My name will never go down next to Milton Berle’s in the annals of television, but I can honestly claim I was a sort of video pioneer. No, I’m not talking about the two TV shows I hosted and produced in very recent years on a regular broadcast TV station in South Florida. I’m going back now to the seventies, and the telecast medium wasn’t a regular broadcast channel. It was cable.
When New York City, where I lived at the time, got wired up for cable TV, part of the deal was that the two cable companies serving Manhattan would have to provide Public Access channels, which anyone could get time on. Anyone. Even me.
I first became aware of Public Access when the slow process of cabling New York finally reached our building. Twisting the dial to see what came in on the lettered channels that appeared on the converter they’d given us, I discovered the curious amalgam of lunatics, egomaniacs, cause-promoters, and self-proclaimed stars that graced, and occasionally disgraced, channels C and D. The roster of Public Access programs included such offerings as “The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex, and Violence” and “Waste Meat News.”
I knew I was no Johnny Carson, but I also was no dope. People with cable time were getting the names of their organizations, or causes, in front of the camera. Advertising was forbidden, but couldn’t I get the name of Apartments For Rent, the newspaper I was publishing at the time, in front of the audience?
I wanted a good time slot, and one that was available on both systems so my show could be cablecast to both uptown and downtown through the interconnect. I signed the necessary papers, cleared the time on Channel C of both systems, and booked studio time for taping. I was told there would be no time for rehearsal at the Public Access studio, and only one take. There would be no stopping the tape. I was also warned that the facilities were simple.
“Simple” wasn’t the word. “Primitive” would have come closer to it. The studio was a storefront up in Harlem, divided into three rooms: front, back, and all-the-way-back. Up front were a reception desk, a tape deck, a quantity of chairs, and not much else. On the other side of the glass partition was the studio itself, an area smaller than the average living room. There were folding chairs, a table, and a plant. That was the set. There were fixed lights, one camera, another tape deck, and some microphones. That was the equipment. There was one man. That was the crew.
No lighting man was there—or needed. The lights remained on when the studio was in use, off when it wasn’t. There were no spotlights, no adjustments in brightness of the existing lights. There was only one camera, therefore only one cameraman was needed. There was no stagehand or propmaster. The cameraman moved the table, chairs, or plant as needed before each show started taping, and there they remained. There was no director. It was permissible to bring one’s own, but the directing had to be done silently, and the director had to make it his or her own responsibility to keep out of camera range.
The third section of the storefront, all-the-way-in-the-back, contained two bathrooms, which doubled as dressing rooms. They opened off a little dark area behind the partition that served as backdrop of the set. This was “offstage.” If you needed to “wait in the wings” till your cue, you entered from there. If you lingered too long in the bathroom changing clothes after you finished taping, and nobody counted heads before the next show started, when you left the bathroom you were likely to walk onstage into someone else’s show. It was also inadvisable to flush the toilet while the tape was rolling. The sound carried.
There were no listings for Access shows in the daily papers. The cable companies enclosed monthly listings with their bills; and updated listings of all shows, cable and broadcast, ran on one of the cable channels, but we all still wondered if anyone out there was watching. There were no Neilsens for Access.
I know I had at least three viewers. Three times I was stopped on the street by people who said they had seen me on television, but none of the three knew where on the tube they had seen me. Two of them thought they had seen me on PBS!
I called the show, “New York, the Living Scene.” Not as catchy as “The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex, and Violence,” but more relevant to the subject matter I planned to present: shows about living in New York, especially about where to live…and finding where to live.
At first, in my effort to publicize Apartments for Rent , I kept the show centered around apartment-hunting. My first guest was a real estate broker who discussed what the situation was like on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and gave some good tips for apartment-hunting. The second week, my guest discussed the availability situation on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, and what the most important things were to remember in deciding which was the right apartment for you. The third week, my guest discussed the scarcity of apartments in Greewich Village, and how to decide whether it was worth all the hassle of looking for that rarest of commodities, a well-situated, comfortable-sized, affordable apartment in Manhattan.
The opening and closing credits of the show identified “your hostess” as “Cynthia MacGregor, co-publisher of Apartments for Rent .” My name was written small and spoken softly. The name of the paper was written larger and announced louder. By me, of course. The cable company did not provide announcers, either.
And several times during each show, I urged our viewers to let us know if they had any comments about the show or requests about guests or topics they’d like to see on future shows. They were urged to send these requests to “‘New York, The Living Scene’ c/o Apartments for Rent , P.O. Box 62…” or to call us at…. I did everything but read out the list of every newsstand that carried our paper!
During the course of those first shows, I also managed to find some opportunity to talk about the publication with my guest. If the broker was speaking about the number of vacancies in the East 50s then, as opposed to two years ago, I’d speak up and say, “It’s true. There seem to be fewer apartments available in that neighborhood now, to judge by the ads we’re getting in Apartments for Rent every week, but there still are some things around. We had an ad for an apartment last issue that sounded really great and on a very good block, too.”
Of course, while I was busy plugging AFR , my guest was talking up his or her agency. I was amazed that the cable company never bleeped our self-advertising references. Commercials, or anything that smacked of them, were a no-no, and we certainly laid it on thick at times. The cable studio probably just didn’t have a bleep machine, either.
By the sixth show, I was running out of topics, though not out of guests. Most of my advertisers wanted to jump on the bandwagon, and one of them had already applied for a show of her own. Having covered most of the marketable sections of Manhattan, the only borough we were cablecast in, I facetiously proposed doing a show on, Is There Life in the Outer Boroughs?
Instead I moved on to: Decorating (Fixing up that new apartment you’ll find among the many wonderful listings in Apartments for Rent ), Moving (How to pack carefully and move economically when you’re moving into the great new apartment you’ll find in Apartments for Rent ), and even Exterminating (What to do if you find you’re not the only tenants in that otherwise wonderful apartment that you’ll find in Apartments for Rent ).
When I had exhausted all the topics ancillary to apartment-hunting, it was still too early to go back and do an update on the vacancy situation in each part of Manhattan, but fortunately by then we had started publishing Help Wanted. I saw a chance for a double promotional tie-in, and invited an employment agency owner to come on the show and discuss the job situation. (What are you chances of getting a better paying job, such as you can find in the pages of Help Wanted, which will enable you to afford the rents of those great apartments you can find every week in Apartment for Rent ?)
From there, I branched out into less and less apartment-relevant topics. True, I was losing the tie-in, but if I limited myself to the same tired topics, I was afraid I’d lose my audience, if by chance I had one. I still told the audience, once or twice during every show, that they could send their comments or requests to the show in care of the paper. (Pause before paper’s name, enunciate carefully, speak loudly. No trumpet fanfare, but you can’t have everything.) I still told the audience, at the beginning and the end of every show, that their hostess was “co-publisher of Apartments for Rent,” or even, on weeks when I felt especially daring, “co-publisher of the weekly newspaper Apartments for Rent.”
Saying it wasn’t difficult, getting it in writing was. Along with all the other things the studio didn’t have, it also didn’t have a machine to provide a credit crawl. Once I saw that there was no real scenery, no lighting effects, etc., I shouldn’t have been surprised that there was no provision for credits. In fact, under the circumstances, the average show on Access didn’t have too many credits to list. Hairdresser? Costumes? Assistant producer? Be real!
When I asked, the first week, how I was supposed to list what credits I did have (“This week’s guest:…” “Your hostess:…” and the most important of all, Apartments For Rent ) I was told that some of the shows held hand-lettered posterboard signs up to the camera.
One week I was scheduled to tape at a different hour than my usual first-thing-in-the-morning. When I arrived, the chairs in the front room were filled. There were standees, too, and even people sitting on the floor. I wondered if one of the shows was featuring an orchestra, but what I was looking at was four shows’ worth of hosts and guests, the usual afternoon backlog. The studio scheduled tapings too close together, without allowing enough time between shows, and this was the predictable result. The later in the day your taping was scheduled, the further off schedule the studio was.
What’s more, not only didn’t they leave enough time for foreseeable delays, but technical troubles really threw them off! If there was trouble with the only camera, everything had to stop till another one was brought down from the main building, 82 blocks away.
Any other technical trouble, such as a blown light or malfunctioning mike, also required stopping. At least, with so little equipment, there was a limit to the number of things that could break down.
The long wait that day turned out not to be a waste of time. We all sat around exchanging gripes about the equipment, or lack of it, and I raised the topic that was bothering me most at the moment: lack of facilities for a credit crawl.
I had a Headliner machine in the office—remember, this was long before the computer era—and could run off all the professional-looking lettering I needed. But to hold up signs, one by one, in front of the camera? Tacky! One of the groups waiting for their studio time was an aggregation of people promoting some non-profit cause. They had their act as together as the facilities would allow. They brought their own props with them, several guests per show, and one fellow even served as as their show’s director. They also had a credit crawl.
“It’s easy,” the star/producer explained to me. “All you have to do is take a long strip of paper, print your credits on it from top to bottom, and tape it up on the studio wall before the show starts. Then have the cameraman pan down the list, and it’ll look like credits rolling up, on the screen.”
He was right. I taped pieces of typing paper together to make one long sheet and pasted the lettering onto this. Taping it firmly to the studio wall so the edge of the paper didn’t show, I pressed the tape down firmly so it wouldn’t show, either. Voila! A credit crawl! I had two sets of credits, opening and closing. One carried the guest’s name, which changed every week. Both featured the name Apartments for Rent in big bold letters, and an attractive picture to catch the viewer’s eyes. Except for the fact that it wasn’t superimposed over a shot of my guests and me, you couldn’t tell when you watched the show that it wasn’t a real credit crawl.
I discovered another technical deficiency when I had the children’s chorus on as guests. I was getting further and further away from apartment-oriented themes, and with the holidays coming up I had thought the children’s chorus would make a nice show. They sang songs in several languages and were multi-national themselves.
They had appeared in public but never on TV, so their leader didn’t turn her nose up when she heard the show was “only on Access.” It was a reaction I’d gotten from other people; they were willing to guest on the show till they heard it wasn’t “real” television. Then they said Thanks but no thanks.
The children’s chorus didn’t mind that we were only on Access, but they were concerned about whether the piano in the studio was well tuned. Tuned? A phone call to the studio revealed there was no piano at all and no chance of getting one. The kids couldn’t sing a capella . What to do?
I went to the chorus director’s house with my little cassette recorder and recorded her playing the accompaniment for the chorus on her own piano. Now all I had to do was figure out how to get the tape played at the right time and stopped at the right time.
I couldn’t dragoon anyone into going up to Harlem for the taping with us to operate the tape recorder, so I positioned my chair in the studio facing the camera 3/4 instead of straight on. At that angle, it was easier to hide the fact that the arm that was away from the camera was behind my back, clutching the tape recorder. While introducing the chorus and director, I turned the tape on and silently began counting in my head. One, two, three . If I talked too long, the piano would start playing while I was still talking.
Miracle of miracles, I timed it right. I shut up right before the piano came on. The chorus joined in on cue, and the first number went flawlessly. When the group stopped singing, I shut off the machine.
My arm was beginning to ache from the awkward position. The director introduced the next song. I complimented her on the chorus’s singing as I turned the machine on and silently counted again. Again, I stopped talking just before the piano sounded as if on cue. All the songs went off without a hitch, but when I later saw the show on TV, it looked as if one of my arms was crippled or missing.
There were other horrors to contend with, too. What do you do when your one and only guest doesn’t show? I’ll bet Jay Leno never had that problem. It’s one minute till taping time, and you’ve got to go on. Doing what ? I went on alone, and I talked for the whole 30 minutes. I have no recollection of what I said. It’s probably all for the better.
There came a point when it seemed I had run out of guests. Not everyone was jumping at the chance to appear on “New York, The Living Scene,” and some of my shows had bored me so much that I kept yawning on camera. I had no reason to believe my audience was any better entertained than I. I had no way of knowing whether any more copies of AFR were being sold per week because of the show. I had no concrete reason to believe I even had an audience. “The Living Scene” died.
This blogpost was adapted from a chapter of Life Behind the Office. If you enjoyed reading it, consider buying the book, published by Roundtable Publishing and available at GreatReads.buzz