The headline read, "Local Cable TV Hooks Postville Tube Watchers." In 1984, the small Iowa town where I attended school offered cable TV to its residents for the first time. The citizens were provided with 13 basic channels for $9.00 a month. Two premium channels, HBO and Cinemax, were available for an additional $9.00 a piece per month. However, if one opted to get both movie channels the second one was only $7.00 a month. So, if one were to get all 15 channels it would come to $25.00 a month.
When cable TV arrived in Postville, I was becoming close to a blond-haired coed. Blondie and I had been talking and flirting during the school day. I was a sophomore, and she was a freshman. The arrival of cable TV offered her an easy way of asking me to come over and hang out.
"You should come to my house. We can watch cable," she'd say.
Perhaps if I'd grown up during an earlier era, she would've invited me over to listen to the radio or records played on her phonograph.
I lived on a farm a few miles from town so, of course, we didn't have cable. One of our neighbors had a big satellite dish but that was rare in the 1980s. At our house the television reception wasn't the best even with an aerial antenna. We had clear reception for ABC and NBC. But the reception for CBS was poor if it came in at all. PBS had poor to no reception as well. But, for the most part, I was content with only two channels. Sometimes on a Saturday morning we'd put up with the snowy, poor-quality picture reception on CBS so we could watch Looney Tunes cartoons. If we wanted to watch the Iowa State High School Wrestling Championships on Iowa Public Television, we'd go to one of my grandparents' houses where there was better reception.
I did go to Blondie's house a few times under the pretext of watching cable TV. I found the so-called cable box compelling. Instead of a handheld remote, a cable box covered with a fake wood veneer was hardwired to the television. Blondie's cable box was connected to the television with a cable. One selected a desired channel by simply moving a horizontal slider from channel to channel.
One evening we happened upon a movie in which a couple was having sex. The man was on top of the woman sweating and making a lot of noise. Blondie started laughing nervously. We continued to watch the movie though. When the couple was finished having sex the man was upset with the woman because to his dismay she is never able to have an orgasm with him. Of course, the mention of orgasm made Blondie even more embarrassed. It was kind of funny but awkward that two teenagers watching cable happened upon a sex scene.
When I was in college, I came upon some racy material on cable one evening as well. I was hanging out with my buddy Curtis late one evening flipping through the channels on cable. I came upon a scene where a maid was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. She realized that her male employer was watching her so she scrubbed vigorously being sure to move her rear end a lot. She found it amusing that she almost gave her master a heart attack by teasing him. I found out years later the film involved three stories and was entitled The Secrets of Love: Three Rakish Tales. The film was an anthology of three films consisting of screen adaptations of three erotic stories by pre-20th-century French authors and was originally produced for French television. Thank God for cable TV!
I didn't watch much cable TV during college. I was too busy studying. Just kidding. I rarely seemed to be able to sit down at the television in the lounge without other people showing up which would make me uncomfortable, and I would leave. I am an introvert and shy and was always concerned they wouldn't like what I was watching.
I do recall watching A Little Romance late one evening when no one else was around. The movie involves two teenagers living in Paris who fall in love and travel to Venice because of a tradition that if a couple kiss in a gondola beneath the Bridge of Sighs in Venice at sunset while the church bells toll, they will be in love forever.
I also seem to recall watching Snorks on the USA Cartoon Express on USA Network early some mornings. Cartoon Express was the first structured animation block on cable television, predating Nickelodeon's Nicktoons and Cartoon Network by a decade.
I wasn't into MTV in college. I did like music videos. I was a fan of Friday Night Videos on NBC. Friday Night Videos took advantage of the fact that many areas in the early 1980s were still not serviced by cable television and that not all cable television providers offered MTV at first. But, when I was finally able to watch MTV in college I was unmoved. A channel that played music videos all day long was a bit much.
During my last year of college, I "discovered" Iowa Public Television on the little black and white television I had in my room. I continued to watch IPTV after graduation. I found shows devoted to carpentry, cooking, gardening, home improvement, painting, sewing, and travel. PBS also showed British comedies like Are You Being Served? and Keeping Up Appearances.
Of course, now cable and satellite TV offer entire networks devoted to all of these categories and more. For example, one can watch Food Network, Home & Garden Television, and Travel Channel.
My parents signed up to receive DIRECTV in the mid 1990s. It only required a small dish and a receiver. The dish was small compared to the old C-Band satellite dishes. It was interesting having access to all of those networks like USA, TBS, TNT, MTV, VH1, and so on. I enjoyed the History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, and the Cartoon Network. It was even possible to rent movies right through the television. I believe the service was called Direct Ticket back then. None of this would've seemed possible during my high school days.
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| A photo of the back side of an old C-band satellite dish by Bmag32 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54600115 |
Another new technology introduced to my generation was the videocassette recorder (VCR). Even with cable television, consumers were still limited to watching a show when it aired or missing it entirely. The VCR allowed people to record TV shows to watch when they pleased. The VHS format became dominant. The VCR and VHS tapes exploded in popularity throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Blockbuster was established in 1985, allowing people to rent movies and shows for the first time to watch at their convenience.
I went on a road trip with a buddy during my senior year of high school to see a concert. We stayed overnight at his brother's place the night before the concert. We rented a VCR from a grocery store or perhaps it was a convenience store. That's right. You could rent a VCR back in those days as well as the movies you wished to watch. The VCR was in a briefcase or suitcase of sorts so you could transport it easily. I believe we watched The Wanderers from 1979. As I recall, someone had also loaned us a pornographic movie on a VHS tape that for some reason played back too quickly. We didn't want to watch pornography that appeared to be in fast forward so we just gave up in despair. I did watch a pornographic VHS in college for the first with some floormates.
Some people claim that we have the VCR to thank for the "on demand" experience some of us take for granted now of watching what we want when we want. Netflix and other streaming services allow us to do just that.
Perhaps if I was coming of age now, Blondie would not invite me over to watch cable but instead to watch Netflix and chill.
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