Okay my sweet little grandkids, it’s time to put down the Ipads and head off to bed. What’s that? You want grandpa to tell you a bedtime story? Well….let’s see…..okay got one. Snuggle under the covers and I’ll tell you a TV story.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a world where there were only three TV stations…..a world where you had to actually get up out of the chair and walk to the TV set and turn a dial to change the channel…..a world where the TV screen was part of a large piece of furniture that rested on the floor, not on the wall. It was called Antenna World, named after the long, thin metal protrusions that rested on its top.
There were only three networks broadcasting on Antenna World, NBC, ABC and CBS. Actually there was a fourth network. It was called PBS. But it existed in that snowy, murky land called UHF. No one really understood much about UHF, except that there were a bunch of school type shows on it, mostly teachers in classrooms standing in front of blackboards doing math or science lessons……like anybody was going to watch that! And anyway, it was almost impossible to get a nice clean picture on UHF. Usually it would fade in and out like a burst of wind.
There was no color on Antenna World. There was only black and white and shades of gray. Strangest of all, there was no strong violence or bad language or naughty romantic shenanigans on the shows. When the good guys would shoot the bad guys, they would just fall down. Oh, and that’s another thing. In Antenna World the good guys would always win. And you could tell who they were. Some of them wore white hats. On the funny shows they would try to make you laugh by just being silly. They didn’t have to use bad words and naughty jokes. Sometimes they would just hit somebody in the face with a pie, or fall through a trap door.
Everything was fine on Antenna World until one day it was invaded by the Satellite People. The Satellite People attached long cables and weird looking dishes on the roofs of people’s houses and brought in hundreds of networks and channels. Suddenly there was much, much more than NBC, ABC and CBS. And every channel was aimed at a special group of people. There were channels for golfers and tennis players and race car drivers, for people who liked cooking, and remodeling and travelling, for fans of old movies, mushy movies, and funny movies, for Jews and Catholics and Scientologists. There were even channels for people who didn’t speak English.
The Satellite People worried that there would not be enough folks to watch all of these channels, so they started making them nastier and naughtier and more disrespectful. They were also charging a lot of money to see all of their channels. As time went by the number of channels kept growing and growing. There were channels for children and teenagers and very old people. Channels for music videos and government hearings and cowboy western shows. And some of the shows kept getting nastier and nastier and naughtier and naughtier. It got so bad that some of the people on Antenna World had had enough. They told the Satellite People to go away. They started cutting those cables and taking the dishes off of their roofs. They went back to the long, thin metal protrusions on top of their TV’s. They found they could still get more channels than just NBC, ABC, and CBS, but most of them just showed those old programs that were funny and silly and nice.
The people of Antenna World had learned a very important lesson. That more is not always better. That we can laugh and cry and pay attention to things without them being nasty and naughty. That it was silly to spend all that money for hundreds of channels that they don’t even watch! Why, they even discovered they didn’t have to watch so much TV at all. They started talking to each other and spending time together. They were very pleased. And they lived happily ever after. The end.
Now go to sleep my little buddies. Tomorrow we’ll take a break from Disney Plus and maybe play catch.