I’ve been collecting TV shows I used to watch when I was a kid for my home video library. What I’ve had to discover is how incredibly sexist a lot of them are, especially regards the one off female supporting characters per episode. There is so much heterosexual male fantasy there that, when I was that age, went right over my head, that I can’t stop seeing now. Okay…it probably wasn’t just my age back then. Gay boys tend to know even then that there is something a bit different about them.

TV shows like Burke’s Law, which if you ignored the heavy handed female sexpot of the day thread in the plots, was actually a pretty good mystery story series that played fair with the audience. The clues were always there for you to see, but you almost never did until Amos Burke pulled it all together. I tended to zone out at the romance scenes…there were an obligatory two per episode, plus the one at the beginning when Burke gets the phone call about yet another murder somewhere among the rich and famous. I always mentally skipped over the romance scenes. It was that Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II that totally fascinated me.

I picked up a set of Man From U.N.C.L.E. dvds, because I remembered how much I liked watching all the cool spy gadgets in it, and truth be told had I been willing to admit it, like a lot of girls back then I thought David McCallum was very nice on the eyes. What I’d forgotten, probably because I always zoned out on those scenes, was how relentlessly horny Napoleon Solo always was. You just couldn’t leave him alone with any of the female U.N.C.L.E. agents, who were of course always sexy and willing. Problem was there were men back then who felt perfectly free to be like that to the women in their workplace. And now they resent being told not to.

Speaking of secret agent shows, at least Emma Peel was played as the equal to John Steed, who was always a gentleman, even if she was required to have at least one scene per episode in those tight leather suits. And you got none of that in Secret Agent (aka Danger Man in Britain where it originated). I think the reason I liked Secret Agent more than the others was Patrick McGoohan was a more convincing secret agent, and he seemed like a decent man doing a very dangerous job for his country. The others were pure fantasy. Heterosexual male fantasy.  

And that fantasy played big in Hollywood, among the high testosterone studio heads. But sometimes it was played for laughs. One that went completely over my head until recently was Petticoat Junction. Look it up in the urban dictionary (“lots of curves you bet”), and also take note of the town just down the tracks named Hooterville. How did I not notice this? Did Hooterville have a Hooters I wonder.

That was Hollywood back then, where the hero of the story had to have a new babe every week, and gay males had to endure being told from every direction that there was something mentally wrong with them for being so preoccupied with sex all the time.

And perfectly willing to go back to it.

I finally got around to cancelling my DirectTV service today, after years of hemming and hawing about it. My viewing habits have declined a lot since I was younger, and surfing the Internet tubes takes up much more of my time nowadays. Paying to get a signal has been looking less and less attractive as the years have gone by. There’s a line in The Wall by Pink Floyd that goes Got thirteen  channels  of shit on the T.V. to  choose from.  Well I’m here to tell you there’s a lot more to choose from on the cable networks these days, and it’s still mostly crap. Sturgeon was an optimist. And don’t get me started on the satellite radio I have in the car, that I’m paying several hundred dollars a year for. I did a test recently where I wrote down all the times I randomly turned on the TV, usually to The Weather Channel (a friend of mine calls it MTV for old guys) but sometimes to something else, and instead of getting content I got a commercial. It was, I kind you not, about five to one. That is, for every six times I turned on the TV, five of those times the first thing I saw was a commercial. After a while you start wondering Why the hell am I paying 80+ bucks a month mostly just to watch commercials?

When I settled on the house back in 2001 I knew I wanted satellite TV because it was the only alternative to Comcast which was loathsome even then. Everything including HBO and Showtime amounted to about 80 bucks I think. Eventually it got costlier and when it hit over 100 bucks and I dropped the movie channels and that got it back down to 70. But of course it keeps creeping up and up and you can’t just pay for only the channels you want. Sorta like how the music industry pushed albums onto listeners so you’d have to buy a whole bunch of songs you could not have cared less about just to have the ones you liked. This month my DirectTV bill ratcheted up to $90 a month and that jogged me out of my inertia.

I don’t need it. I am so close to my local TV towers I can put a coat hanger on the TV and get a good signal…

Looking east from the street in front of my house

I still own an old Sony 32 inch CRT TV that’s so heavy it would take two people just to move it to the recycling drop off. I got a digital converter for it when they changed the broadcast signals over instead of getting a new HDTV flatscreen. That’s how much I care about TV. Oh…and I still have a VHS recorder, a Betamax and a Laser video disk player attached to it, along with the DVD player I play my collection of favorite old TV shows with. And I have a ton of stuff I can just pop into any of those players and enjoy whenever I want. But mostly these days I just sit in front of the computer and…well…write to my blog like I’m doing now for one thing.

At some point I might get a nice HDTV and a Blu Ray player so I can watch some of the new computer animated movies because you can’t really appreciate how amazingly good computer animation has become unless you see it in high rez. But I dropped a grand on refurbishing a 54 year old Leica M3 this month (I checked the serial number for the date of manufacture…it was made in July 1960) so that’s where my priorities are. 90 bucks a month to watch TV that’s mostly commercials anyway is just too much.

Just for effect, I’m going to try and find me some rabbit’s ears. It’ll be like old times!