Letters to my digital children: watching cable tv

Dear Beertje and Kabouter,

The tv is often confusing for you both.
You turn it on and request me to watch this or this show now and I must say that it isn't on at that moment.  You've been watching something and you request to see it once again and I say I can't.  You often pauze or rewind some programs. And then you switch to an ipad where you youtube, Netflix or use tv channel apps to watch

When I grew up things were a little different.
The internet was not invented yet and we had no computer or ipads in the house.  Just one television. There was no recorder either.

The television device

The screen wasn't as big and flat as it is nowadays. The television was a box.  And it came with a little square box with 12 silver small rectangular high and narrow buttons on it: 2 rows of 6 buttons. There must have been numbers on it at one time but our sweaty hands had worn them off.  We had to know by heart that they ran from 1 to 9 and then there was a button to switch to the +10 range  . In total we had 16 channels if I remember it well. Only 5 were in Dutch (2 Belgian - 3 Dutch).  It could be worse since the generation before me had black& white televisions and no remote controls.

TV programming


Each week we got the tv program at home in a book (part of a magasine subscription) and then we browsed through the programming to read what was going to be broadcast when, which show we'd like to see, a short announcement what would happened in our favourite series, etc... As a teenager I marked in the programming, what I'd like to see. Later on, we did have a recorder and then I could program beforehand everything I wanted to see but where I knew I'd not be at home (of if I wanted to see 2 things in parallel) and then I had to make sure there was an empty video tape in the recorder at the right time. But that was only when I was already a bit older. Until we had a video recorder, we could only watch what was being broadcast in real-time on the tv.  If we were not home, if someone visited us, if we forgot to turn on the tv on time...we missed the program we wanted to see.

When we had to go to the toilet...we missed our program since we could not pause.  Publicity on tv was the moment everyone in the country went to the toilet at the same time  (as confirmed by sewage firms). If  the phone rang, we needed a victim to go and go and answer it and then afterwards we had to fill in the person on what (s)he missed since there was no recorder but also no answering machine. So some phone conversations had to be cut short because something was starting on tv that we wanted to see.

There weren't always tv programs: during specific hours of daytime, tv broadcast "the test card". So there simply was no tv. However that was during day-time so I was in school anyway.

Family watching

We watched tv programs together with the entire family since there was no alternative to watch something else: no computer or ipad, remember? So we had to agree on what to watch together. In reality there was some time for children where we could determine what to watch and at a certain point the tv control was taken over by the adults and they made the choices. I believe there were child programs between 4 PM and 6-7 PM (??)and on Wednesday afternoon there were more. Then the programs for children stopped and the adult programmation started.
I used to watch a lot of child tv programs on the Dutch tv when I was small and on Wednesday afternoon I sometimes watched French cartoons (if I was allowed to already turn on the tv in the afternoon).  Obviously when I was growing older, I had more input to give or there were more family programs that we all watched together. The offer of programs wasn't nearly so big as today anyway.

I think there was a bigger offer of shows and less series.  In shows there was interaction with the audience in quizzes etc where you could participate by sending in beforehand with yellow postcards or later on, you had to try to phone yourself into the program :).

Since we watched together at home, but since the offer wasn't so big...chances were our friends had seen the same thing. So it triggered more conversations than today when tv is only a source of conversation for hyped real-time programs.  The advantage was that if we missed an episode of a fun series...I could ask at school what I missed and my friends would fill me in.  TV shows from the 70ies and 80ies all have now for our generations a "classic" memory because we've all seen it and all watched the same things.

Suspense vs binge watching
We couldn't binge watch if there was a good series on.   We had to follow the tv programmation and series usually came with one episode per week. So if it had a real thrilling end...we just had to wait until the week after! (and make sure the tv didn't ring and we hadn't other appointments in our agenda).

The freedom of choice, timing and the possibility of binge watching now, has caused nowadays that each is more taken up in its own choice of the moment and that we discuss socially what to recommend or get recommendations because the choice is overwhelming. It's more like books "what shall I watch next" but we aren't watching the same at the same moment anymore.