If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember TV Guide when it was digest sized and provided full descriptions of the programming on your television. Of course, back then we only had about eight stations. Today we have so many stations, the television guide magazines are the size of weekly installments of War and Peace just to hold onto half the information we used to get. Too many channels, not enough information about them.
Back in the good old days around these parts, we knew NBC was Channel 3, ABC was Channel 6 and CBS was Channel 10. If you wanted syndicated programs or needed to park your child in front of the cartoons, you went to the UHF channels. Whatever you chose, the famous TV Guide had complete descriptions like this:
(6) The Blah Show (Color: 60 mins.) – Jane watches potatoes boil, while
Stan finds Billy’s toy truck stuck in his lawn mower. Lydia Dull,
Bruce Boring, Elisa Exciting (guest star).
Now the channels are laid out in a grid, and you’re lucky to get two words of descriptive text. Sometimes you may even get the actors’ names.
Today I was scanning my magazine when I saw that TCM was featuring Alfred Hitchcock movies all day. Happily I tuned in, expecting to see Rear Window, but there was the great black-and-white classic Stagecoach instead. I like John Wayne, but he is no James Stewart. So how did the listing get it wrong? I don’t know. I checked the daily paper and it was correct in there, making me question the value of my guide.
Also, not every channel gets listed; there are too many of them to warrant a complete guide blow by blow every week. The subscription costs would bankrupt us. I could wear out my remote going up the dial channel by channel. There might be a great network out there I will never get to know because I don’t know what programs they have.
So use the onscreen programming grid your cable company provides, you say. Really, how many of the first five minutes of a program have you missed trying to find what you’re going to watch? 400 channels? We’re talking forty minutes of surfing, and by then you’re halfway through the show (not counting commercials).
The next option is to get a voice remote. I had a bad experience with voice activated software once; I wanted to write a piece about women truckers, and when I spoke into the microphone, the results that came up onscreen I won’t print here.
So I didn’t get to watch Hitchcock, I have a useless television directory, hundreds of channels and nothing on. And the fall season is two weeks away. Sigh.
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