Bring back the test pattern: When it comes to TV, the boomers had it best | Peter Goers

When it comes to classic entertainment, only one generation can seriously lay claim to being the most privileged of them all, writes Peter Goers.

In our digital age knobs on all manner of appliances have gone the way of the dodo. A long time ago in a galaxy far away we had black and white televisions.

My very first memory is the great excitement of our TV set being delivered – a Kreisler – circa 1960 and it was placed proudly in front of the terylene curtains in the lounge room and I plopped in front of it on the Burgundy Axminster wall-to-wall carpet (which covered beautiful jarrah floorboards) near the kero heater and was immediately told “don’t sit too close!”

Then I fell in love – firstly with TV itself and then with Mr Squiggle’s offsider, Miss Pat.

My love for Miss Pat was total until I callously, ruthlessly threw her over for Anne North on the Channel Niners.

I finally met my beloved Anne North, 62 years later at a funeral and expressed my unrequited love.

I didn’t tell her that in later years I threw her over for Willsy, Peta Peter, Bobo Faulkner (in a Cashmere Bouquet bubble bath) and Kate Fitzpatrick.

.

You changed channels with a dial even though TV announcers implored you “don’t touch that dial”.

There were knobs for volume, tone, contrast and vertical and horizontal hold

Later you stopped trying to restore vertical hold via the knob and you just thumped the TV much as nowadays we turn a computer off and on in the hope of the restoration of everything including our sanity.

As a kid, my favourite TV shows were I Love Lucy and everything with Lucille Ball – the greatest ever female comic and as important to TV as cathode and Lost In Space.

On the latter show I adored Jonathan Harris as Dr Zachary Smith and learned from him the power and comedy of the anti-hero and the power and comedy of camp.

TELL US YOUR FAVOURITES IN THE COMMENTS

I met Jonathan Harris in Sydney in the ’90s and asked him to come to Adelaide and star in a play and he told me, “I’m too old, too tired and too rich but thank you, you bumbling booby”.

I watched The Mickey Mouse Club, Bugs Bunny, the Three Stooges, The Flintstones, Shirley Temple’s Storybook (and one of her fairy tales scarred me for life) and Skippy (“What’s that, Skippy? Bad men down by the creek! Get the dynamite, Skippy!”) Flipper was just Skippy wet.

I loved Bobo the clown while drinking Bobo Cordial and eating Twisties while watching the Twisties ad – “Henry!!!! Eating all the Twisties! Henry!!! He loves them so!!”

The one and only Anne Wills. Picture: Matt Turner.

Legendary I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball and her on-screen and real life husband, musician-actor Desi Arnaz. Picture: AP Photo/file

Wagging school I’d watch Tommy Hanlon’s It Could Be You featuring hysterical housewifely contestants and I wasn’t allowed to watch Divorce Court hosted by Ron Haddrick (“too adult”) but did anyway.

Later, Deadly Earnest and all the Hector Crawford crime shows with wobbly sets including Matlock (“VKC to Matlock … Come in Shirl.”).

Bonanza was the most popular show on TV and we’d watch it and the Sunday night movie as a family sitting on the vinyl lounge suite and eating a family size block of Cadbury chocolate.

We’d watch Willsy on Adelaide Tonight and Anne and Susan Wills dressed in gingham and singing on a hay bale on the Country And Western Hour.

Stuart Wagstaff’s Benson and Hedges ads were the acme of sophistication.

At 11pm on Channel 9 you’d get On This Day – a compilation of old Movietone newsreels, followed by the Epilogue in which a heavenly choir sang “Goodnight to you/Goodnight to you/It’s time for us to leave the air/Stay with us a moment more/It’s time for the evening prayer” and the stentorian-voiced Rex Heading would lead SA night owls in prayer.

'Bonanza stars Dan Blocker, Lorne Greene, Michael Landon and Purnell Roberts.

This was followed by God Save the Queen with scratchy vision of a bored Queen in uniform on a horse.

Then the test pattern which we would often watch until it was replaced by snowy static.

The miracle of black and white TV was cinema.

My generation was privileged to freely see the full panoply of cinema by day and night.

It was the last great flowering of glorious, historic black and white cinema. From Citizen Kane to Abbott and Costello.

My most cherished memory is being woken by my father when I was about eight years old and put into my Onkaparinga dressing gown and Hush Puppy slippers over my flannelette PJs to watch the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup and laughing til we cried. Sharing laughter is an act of love.

So that’s a fond televisual vision of the past – with knobs on.

Pictures: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast the Musical

VIEW GALLERY

HOT

Brian at Battery World, Hilton – great service

Beauty and the Beast the Musical – gloriously good at the Festival Theatre

Ambrosini’s on Magill Road – peerless Italian tucker

Marion Cultural Centre

Geoff Goodfellow – poet of the people

NOT

SA Power Networks butchering apple trees and giving everyone the pip

The Greens – I can no longer say I’ll be glad if you’ll be Franks (OK)

All Kardashians

The multistorey car park at Elizabeth

Originally published as Bring back the test pattern: When it comes to TV, the boomers had it best | Peter Goers