@ jayseye and Salix folk.
Hi. I was a boy in the 1960s. Obviously back then there wasn't the tsunami of entertainment options there are now. Tv was in black & white. You had to wait for it to "warm up" a couple of minutes before you could watch anything. If you had favourite weekly TV shows, then you had to be switched on and watching at the right time. In Britain we had just 2 channels; state run BBC and commercial ITV. In '64 that became 3 with the addition of BBC2 for which you needed an addtional antenna. (I wanted to get this extra channel to watch The High Chapparal.)
As a boy of 6 or 7, everybody raving on about the Beatles didn't interest me remotely. What DID interest me was Gerry Anderson sci-fi puppet shows like Fireball XL5, Stingray and of course Thunderbirds. There was also a weekly sci-fi adventure Hanna-Barbera cartoon I would never miss -Johnny Quest. Then there was Herge's Adventures of TinTin. Dr Who and the Daleks were a national institution by 1964 - and I did actually hide behind the sofa when I first saw them the previous year. At the end of the '60s Star Trek also appeared enjoying huge popularity.
After the success of James Bond, films - lots of secret agent type shows appeared. My favourites were The Man From Uncle, Danger Man, The Avengers (John Steed, Emma Peel) and in 1969, The Champions. Roger Moore as The Saint was one I never used to miss.
Popular police series were Gideon's Way, No Hiding Place, Z Cars and Softly, Softly.
As for comedies, they too began in glorious black & white with things like Mike & Bernie Winters, Morecambe and Wise, George and the Dragon with the hilarious Sid James (who had previously been in Hancock's half hour and the Carry On films). Then came colour in 69 with "On The Buses", "Doctor in the House", "Father Dear Father" etc. Some of these were better than others. My parents never got a colour TV until mid 1972 as they were at first very expensive. It was a nice Phillips set. Square corners on the screen and teak side panels. Solid-state too so it didn't need to warm up.
Anyway, now luckily we can see many of the shows again on YT and things like VeeHD.com for which I'm grateful. If I see something I really like, I download the file, put it on a USB key and watch it on the modern Samsung flatscreen. That would have been sci-fi back in the sixties . Then, if you wanted to make a movie it meant a cine-camera, and to record sound, a reel 2 reel tape recorder.
Cheers
Jonathan
60's TV shows and comedies.
60's TV shows and comedies.
K.I.S.S. - Keep it Simple and Sublime.
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jayseye
- Posts: 233
- Joined: 24. Jul 2011, 17:22
- Location: Brownsmead, Oregon (Center of the Universe)
Re: 60's TV shows and comedies.
Aside from shortwave, the BBC first made it across the pond via the Dalek feature films IIRC. Those "non-cannonical" movies came decades before Tom Baker caught my attention as The Doctor.
Back in the late '60s / early 70s, BBC comedies such as Benny Hill probably were the first actual BBC TV shows to make it here, followed by Monty Python, and Are You Being Served?
Will have to check when The Avengers arrived, that definitely caught my attention, up 'til Tara replaced Mrs. Peel.
Also enjoyed The Prisoner, right up until the final episode, which struck me as a let-down. BTW Broken Sea Audio did a pretty good "fan fiction" podcast revival of that show, along with many other '60s TV series and movies.
Also would be interested in discussing more Salix-related TV stuff here, including replacements for Flash on old PCs. The latest versions fail to run on my old Pentium III (Coppermine) CPU, so I'm stuck on an older Flash. In the past I've had success with Rube Goldberg-like arrangements of Flash Replacer. That Firefox plugin also required the presence of an actual version of Flash, as a sort of dummy security key. Have been meaning to retrace my notes, to discover all the components required to make that work.
Another goal would be to allow downloading of Comedy Central shows, specifically Colbert Nation and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Our slow DSL connection often results in "bad reception," just like the old days when we had to fuss with the TV antenna
Really would like to download the shows during off hours, so we could watch them straight through during dinner.
We'd even be willing to sit through the ads (muted, of course), as long as they played at normal speed instead of in jerky segments. Watching those is just as painful as the first videos I saw in the early days of the Internet. Cyndi Lauper, anyone?
Back in the late '60s / early 70s, BBC comedies such as Benny Hill probably were the first actual BBC TV shows to make it here, followed by Monty Python, and Are You Being Served?
Will have to check when The Avengers arrived, that definitely caught my attention, up 'til Tara replaced Mrs. Peel.
Also enjoyed The Prisoner, right up until the final episode, which struck me as a let-down. BTW Broken Sea Audio did a pretty good "fan fiction" podcast revival of that show, along with many other '60s TV series and movies. Also would be interested in discussing more Salix-related TV stuff here, including replacements for Flash on old PCs. The latest versions fail to run on my old Pentium III (Coppermine) CPU, so I'm stuck on an older Flash. In the past I've had success with Rube Goldberg-like arrangements of Flash Replacer. That Firefox plugin also required the presence of an actual version of Flash, as a sort of dummy security key. Have been meaning to retrace my notes, to discover all the components required to make that work.
Another goal would be to allow downloading of Comedy Central shows, specifically Colbert Nation and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Our slow DSL connection often results in "bad reception," just like the old days when we had to fuss with the TV antenna
Really would like to download the shows during off hours, so we could watch them straight through during dinner. We'd even be willing to sit through the ads (muted, of course), as long as they played at normal speed instead of in jerky segments. Watching those is just as painful as the first videos I saw in the early days of the Internet. Cyndi Lauper, anyone?