
2) 🎵 I want my MTV! I described in my previous blog how being a town with Community Access TV (CATV) we had an easy transition to cable TV. By the early 1980s the whole town had honest-to-god cable. One thing I didn't mention before is that one of our early cable channels was MTV. I don't recall if we had it on MTV's launch date of August 1, 1981, but if not we had it shortly after. I know that because I remember when cousins from the midwest came to visit us in summer 1982. Yes, I remember the year and the season. I remember it because it's also when I started playing D&D. My cousins brought the game and introduced me to it, and when we weren't sitting in my bedroom doing hack-n-slash, they were sitting downstairs in my parents' living room utterly transfixed by MTV. It was something they'd only heard about... and already we'd had it so long I thought it was old hat. 🤣 BTW, back then MTV was still called Music Television and it played music all day- like, 24/7.
3) Stations used to sign off for the night. While MTV ran programming 24/7 in the early 1980s it was an outlier. Up through the mid '80s TV stations would routinely stop broadcasting late at night. Like, at midnight or 1am they'd "sign off", often playing the national anthem over a loop of a waving flag, then broadcast a steady image of a color bar or go completely off the air, leaving your TV to show "snow" (the visual effect when your TV's tuner found no signal on a channel). Stations would come back on air at 5-6am with morning news. MTV actually helped move a lot of stations to 24/7 broadcasting. The sudden popularity of music videos gave stations something cheap and low-effort they could air through the wee hours o the morning. Soon taped infomercials took over the wee-hours programming.
4) TV was a shared experience. The family watched TV together- and all your friends talked about it the next day. This made TV a shared experience. After the airing of a really popular show, two-thirds or more of everybody in your peer group the next day had seen it and was excited to talk about it. Also, the concept of "spoilers" didn't really exist. Everyone would talk about the big episode the next day at school or work. There was no, "Wait a few days or a week until I catch up." If you didn't watch it when it aired, you had effectively missed it.
5) If the video store was out of it, you couldn't watch it. VCRs became popular in the 1980s. My family got its first one in 1987, and we were a bit behind the curve for working class families, IMO. While 1980s VCRs were fidgety and low quality for recording programs they were great (at the time) for airing professionally published tapes. A new category of business sprung up: the video rental store. You'd go to a store in the nearby strip mall, browse the titles, and for generally $1.99 you could rent a video until the next night. But they had to have a spare copy. Popular new-release titles and old classics were often sold out. So you always had to go in with at least a second choice, if not a third choice, in mind.