Channeling Christmas

My article last week on Christmas gifts of the past elicited quite a response from readers. So, this week we head back to the past, but focused now on one type of Christmas gift that has been on everyone’s wish list for the last 60 years or so — televisions.

Before television we had radio. The pre-war period (or what they called peace-time here in the Philippines) was the era of radio. Music, news, drama and comedy reached Filipino homes first in Manila then in most of the country. At least those that had major broadcasting stations.

By the ’20s, western inventors were testing a new device that would transmit wireless images along with wireless sound. The idea of television was actually born much earlier. Jules Vern wrote about a “distant vision” machine (the term directly translated from the French) in his 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. From that time on works of fiction drove inventors to develop the technology for “wireless moving images.” This is much like how cell phones were first inspired by Star Trek’s communicators almost a century later.

Scotty started beaming Kirk up the Enterprise in full living color only a quarter century or so after the first commercial broadcasts in 1939. The war intervened and television only came back to the US in the late ’40s. It first appeared in the Philippines in the mid-’50s; although experimental sets were scratch-built by the likes of Dean GY Zara of the FEU.

The Radiowealth ad from the late ‘50s in the Philippines also offered radios for your other rooms.

Television really took off in the Philippines only in the late ’50s as more sets were sold and the first stations managed enough content to broadcast mostly in the evenings…although the lunchtime variety shows like Darigold Jamboree quickly took the cue from their original radio versions.

From the mid ’50s onwards we started to see the television marketed via ads in newspapers and their weekly magazines. These weekly periodicals like the Sunday Times magazine, The Weekly Mirror, The Chronicle magazine, as well as the Philippines Free Press were the venues for these ads. Being big-ticket items these ads mostly came out right before and during the Christmas season.

The sets were just below cars in terms of cost. The ads touted them in the late ’50s as de riguer for modern living rooms. Many ads like Radiowealth’s included other appliances (mostly radios) for all the other smaller rooms or for the outdoors (powered by batteries, which we would bake in the sun to recharge). In those days having one television was already a sign that you’ve “made it.”

Every year television sets would be marketed at Christmas with more frequency and with more variety in terms of screen size and cabinetry; 20” was considered large then (a function of the cost of those CRTs- cathode ray tubes), so manufacturers added to the bulk with fancy wood shells, which were necessary anyway since those old set, like radios, used tubes instead of transistors — and they heated up quickly, necessitating a large box with vents for cooling.

TVs were expensive so the top-of-the-line ones were advertised with people dressed to the nines just to watch a TV show.

Although color TV was available in the US from the late ’50s, it was not seen in the Philippines till 1964. Advertisers sold black-and-white TV using brightly colored ads to make up for the lack of polychromy on screen. For a while in the early ’60s, some entrepreneurs sold “magic colorizing” screens that you could mount on black-and-white sets to turn them into faux-colored TV (they actually just refracted some light to fringe the figures on screen with slightly rainbowish outlines).

My favorite shows then were (aside from cartoons and The Lucky Seven Show in the early ’60s) 77 Sunset Strip, Bonanza, Davy Crockett, Combat, The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, Ivanhoe, My Favorite Martian, I Spy, The Man from UNCLE, The Fugitive, Super Car, and The Thunderbirds.

In the ’60s I remember longing for those newfangled colored TVs by Radiowealth or those assembled by the robot of Ysmael Steel. Manufacturers still made other appliances to complement the TVs since shows were still mainly in the evenings, except for Saturdays and Sundays when cartoons and religious shows were aired.

ABS-CBN and Uncle Bob’s Channel 7 started broadcasting in color from ’67 onwards. That was the golden era for watching TV shows for me. My favorites were The Wild Wild West, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Laugh In, Space 1999, Charlie’s Angels, Captain Scarlett, Hawaii 50, The Avengers, The Prisoner and Battlestar Galactica!

Color TV was the top gift to give one’s honey.

The ’70s brought a whole galaxy of television options as the prices of set became more affordable and more manufacturers made for a competitive market. TVs were now advertised all year round although new models were usually launched towards Christmas to encourage sales. Having more than one TV was getting to be normal, too.

The ’80s and the advent of Betamax (eventually VHS) machines changed the complexion of television sales. Now you had to buy both machines to really benefit for the technologies. The shift from cassette audio tapes to CD (eventually DVDs) also led to a melding of gadgets and huge changes in the way television “sets” were made and sold.

Today televisions are not “sets” anymore but “screens.” These ever-growing and ever-thinning electronic marvels can now be hung on walls, suspended from ceilings, and even embedded in your bathrooms. Television and multi-media screens are now marketed during Christmas with the latest technologies — 3D, Internet capability, connectivity to your computers, tablets, cameras and even you phones. Many phones now boast video playback as a standard function. And to bring the cycle back to its origins, some phones can now receive television or “distant vision” signals across the ether.

Next year, my forecast is that these screens will be all be 3D (without the need for special glasses), and so light and thin that you could use adhesive to mount them on a wall. Some will feature built in hard disc drives of up to five terabytes of memory so you could store downloaded videos or anything you wish to record from the screen or from a thousand other satellite-accessed channels.

I do wish that connectivity ports are accessible in front all the time instead of having to de-mount the whole shebang just to attach a flash drive or mount my iPod or iPad. Oh yeah, they will have “Siri” and I’d be able to give voice commands. If they make this television, they’ll probably call it “Sirivision”… and I want one next Christmas!

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