Small-town TV

Local live entertainment at AFTV-22 in 1967 relied on amateur performances and boring interviews.

It's tempting to say that AFTV-22 was tinker-toy television in 1967. But military television was still in its infancy then. The pilot station for what would become a worldwide broadcast TV network for service members and their families stationed abroad had gone on the air in 1954 -- just 13 years before.

The more appropriate way to look at it was as small-town TV. Very small-town TV.

When I started there as a part-timer, AFTV-22 served three major U.S. air bases in Germany's Eifel Mountains -- Spangdahlem, Bitburg and Hahn -- and a lot of army batteries in between. It was broadcast television using U.S. technical standards so that when GIs brought TVs with them from the States, they worked. A scattering of German nationals had adapted their home TVs so they could watch American television. (German television sets couldn't receive the American signal, nor could American sets receive German signals.) My guess -- and it's just a guess -- is that there were about 40,000 people who could watch AFTV-22.

AFN, the American Forces Network, was far better funded and far more established than AFTV was. AFN radio sounded as good as any of the big three radio networks back home. They had decent equipment, completely professional talent, and major financial support from the Army. AFTV-22, on the other hand, was underfunded, young and brash, and not doing so great on the professionalism scale.

Imagination was also in short supply. Local live shows often featured bands or choirs or majorettes from the American high school at Bitburg or deadly and unenthusiastic interviews with this or that base or wing commander. Visuals were also scarce. We had a Bell & Howell Filmo hand-held silent camera, and we had an Auricon film camera that recorded optical sound. But the only way to get film processed was to plead with the technicians who developed film shot by fighter jet surveillance cameras. The technicians had to do a special run for our snippets of film. And they could process only negative stock. That meant we had to edit in negative and then reverse the polarity when it was broadcast. Given that the Auricon weighed as much as a loaded duffel bag and was just about as unwieldy, we didn't use it often. The station didn't have even a rudimentary videotape setup.

AFTV-22 had one TV studio and a small announce booth for station breaks. The control room overlooked the studio, and behind the control room was a room containing a film chain -- two 16 millimeter projectors and a 35 millimeter slide changer. The technology was old but serviceable. Most of what we had to work with looked low-bid. Even a task so simple as doing a smooth dolly took experience and skill with one of our low-end Dage cameras. The linoleum tile floors didn't help. The ceiling was no more than 12 feet high, so lighting was tricky.

Not only was AFTV-22 a lot like small-town television, it was a lot like small-town television that was 10 years behind the curve.

But it was what we had to work with, and we set out to make do. Over the next two years, Les Jackson, Chuck Minx and I -- along with later arrivals John David Wild, Peter Neumann, John Noble and others -- were the Young Turks who aimed for more of a professional attitude and a sense of audience involvement in local-live programming at AFTV-22. We took some risks, and we got called on the carpet more than once. Sometimes we even knew we deserved it.

But - hot damn! - we put imagination and inventiveness to work, and for a few years we made some pretty good GI television.