Cable Hopping
KITMAN, MARVIN
U OnTelevision CABLE HOPPING BY MARVIN KITMAN 13 JLa^oy, am I thrilled with my new cable system. I now have multichannel capability. It takes me 36 switches of the dial before I can say there's...
...I didn't know there were so many movies I never intended to see until I bought this service...
...Unfortunately, my system shields us from the hard core filthy stuff they get in Manhattan...
...It gives me a vicarious thrill to read about cable's goings on in the papers, how little guys like Warners' and American Express can still turn a buck in the marketplace by pooling their multimillions...
...I don't mind that they are talking head shows...
...If they can resist the moral depravity in the big city, we can fight it off in the suburbs...
...Playing with buttons is also what Paul Klein used to call "doing laps around the dials...
...Being a mile and a half away doesn't make us any weaker...
...Wilkes-Barre...
...I'm no longer a passive viewer...
...Of course, what HBO really means culturally is that there is now a lot of cussing in our house...
...I've lost count, but I think there are some 14-15 cultural pay services announced already...
...Then I really get bored I turn to the community access programs: Sleazoid cable (to use the artistic term), with its cheap look...
...Heaven is putting together a straight 24 hours of Benny Hill on the various out-of-town stations that now appear magically on my screen: I get my thrill on Benny Hill...
...I've heard better from Mailer at cocktail parties...
...Or seeing advance tapes of TheLoveBoat...
...I can no longer spend a day without a smattering of Spanish soap opera at night...
...Cable has actually changed my life...
...They feature every pathetic five-and-dime politician who ever dreamed of starring on TV...
...There I go again, being concerned about other people's money...
...Instead, original programing is cable's Achilles heel and toe and thigh bone...
...Anyway, what I love most about my cable is flipping around the dial until there is something interesting on the screen...
...The way the cable people threw numbers around during the installation was a little confusing...
...The thing has gotten a second life...
...I'm an artist painting with the palette of TV, hopping around the dial as befits my individual personality...
...I usually allow a program 10-15 seconds...
...And then there is the Home Box Office channel, home of recent films that were blasted by the critics...
...Ten seconds ofadrama, lOsecondsofagameshow, 10 seconds of an editorial, and zero seconds of a commercial...
...The gold rush mentality is getting me dizzy??Sacramento must have been like this in 1849...
...maybe people will pay for what they would not watch on regular TV for free...
...they're taking over the airwaves, too...
...Or seeing how Happy Crappy did in the fourth at Belmont (that's on the local cultural channel in New Jersey, the one that gives the horse racing results all day long...
...Cable is pubic TV...
...For an hour he explained how wonderful he was...
...It'sgood for my heart, especially given the lack of surprises...
...Because it's there, like Mount Everest...
...The movie reruns on all the free commercial stations I am able to pull in are great, too...
...The medium, as I once said, is the medium...
...Very inspirational...
...I'm into films that never would have coaxed me to a theater unless I had been chloroformed by white slavers and forced to sit there...
...There is precedent for this in the prostitution business...
...It's losing lots of money, thanks to some very good, expensive work and a shortage of sponsors...
...or "The Mysterious Eastern Zone...
...Then one network will present a half-hour version of Mahler's Third Symphony...
...It's great, for example, to have Dick Cavett and Ralph Nader hosting the nostalgia anthologies and documentary series...
...You get used to it after a while...
...The package cost me $55 or $95 to start...
...I'm pooped," a guy says to his neighbor on the train going into town in the morning...
...Yet the cable people don't seem to take this as seriously as, say, presenting movies...
...I sometimes think there is less to the video revolution than meets the eye...
...That politiciansdominatethecom-munity is bad enough...
...I did six laps on TV last night...
...I keep reading these stories about how wonderful cable programing is going to be...
...There's one undeniable advantage to cable: It cleared up the acne on my set??a museum piece, a crystal TV set made by the kid down the hall...
...Classics such as The Monkees are on Channel 48 in Anthracite City, Pennsylvania, and other exotic places...
...You have to develop a taste for it...
...Actors say "bleep" or "bleeping" on HBO (ask George or the Supreme Court justices on the WBAI case for the words...
...In the episode I glimpsed, three males were showing their rear ends to female contestants, a sort of derriere garde version of The Dating Game...
...Political programs are the highlight of sleazoid in most places...
...It presents a weekly pay-TV magazine of the arts...
...Original programing on cable is still looking for its Uncle Milty...
...No longer do I see five balls at Wimbledon...
...Yes, but how long is Lincoln Continental going to want to talk to the same 12 viewers...
...And who knows...
...My overentertain-ed Manhattan friends tell me that it's tedious watching George persuading women to take their clothes of f in front of his portapack camera, but I want to be able to reach that degree of sophistication for myself...
...Why should anyone get cable...
...In my opinion reruns are not without their socially redeeming qualities...
...It's what the heads are talking about that bothers me...
...Nor can I conceive of life without the All-Weather channel, which has more useful information than most public TV shows...
...We'll have three symphony orchestras on at the same hour...
...Cable is terrific, though, especially for reruns...
...Every month there is a definitive cable piece listing all the new pay services coming out that are supposedly going to make the system even better...
...Imagine paying for that...
...If I want commercials I go directly to M-TV, which plays record promos all the time??can you believe it...
...Then ABC and Westinghouse buy up Teleprompt-er and half the world...
...Wait until NBC has an arts pay-cable unit to compete with CBS and ABC...
...Atlanta vs...
...Monthly, it's about as much as the phone bill used to be in the days when there was only free TV...
...CBS Cable, the biggest rival to ARTS thus far, is splendid...
...Sometimes I am a worry wart...
...Soon it will require 84, and before long 207...
...In effect I am putting together my own programs...
...When are the comptrollers going to stick in a few more commercials...
...With cable I get a lot more exercise than before...
...You can watch a series of short and long films on cultural subjects, linked together by a vague, pretentious theme: "Their World...
...A lot of people don't want to...
...It takes me 36 switches of the dial before I can say there's nothing on...
...They should be doing the things the networks will not or cannot do...
...Cable is the place where you can hear George Carlin utter the seven words heard everywhere in America except on network TV...
...What if you happen to have a dull community...
...Making mountains out of molehills is always exciting...
...Now I really enjoy sampling the same movie 17 times in one month (or is that a week...
...That particular show was over my head when it first ran...
...But you have to ask what it does for the viewers...
...the first all-classical glockenspiel and lute music channel, shared with porno...
...The first to go, I predict, will be CBS Cable, because it's the best...
...One of my favorites was an hour-long film about Norman Mailer on Mailer...
...either I'm maturing or it is becoming more profound as it ages, like a wine...
...It's all hype if you ask me, a battle of press releases??the first this, the first that: the first all-cooking channel, shared with porno on the transponder...
...I am the ex-ecutiveproducer...
...Community access programs reflect the community...
...Yet I wonder how it's going to make money doing this forever...
...CBS broadcasts all the great stuff??fine music, serious plays...
...Although narrowcasting is a brilliant concept on paper, the market here is unclear...
...When it palls I move on: Lifeis too short to just sit there...
...I'll admit that one of the reasons 1 wanted cable was for the smut...
...Among Escapade's contributions to original programing is the first strip game show, Everything Goes...
...There are minor exceptions...
...Sure, they broadcast theater??and it's as boring on the tube as it is on stage...
...Special interest groups, they say...
...As it is, I have two channels in Spanish, one in Japanese, one in Wall-streettickertapese, and four??count 'em, four??24-hour movie channels...
...Take, for example, ARTS??the Alpha Repertory Television Service, a merger of the talents of ABC and Hearst magazines and the first of the hyped operations to go public last year...
...I can treat myself to M*A *S*H five times a day, instead of the standard three...
...I still end up settling on year-old tapes of Second City TV...
...I like the rough feel of locally produced efforts...
...I can compare how a perennial like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is edited for television in different cities around thecountry: Buffalo vs...
...It should have been called "Norman Talks to Himself...
...It has as much culture as I get in yogurt...
...In the midst of "Tobe, or not to be" will come, "We'll be back after the following messages...
...My major complaint about cable, however, is the dearth of original programing or experimentation...
...We live in New Jersey, a mile and a half from the George Washington Bridge...
...Everybody is his own Grant Tinker, with his tinker toys...
...It's a perk of the job, like having lunch with Genie Francis, formerly of General Hospital, who is always asking my advice on her career ("Should I play in Uncle Vanya or O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness...
...They provide a retrospective of great video art, what Andre Malraux might have had in mind when he talked about "a museum without walls...
...This makes me feel creative...
...I put it on my TV critic's expense account here...
...Nobody much seems to watch Bravo, a culture cable service sharing a channel with Escapade??a racy films enterprise that makes it unnecessary for some of us New Jersey people to go to Times Square to keep up with the arts...
...In Manhattan they are beyond belief, like Channel J's Ugly George's Hourof Truth, Beauty and Cellulite, or whatever it's called...
...Our World...
...Darn it...
...Another will add a singer to compete...
...The skyscrapers in Manhattan weren't helping reception, and out my way the signals were hitting a three story walk-up medical arts building...
...I covet my neighbor's community access programs...
...Or helping Valerie Bertinelli of One Day at a Time with her algebra homework...
...But what do I care how much cable costs...
...Thar's gold in them thar molehills...
Vol. 65 • June 1982 • No. 13
