Older anons

Older anons
What was it like with only a handful of channels?

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we had less to watch, which meant we did other stuff like fuck, listen to music, go out with friends, or rent a video

Probably better than having a thousand channels and nothing of value to watch.

It was terrible. You had to watch crap they feed you. Imagine watching all these classic universal monsters every Halloween.
Don't get me wrong, I liked them but cmon not when watching another frankenstein, dracula or mummy tomb, curse or ghost all the time.

You just kind of excepted it..you didn't know better, so it didn't bother you.

One BW channel from 6AM to 10PM. Test pattern overnight.
TV was never our main source of entertainment since it was so limited, I only watched it for MASH between 7:30-8:00.

You had no alternative other than getting out of your house and socialize.

This. It was actually rare to see fat kids back in those days.

it's not like there was a lack of channels, probably around 28 basic, maybe 60 with cable and ppv. i had around that many growing up.

cartoons as a kid were scarce so i looked forward to them. also loved to flip through the channels.

Now that I rewind it, I only remember having exactly two fat friends across many many years.

I actually remember my gandma having an old black and white tv in one of the rooms in her house. Funny enough I saw some reruns of Disney's Wonderful World of Color on it.

not that guy, but in the UK we had 4 basic channels, bbc1, bbc2, itv and channel 4. cable/sky was around and had about 20 channels but that was it, . nobody cared, we just watched a vhs or did something else.

Doesn't really matter. There's only a couple channels worth watching anyway, don't need the rest

>go out with friends
Don't lie to him.

We actually went outside and played with our friends, but it was still fun to watch Saturday morning cartoons and hook up an NES.

I am not that old (25) but I did grow up poor and we couldn’t afford TV so we had to se bunny ears with aluminum foil to get local news, Fox, and a couple other channels.


Most of what I watched were dvds and tapes

I distinctly remember getting Jackie Chan’s First Strike and Mr. Nice Guy from Papa Johns and watching that like 10 times

i was a kid. kids go out and play. the only time i watched tv was after school until 5pm when the adult programmes started like news and soaps. fuck that i'd rather climb a tree senpai

>being a pleb
I would sit in front of that TV for hours watching reruns of everything that was on until I got sent to bed.

My entire childhood schedule up until high school

1. Get home ~4:00 and watch toonami while doing homework
2. Go outside and play football or basketball for 2 hours
3. Dinner around 6:00
4. Play video games until 9 and go to bed

>adult programmes started like news
Hated when dad would be home and take the remote off me so he could watch the news or sports.

didnt watch tv all day but when i did it was the best hour of monkey magic and hercules the legendary journeys

that's because you had no friends you hermit

You just knew what was on every single channel at all times.
There were so few channels that it was easy to memorize so u knew what on was tv at all times.

the real world was more appealing back then

this basically. they didnt give a tv show to any transgender teen or gangster whore on some obscure channel. you had to have talent.

>having friends
Get a load of this fag.

i used to cry when a brit soap opera called 'coronation street' came on. it was soooo fucking depressing i'd literally cry

youtube.com/watch?v=F5isl0O4bAI

i was 9. i was normal back then damnit!!!

tfw u skipped school and watched tv and realized there was nothing on tv at that time of day.
You'd end up watching weird shit because of so few options.
obscure old 60s sitcoms like Hazel.
The Flying Nun with Sally Field
Gidget with Sally Field
Mayberry RFD

My family only had five tv channels until 2007. To be honest I didn't really care or notice a gap in my life, except when kids in primary school talked about what they watched on the Disney Channel last night. It was a Catholic school in a poor area though so a few people were in my situation, some had no tv.
It did make watching spongebob at my nan's house really special and exciting. Miss her.

Back then it was safe to go outside, so you did that instead. You could go downtown or hit up the shopping mall without getting gangraped to death or blown up by Muslims or beaten to death by gangs of gangs of roaming BLM youths. Instead you could have civil conversations with and even befriend minorities because they weren't weaponized against you by Communist brainwashing. You could also walk down a suburban street without having to step aside for morbidly obese leftists with dyed purple dreadlocks and rainbow furry tails and being falsely accused of rape for sniggering at them. The shows weren't 100% hysterical poisonous political hatred directed at you, though, so there was actually a reason to watch TV. So I guess it balances out.

Just like now, there was rarely anything interesting on. Multiple channels with 24/7 programming have done nothing else but made it more clear that most of the TV programs are pure crap.

Seasonal.

Our house had a c-band satellite (mid 80s-early 90s), so we always had tons of stuff to watch. Weekly blocks of syndicated cartoons after school was a favorite of mine... the black screen for commercial insertion was kinda lame though.

Younger user here. Literally no one watches tv anymore.

i miss that. also miss watching scrambled titties on the channels we didn't have.

didn't sit inside all day, we didn't have internet either, felt good.

>Britbong
>live near city with massive Indian population (Leicester)
>in addition to the usual five channels there was also MATV
>sometimes my friends and I would put it on and laugh at the weird Indian shows and movies
>ofw Bollywood musicals were showing

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlands_Asian_Television

Overall though with only six channels you tended not to watch much TV. I still don't.

How old? For my age:You know how you can only see a movie worth a shit and less than 15 years old on tv if you pay for cable? Wasn't always the case. And most of the kinds of shows people watch on cable? They would have been on broadcast then, too. Cable was very bad for tv in total.

I grew up in Birmingham and I've never heard of this. How is that possible?

I did. During late 80s and early 90s during spring and summer I was rarely at home, most of the time I was outside playing football, going out with bike and playing in the arcade.
Then puberty came in and everything changed.
Not american by the way.

34 to here, it was more important to catch your certain shows at the right time, because unless you recorded it on a VCR, you missed it. There were less channels, but I honestly feel that the quality was overall better on average, no reality TV shit and less celebrity shit
Every day after school, it was Batman TAS, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Simpsons
I actually miss old TV, haven't had cable in many years, but every time I see TV somewhere it's worse and worse

It broadcast from Leicester and the signal didn't travel far. Once you were about five miles from the outskirts of the city you wouldn't be able to pick it up. Even where I lived the picture was a bit fuzzy.

we kept the only video rental store in business

Ah fair enough. Would have been funny to put it on for a laugh back in the day.

we used to get 4 channels over the air. now i think we can only get one like that so its worse for me now

We were just as glued to those few channels as we are now to the whole internet. Much easier to manipulate us on a massive scale then.

How old? For my age:You know how you can only see a movie worth a shit and less than 15 years old on tv if you pay for cable? Wasn't always the case. And most of the kinds of shows people watch on cable? They would have been on broadcast then, too. You could know what the fuck people were talking about through casual viewing instead of having to sit down and fucking pirate everything if you didn't want to pay a ridiculous amount for less quality than what cable used to have. You could also find out you like shows that didn't sound like you would that way, since you're less likely to search something that doesn't sound good to you than overhear and glimpse it. Cable was very bad for tv in total.

any other uk anons grow up decidedly middle class but with parents who refused to get anything other than terrestrial? date jelously of the poor kids with disney and later the cbbc channel

It wasn't just lack of tv you had limited internet or no internet, you could focus more on other things

I used to draw a lot,

Lived in germany for a while and there was only 1 tv and radio channel it felt weird when I moved back to the uk to have 4 different channels to choose from

don't even own a tv now, this is why I come to Sup Forums see what worth streaming when I want to watch something

when I think about it now I don't know how people are addicted to it, If I visit my parents the tv is constantly on and before I left they used to come home from work and sit in-front of the tv for another 6-7 hours

Believe it or not the amount of watchable content on tv hasn't increased in proportion to the number of channels.

Not too bad.

I learned a lot by staring autistically at the screen and absorbing whatever came on.

These days I don't consume much I don't seek out myself. On the other hand that means I discover unexpected things less often.

Swings and roundabouts.

I was born in 2000 but I'm pretty sure that back then no one dared to force racial diversity into everyone throat or making leftist propaganda disguised as a TV show for children, surely there was war and such but it sounds like it was way better back then

It's fluctuated since some point in the 60s. They didn't have the balls to do it both quite as much and consistently as they do now, but compared to some points, that difference is fairly small. Also, it factors in that there weren't as many minority actors and performers before,.

You can pay around $90 a month for 90% of it now, though!

Fantastic story bro

In the early 00's in my Slavistan I had something around 6 channels- and I wasn't poor to begin with. Mostly local sitcoms, American TV shows from the 80s and 90s, some movies in the evening. These days most channels figured out that docusoaps earn a lot of money, so TV became unwatchable.

That's right, Yes Man.

There werent things such as transgender teens when I was a kid, they were all locked up in mental homes where they belong

Comfy, there's a strange comfort in not having to choose

I stopped watching a decade ago

I'm sorry, I meant to say around 95%!
hasn't cable been wonderful?!

You saw stuff you weren't necessarily into but which broadened your horizons.

It was simple - I didn´t watch a lot of TV. As a kid I would go out after school and play with my friends. On the weekends I would watch a movie from Blockbuster.
As a teenager I would come home, practice drums, listen to music or just go out. Sometimes I would just stay home a read a book. I didn´t even play videogames much, maybe twice a month.
Nowadays I still don´t watch a lot of TV. When I am home by myself I turn the damn thing off.

It was pretty shit at times. On the odd occasion you would be entertained by something you would never pick if given the option. But with the internet around, limited tv always gets btfo, no matter the nostalgia.
The true gold was catching some foreign kino with explicit sex scenes. Those treasures were rare as a kid with no nudie mags or internet.

i grew up with 4 channels until 2006 but to compensate that, we had a satellite dish on my mom's childhood house where we spent our vacations, so i'd watch lots of german tv

I think the greatest difference is that you weren't fed with only what you like. Of course there is the problem of choosing today, with that internet that was blown out the roof.

But both with the internet and with television today with multiple channels, you have some programming that suits you, my mother watches cooking shows all day, my father watches his art documentaries, my brother watches sports and they are all up 24/7. Our facebook feed is designed to work on us, it shows only what they think you'd like.

This has a good side, an imediate pleasure in finding what you want and we don't have the frustration of saying "there is nothing on tv, there is nothing to do". There are plenty to do and our anxiety today is about that. The bad side is exactly that you are sucked into it like a spiral, you don't go out of your comfort zone. I've watched plenty of bad movies or retarded programs on tv back then, but that's not a bad thing, I discovered a lot of things through that, good or bad, but nevertheless things that showed me different areas of culture, different worldviews sometimes.

Grew up in the early 80s, it was only a handful of channels before it tv, on & hbo & network tv went off the air from about midnight to 5am. To me it was better, quality over quantity

MODS

no big deal

It was fine, we didn't know any better. It was choice enough and our parents hadn't had TV (at least when they were kids anyway) and would remind us of the fact. People were still pretty excited it was in colour.
What this user says: And also TV also produced a common social experience both because everyone was watching much the same stuff and also because there was less money in TV (at least in Bongland) so you'd get a load of old stuff. I don't think I'd have watched b&w war films and Ealing comedies if there had been 60 or 100 channels to choose between, but no regrets at all. And of course all the eccentric and weird Britbong kid's TV that its hard not to drone on about (Mr Benn, Bagpuss, Clangers, Trumpton etc). For a bit TV brought people together oddly enough.

Too much choice is actually bad, its why all you millenials are retarded

I legit hated t.v. as it was boring. I usually went over to friends and shot the shit. Man things were so much simpler. There was also no deodorant so there's that too. T. Oldfag

youtube.com/watch?v=LPguqGyV4OU

Before the days of cable and VHS, television premiers of big-screen movies used to be fucking events. People would invite friends over, pop popcorn and shit. Miniseries would capture everyone's attention and would be discussed for months if not years.

Only person old enough on here to remember a handful of channels is Shatner.

Liberating. Same as having no internet. It meant we had to get hobbies and learn skills to amuse ourselves, and actually go outside amd meet friends, which led to us doing stuff together. We couldn't just argue like toddlers on imageboards or watch cat videos for 10 hours while pretending to be a nihilist.

depends where you were/when born. until 92 my country had two channels and both were state-owned.

We had five channels- CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and one local channel that introduced my boner to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

We played outside a lot. TV was cool, though. The A-Team, The Incredible Hulk, Knight Rider, Airwolf, and the Saturday morning lineup.

Dunno, I played outside with friends or board games with family and then went to bed.

Remember when Fox just like, appeared?

Until I was about 17 we only had 8 channels. It was good I think, you had your 8 channels and you flipped through them for something to watch, and if there was nothing on you checked the teletext for what was on next, and if there was still nothing on you went and did something else.

You got to know each channel's schedule fairly well so there was more of a sense of structure, you knew at 6 on weekdays both RTE2 and BBC2 showed the Simpsons.

Because there wasn't an infinite range of things to watch, or a variety of on-demand ways to watch them, people tended to watch the same things at the same time, which lent more of a social aspect to things. For instance, they used to air L O S T on a Sunday evening, and if you missed it you had nothing to do but wait util the rerun on Wednesday, and pretty much everyone watched it because there wasn't much else to watch. So on Monday morning almost everyone had seen it, nobody was ahead and few people were behind, so you could chat and theorise about it and have a laugh. Whereas a little while ago I met up with some mates and the conversation came around to Dark, and some of us were finished it, some of us were watching it but a few episodes behind, some people planned to watch it through when it was finished, so we couldn't really talk about it.

I think that's the most important thing that we've lost now, the communal aspect of watching TV.

...

I grew up with an antenna and so did anyone else here over the age of 35.

About the same as it is today. There's hardly anything worth watching on television.

I remember my grandaunt downstairs from my grandma had cable and would let me watch Nick.

I am 35 and paren't didn't get cable until I was in college

I remember watching lord of the flies on this. Skipped school. Played doctor with my sister. Put my finger in her tiny pussy, she flicked my shriveled up worm. We were young

>. You could also walk down a suburban street without having to step aside for morbidly obese leftists with dyed purple dreadlocks and rainbow furry tails and being falsely accused of rape for sniggering at them
is this what neets actually belive?

You went outside or read books more. So it was pretty great.

>tfw when lived in croydon and got all the pirate wog radio stations

We were outside playing, only good stuff on TV was during the weekends

This.

With cable I maybe had 50 channels or so, and maybe I watched 10 channels or less.

Before I stopped watching tv all together I had maybe 200 channels, and I think I only watched 5 channels, and most of those just played edited and censored movies.

I grew up with 2 channels, I'm 33

I'm 31, my house always had cable. I even remember when my parents had to pay extra to get the disney channel but then when I got older they got rid of it only for it to I think just a few years later become a normal cable channel.

>What you watched when there was nothing else to watch til you find something to watch.

with no internet you had to watch whatever was on. It wasn't a problem though because you don't miss what you never had.

The plus side is that you grew up watching older tv shows and films.You end up discovering things you might otherwise not watch. I find lots of young people that haven't seen certain classics for this reason.

nice tv

life was hell until they invented the remote