20th century television
A friend of mine recently showed me this absolutely wild video from 1977 Ireland of people attempting to drive while absolutely wasted:
It's shocking - who put the dog on the driving course!!!!!! - and very funny. It has 3 million views, so I guess it's equally compelling to plenty of people.
I then clicked through to the channel it's on and found dozens of videos, many with only a couple thousand views. They're all low-intensity TV spots from Irish TV in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s.
Here is a singing dog:
Here is an escaped pet snake from 1988:
A bunch of people in 1979 make predictions about what will happen in the year 2000, including a lot of speculation on whether there will be another world war:
A news story from 1967 about a housing crisis in Dublin which is quite critical of landlords:
About... half of my great-grandparents were from Ireland? I don't think any of them would have had access to local Irish television in the 60s - I think they were mostly out by the 30s. So I doubt any of them would have seen this kind of low-intensity, human-interest, highly-local news about the country they'd left. It is very weird to realize that I can watch this kind of stuff so much more easily than they could. One of my great-grandmothers was still alive when I was born, and I don't know if she ever had the chance to watch television news from the country where she was born.
I was thinking about whether I have any special relationship with this kind of local news television from the place where I grew up, and I don't, really. I did not watch a lot of local news as kid - I was pretty much only interested in cartoons - and as I grew older, I was part of that big group of millennials who quit watching television entirely in favor of the internet. I do remember some surprise from my parents when I graduated college that I had absolutely no interest in paying for TV or cable in any new place I planned to live.
I have some friends who did have strong relationships to local TV channels and public access TV as kids, and some of them have introduced me to California's Gold, a Los Angeles public television program that ran from the 90s through the 2010s. That link takes you to a fan account on YouTube, but there is an official archive of the show here that is much harder to navigate. Huell Howser, the guy who made the show, would travel around California doing human interest stories about various towns and tourist destinations all over the state.
Anyway, here's a video of him visiting a college art professor who makes art out of dryer lint. This is in fact the second episode about her and her lint art that he produced in his career. It is crazy to me that through the lens of Huell Howser, she becomes "the lint lady" rather than, like, a professor and gallery artist who happens to have a fascination with lint. His accent and enunciation of "THE LINT LADY!" seems to halfway transform her into, like, a Lynchian character. Wild stuff.
I have been racking my brain trying to remember any local television from my childhood, and the only thing I can strongly remember is watching a local TV broadcast in my teens about someone who'd been hit by a train and dismembered. I don't remember characters, human interest stories, or anything like that. A bummer! I feel like it would be nice to have something like this to remember and return to.