Edit: Corrected from Starship Troopers to The Forever War
Spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
True. But then again, far less TV was watched. There was an occasional good show, the rest was filler that was pure drivel.
There's a reason kids played outside with their friends in those days. There was nothing to do in the house.
The stations would broadcast a test pattern at night.
TV was anything but low-key in culture. In fact because everyone watched a show at the same time, there was much more cultural synchronization/watercooler talk with respect to shows like MASH or Seinfeld.
What did change beginning with maybe the Sopranos was that (a limited slice of) TV became more high culture and displaced film to a certain degree in that regard. (And streaming enabled the sort of serialized drama that was hard to pull off in a fixed time slot broadcast world.)
>the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it.
True, but in the US, TV Guide magazine was I believe the most subscribed to magazine in the country. That's where a lot of people got more detailed (though relatively still quite limited) information from.
That is really interesting. For want of a better way to put it, I also agree that it had a "long-tail" quality to it; it was just implicitly part of the status quo.
Communication nowadays seems to be broadly impacted by disproportionate focus on explicit definition, disambiguation, structure, etc, but in such a way that abolishes and shuns implied cohesion. Constantly trying to define and underline the way things should be instead of just getting on with letting things be the way they already are. My current chicken-and-egg "hmm" is whether this came before or after the worldwide obsession around security and safety (which arguably started just before the turn of the century - I once read the "no no stay inside" thing started in America circa 1998).
From this perspective I definitely think TV occupied more of the "tribal knowledge" side of written vs implied culture, than it does today - both in terms of production and societal impact. Kind of weird, that; it had more of an impact when it wasn't trying to shoehorn and corral. Heh.
I lastly wouldn't say that TV "crept up in importance" so much as turned into a vacuous foghorn contest to see who can bellow the hottest air the furthest :P
(AU here, aka UK Lite Edition)
I remember daytime TV in the 60s. Jack LaLane's exercise show, aimed at bored housewives. You had to be desperately bored to watch that. There were daytime soap operas, about as interesting as watching paint dry (they were aimed at bored housewives). Then there were variety shows the local TV stations themselves produced aimed at preschool kids. Like the Krusty the Clown show on the Simpsons. The shows were just a camera pointed at a stage and the host tried to figure out something to do. I bet those shows are all lost from being taped over. There were talk shows, which were very cheap to produce. Game shows, which I never understood the attraction of.
The better stuff was prime time evening. I liked Daktari, but that was a half hour once a week. Movies were very rarely shown. The evening news 30 minutes was popular.
When Star Trek TOS appeared, that was amazing. Even my very skeptical dad actually said it was good.
It's not that I didn't want to watch TV all the time. I did. But there was very little to see on it. Much more fun to go outside and meet up with the neighborhood kids and do kid stuff.