TV and me

When I was a little kid in the '60s in southeastern New Brunswick, we got one TV channel!  It was CKCW in Moncton, then the base of the Lionel Network, whose logo was the Lionel Lobster.  Then in 1969 the CBC affiliate CHSJ got extended to our area.  Note that it was an affiliate rather than a CBC station, so we sometimes didn't get shows that were on the regular stations, or we'd get them at inconvenient hours.  In addition to these stations we could also get CBAFT, a Moncton station for Radio-Canada (the CBC's French network) and CBCT, the CBC's Charlottetown station, but only poor signals with a lot of snow.

When Father spent a year on sabbatical in Missisauga in the mid-70s, we got cable TV for the first time.  Cable TV then meant less than a dozen channels, including CBC and CTV in Toronto, TVOntario, CITY TV (then at channel 79 near the top end of the UHF range), Global (then a new network), CHCH from Hamilton, and the four American networks in Buffalo including PBS.  We could only get Buffalo's independent station WUTV on a direct UHF signal of poor quality.

Back in New Brunswick, we only started getting cable TV in late 1978.  Back then cable only included the ABC and NBC stations from Bangor, Maine. (They only added CBS and PBS in 1983, and then they were stations in Detroit rather than Maine.) And we only had a black & white TV back then.  We first got color when Father was on sabbatical in England in late 1981.  We were in Toronto in early 1982, and the cable system had expanded to about thirty channels.

Back in New Brunswick, we started to get a range of Pay TV channels like CNN and A&E in 1985.  That was the same year we bought a VCR, which greatly expanded the content available to us.

When I moved to Toronto in 1990, Moira and I actually went without cable for a few years, and even made do with a black & white TV.  But I eventually bought a color set, and when the parents moved here in 1994 we returned to cable TV. (In 2001 we switched from cable TV to satellite TV.) We got a DVD player in 2001 and started renting mail DVDs through zip.ca in 2004.  And we bought an HDTV and subscribed to Netflix downloads last year!

My generation was lucky to get introduced to TV gradually.  We appreciate it more than people who've been born with a wide available range of content.