Saturday TV
September 27, 2009 11:17 PM | General
(11:19 pm)
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If kids growing up in the 1970s wanted to watch television on Saturday night, we were forced to watch Lawrence Welk, Hee Haw, Emergency and Carol Burnett. Those were some of the TV shows I recall watching while sitting in front of the living room couch next to my older brother.
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| Lawrence Welk occupied my Saturdays growing up in the 1970s.
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Mom was typically on the couch above us covered from neck to toe in a blanket, dad had the La-Z-Boy propped back just far enough to still be able to suck down a couple packs of Salems (I often wonder how many of those we smoked with him?), while my brother and I usually shared a big bowl of Mr. Bee Potato chips. Believe it or not, we used to dip those Mr. Bee’s in ketchup (I gag whenever I think about that today).
Since no one else I knew owned a second television set - and this was before remote controls - we had to watch what dad watched. Our family democracy consisted of four votes, and dad had all four of them.
If you didn’t want to watch TV, then the alternative was to go to your room and read a book or stare at the wall. So we watched Bobby, Sissy and all those bubbles.
I always wondered why my other friends never had to watch Lawrence Welk until it finally hit me that dad was a little older than the rest of the fathers in my gang. That’s why I listened to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass (the Lonely Bull) on the family stereo instead of The Eagles, ELO, Steely Dan and all those cool Seventies bands that the other dads listened to.
Today, whenever I see Lawrence Welk reruns on PBS I immediately break out into a cold sweat. I also get migraines whenever I hear a clarinet.
I am not sure of the exact order of shows, but I do know Lawrence Welk came on first at 7 p.m. – more than enough time for grandma’s food to digest after the 3:30 supper. Once Lawrence Welk was done leading the orchestra, next up, I believe, was Hee Haw. I was never a big country music fan so that constituted another hour of pain and suffering, although I have to admit I was mildly interested whenever they would salute a small town, holding out the faint hope that New Martinsville, West Virginia would somehow pop up on the screen (I think the closest we ever came to getting on Hee Haw was Martinsville, Virginia).
I did perk up a little when it was time for Emergency, especially when some unfortunate (or fortunate) dude was wheeled into Rampart Emergency Hospital where the vivacious Dixie McCall worked. I know Dixie was already like 50 back then, but I had never seen a nurse that pretty before.
Come to think of it, I haven’t since.
I sometimes think back to those Saturday nights and laugh whenever I find myself spending 14 straight hours in a vegetative state on the couch watching college football like I did last weekend, a remote in one hand, a favorite beverage in the other.
Watching college football games on television these days is kind of like fishing with dynamite.
When the action gets slow on one of the FIVE ESPN channels airing games, you can always flip over to Versus to catch a little Tennessee State-Florida A&M. By the way, isn’t Versus the channel that shows Ted Nugent ambushing animals?
When we 40-somethings were watching college football back in the Seventies, you knew exactly how many games were on (two), you knew which channel to turn to (ABC), and you knew what time to turn the TV on (noon). If you wanted to watch college football at night then you had to stay up to watch the highlights on the 11 o'clock news.
That was it.
The rule back then was four appearances per school per year – two national and two regional. The reason was simple: if it was up to the network it would have been Notre Dame, USC, Alabama, Texas and Ohio State on TV every week. This way, the NCAA’s Walter Byers, who controlled television with an iron fist, could tell his member schools that he was spreading the wealth around.
During Leland Byrd’s seven-year tenure as athletic director at West Virginia University, the Mountaineers had a whopping two regional television appearances against Penn State in 1972 (the Kerry Marbury kickoff return game) and against Pitt in 1975 (the 17-14 game that ended with Bill McKenzie’s field goal).
Well, so much for spreading the wealth.
“You only had one network that was carrying the games back then,” Byrd recalled recently. “They had four regionals and a game of the week. You only had about five choices at that time.”
It was said that Byers used to get himself all psyched up before his TV negotiating sessions. He treated those sessions with the television execs like a personal duel.
“Walter Byers controlled all of that,” Byrd said. “If there was ever (an NCAA television committee) it was one that he controlled.”
In the East, Penn State and Pitt were the two teams usually getting on TV.
“Pitt and Penn State were the superpowers at that time and they got almost all of the television spots,” Byrd noted. “The best we could do was one game with either Pitt or Penn State. It was the same with Syracuse and Boston College. If they got one then that was about it. Until ESPN came along, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do about it.”
In 1981, the NCAA was forced to begin reconsidering its one network stance for college football. It was also around this time that Oklahoma and Georgia sued the NCAA seeking to overturn its TV contract as a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. By 1982, college games were also airing on CBS, WTBS and ESPN. By the mid-1980s, three times as many games were on television.
Twenty five years later, networks are now being created specifically to show college football games.
This week, beginning with Hawaii-Louisiana Tech on ESPN2 Wednesday night, 49 different college games will be on some type of network television before Sunday morning - and that doesn’t include all of the regional TV games.
There are so many games on TV today that it almost makes you long for the days of Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner, especially when some of the primetime choices this weekend include South Carolina State-South Carolina on ESPN Classic and Colorado State-Idaho on ESPNU.
In some respects, all of those old Saturday evening shows that your dad forced you to watch look much more appealing today.
Well, all of them except for one.
