Scary television

Television came to Huntly in the early 1960s, but not to our house. My parents thought it rotted peoples’ brains and stymied the arts of independent thought and family debate. Huntly was a small mining and farm-servicing town in rural New Zealand where I was brought up.  Not many people were well-off in Huntly.
 
My mother would point at the broken-down houses that waited for paint but had a TV mast on the roof, and sniff at their owners’ priorities.  How I wished I lived in their houses. I suspect, so did my father.

By the time I was 8 years old, I was allowed to visit some neighbours’ for 45 minutes of TV once a week. What I remember most was having to walk the 400m to and from the neighbour’s house down a narrow lane passing through a dark pine forest. In winter it was usually dark by TV’s curfew time. I would have to run to get passed the boogey men waiting for me.  But “Diver Dan”, “Lassie”, “Mr Ed” and later “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” all seemed worth the risk. 

TV was Black & White in those days and glowed … rather like the image I feature here as my reminder of the TV run. My photograph was of a line-up of Macrocarpa trees flanking the side of a sports field near our home in Dunedin, New Zealand.

By the way, Mother was right … when we finally got TV in our house when I was around 15 years old, our family discourse instantly fell away almost entirely to the minimum necessary for co-habitation and sharing a pantry.  Watching youngsters on the cellphones these days makes me wonder if face-to-face communication has now degraded another couple of notches since.