Those 70s Shows

Nostalgia has figured prominently in my life of late. Apparently I am old enough to have nostalgia, which is in itself alarming, but on the other hand, it’s provided some great entertainment. Ter and I have done some serious bonding over the music we loved in our formative years, i.e., before we met, and at Coffee on the Wall last week, the conversation somehow found its way into the same decade: the 1970s. And here’s where I learned something that I’ve always known about my wee sister:

She loved police shows. Boy Sister gave us a list of the cop/detective series that were hip in the 70s (more than I’d imagined), and wee sis said she watched most of them. More than I did, for sure. I recall watching reruns of Emergency! with her after school, so perhaps it’s not so strange that her significant other happens to be a paramedic. Funnily enough, when BS asked us what our favourite 70s show was, without hesitation, we both said “Starsky & Hutch!”

“Do you want to borrow the DVDs?” I asked her. “I have the first two seasons.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I dunno, they’ll be pretty cheesy nowadays.”

She’s right, of course. Cheesy doesn’t begin to describe the hokey plots and ham acting that seemed so hip back in the day … though Starsky’s Torino is still pretty darned cool.

The sitcoms of the time seem less dated. Maybe humour is timeless? Sure, the costumes and sets are hideously pea green and polyester, and we get as much laughter out of the hair and makeup as we do the dialogue, but it’s less painful to sit through an episode of M*A*S*H  or Mary Tyler Moore as it is an episode of, well, any of the dramatic fare. Granted, some of the humour then was as blatantly stupid as much of the humour now, but laughter is truly ageless.

Rolling further back in time, the local TV station runs back-to-back episodes of Star Trek on Tuesday nights. Talk about cheeseball, but it’s the original series with the original crew, and that makes it mandatory viewing on “Trek Tuesday”. I look forward to it for the humour as much William Shatner’s wiggle—and I don’t necessarily mean the humour in the script. In the right mood, Ter and I can crack ourselves up during the show, turning a TV classic from drama to comedy with a single well-crafted quip.

We do the same thing with modern-day shows as well, though truth be told, we’re hard-pressed to find much worth watching. Give me the good old days—ironically, the days when folks in their mid-fifties lamented the lack of anything worth watching, deeming it all too crude or controversial.

Time really does move in circles.

I Got the Music in Me

They say that the printing press was the most important invention in history. If this is so, then the advent of recorded music must be a close second.

Ter and I met in 1982. Our mutual musical history began then, with Duran Duran, Def Leppard, Tears For Fears, Michael Jackson, and a host of others. When we tune into the 80s music channel, almost every song conjures a memory that starts with one of us saying, “Do you remember …?” We laugh and reminisce and wonder whatever became of So-and-So when it seemed at the time that we would always be in touch with our friends. Good times, bad times, hard times, doesn’t matter which. Pick a song and we are transported instantly into our shared past.

Tune into the 70s channel, however, and we have discovered buried treasure. Music was less homogenized back then. Folk rubbed with rock, disco dropped in, and pop was often schlock, but everything got airtime because radio had yet to become “formatted.” It was fun, even though I was battling my bones and Ter was in her turbulent teens during most of the decade. We didn’t know each other then. One had no idea that the other existed, in fact, or that the scene was being set for the destiny point when our paths would cross and the adventure would begin.

We hit the 70s channel one night, just because. Oh, we laughed. We laughed … and then the memories surfaced. Not mutual ones, of course, but the fossilized ones unearthed by songs we heard while growing up in our separate worlds. “These Eyes” is her favourite Guess Who tune. “No Time” is mine—but she and I both remember the pink and orange label on the old 45, even if neither of us could name the company that owned it. The 70s channel inspired a different question from the 80s. Instead of “Do you remember?”, one of us asked, “Where were you?” and wow, we had a blast bringing each other up to speed.

I generally stream my silly jazz station at work. With thirty channels to choose from, there’s always something to fit my mood. My membership, however, also covers jazzradio.com’s sister station, radiotunes.com, which features a gazillion channels spanning pretty much every genre in existence. Last Friday, for the heck of it, I picked the Oldies, and O-M-G, everything they played dated from my elementary school years or earlier! It was the perfect playlist to file by!

So, whether at work, at home, or somewhere in between, music has proven critical to my existence. It fires up my imagination and grounds me at the same time. Of course I appreciate the value of the printing press—what writer wouldn’t?—but if I had to choose between TV and my stereo …

N H ell

ah, for the good old days ...

It’s finally happened. I’ve become one of the duffers. One of the crusties who remembers the good old days when one referee was just as incompetent as two, overtime was restricted to the playoffs, and the shootout was a cheap way to win an international hockey game. When the stars played with goons watching their backs and the boys thought twice before hitting a guy in the numbers.

When Ron MacLean hosted Hockey Night in Canada instead of a Sunday night mercy slot.

The game has changed, the league has changed, nothing is sacred and precious little makes sense.

The Flyers lost two in a row over the weekend. In the old days, I’d have gone, Guys, smarten up. Now I’m looking at the schedule and thinking, with 82 games in a season, who gets five days off then has to play back to back, one at home and one on the road? Who set that schedule in stone? I didn’t see the Columbus game, but the boys arrived in Montreal at 1:00 a.m. on game day against the Canadiens and tried to claw their way back from a 2 goal deficit only to fold like a cheap tent in the third period. They were tired! Heck, I get dopey after a long weekend and these guys are expected to hit the ice running after twice that long? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they’re professional athletes, they’re millionaires, they have nothing else to do but stay in shape for a brutally long season, but come on.

And that’s just the players. The fans are suffering mightily too, since the wedding news broke last spring: Rogers had bought broadcast rights to all NHL games and everyone else could go fish. Which is pretty much what TSN has had to do.

Not that TSN trumped CBC for hockey broadcasts, because for most of my life, CBC was where hockey lived. But there were also Canuck games on Wednesday nights, on the CTV affiliate out of Vancouver. Then cable TV expanded and sports channels were born. The Sports Network, for one. I was miffed when the CBC let the Hockey Night in Canada theme go to TSN, but got over it because, hey, TSN ran NHL double headers on Wednesday nights. Better yet, Tuesday night Flyer games were picked up by TSN2—a joy I discovered right before the apocalypse happened.

Most Canuck games were cast on Sportsnet Pacific, called by John and John—Shorthouse on play-by-play and Garrett on colour commentary. A pair of goofballs to be sure, but I enjoyed their banter as much as (and often more than) the game, and it was good to know that, if Ter and I were at loose ends on a winter’s night, there was probably a game somewhere on Shaw’s basic cable.

And, like Old Faithful, on Saturday nights, the CBC reigned supreme.

Not anymore.

HNIC still exists, but I no longer recognize it. Ron MacLean could be cloying, but I liked him better than George Snufflufagus. At least MacLean has sports broadcasting cred. Strombo is a glamour boy trying to be hip and falling embarrassingly short. The broadcast teams are all haywire. Gone from the booth are Rick Ball and Kelly Hrudey, replaced by no-name whozits dredged from the Sportsnet vault. And the panel between periods? I avoided Sportsnet to steer clear of Nick Kypreos and now he’s sitting in PJ Stock’s place with the sad remains of the HNIC talking heads.

Gone almost entirely are TSN broadcasts. Oh, there are games on the new TSN3, TSN4, TSN5 cable stations, when there’s no blackout in effect. Most are part of a new “sports channel” package requiring extra payment for the privilege of viewing. Which might be okay if there were no commercials, but who are we kidding?

Sportsnet channels … now there are a thousand of them, only three of which remain attached to the basic cable package (demanding no extra funding from the viewer) and none of which seem to carry Canuck games on a regular basis. Or any games, for that matter. When we do catch a Vancouver game, the Johns aren’t always calling it. As for the games included in our already exorbitant cable fee, the screen is often so busy with tickertape news items, irrelevant stats and those truly irritating banner ads for cars, restaurants and upcoming broadcast events, that the game is as disrespected as the viewer.

I hate this. I loathe the change, resent the suits responsible, and am powerless to do anything about it. I would stop watching hockey, but I’ve been robbed of that form of protest because I will not pay for games that were once “free” on basic cable.

Only on the Rogers network, you say?

Pity.