Wednesday's Words on a Friday

The original Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and eventually taken over by a moveable feast of participants when Delores had computer troubles.
The aim of the words is to encourage us to write. A story, a poem, whatever comes to mind.
If you are posting an entry on your own blog, please let us know so we can come along and read it.
This month the words are again supplied by Delores and can be found here.

This week's single word is: TELEVISION

When I was a young child, living in the hot and dry mid-north of South Australia, not many people had television sets. Certainly there wasn't one in every home. Being so far from the city, reception for television was poor to non-existent. A solution was to have installed in your backyard a tall metal tower, three-sided, wide at the base and tapering towards the top, where an antenna would be installed, aimed, hopefully, in the right direction, to be able to receive the three broadcasting television stations. 

Rabbit Ears antennas were common, but didn't always work and mostly didn't work well, unless you lived a major city.

These towers must have been quite a sight from overhead, in a plane perhaps, as televisions became more commonplace and towers proliferated. But without one of these towers, you might as well turn the thing off and head for the beach. No one wants to sit for hours staring at a fuzzy snowstorm hoping a picture might appear. Sound was often as non-existent as the picture. As time went on, everything improved and people became used to watching the daily news, the sitcoms of the day and the weekly movie, along with Saturday morning cartoons. When movies began broadcasting more often than once a week, the two movie theatres in town really suffered, and one eventually closed. 

All televisions were black and white, no one had a television that showed colour. There was great excitement one weekend when a few families were invited to the home of someone to view their "colour" television. How extremely disappointed we all were to find it was an ordinary TV with a sheet of coloured cellophane over the screen so the picture appeared blue tinged, or pink, depending on which sheet of cellophane was in place at the time. 
People in my town did eventually get colour TVs, but they just weren't readily available for many years. 
One thing people did get, and plenty of them, were TV dinners 

served on foldable TV trays. 

Gone was the family dinner around the kitchen or dining room table. 

At sixteen I moved away from my town to live with my mother, in a southern town, closer to the city, but still far enough away that TV reception wasn't all that good if the weather was stormy. TV was still broadcast in black and white and I'd lost interest in most of it, preferring to read a book. Years later, in my twenties and married, we saw our first colour television at a friend's home, in an outer suburb of Brisbane, Queensland. We loved it, but couldn't yet afford one for ourselves, but I started saving. When we moved to Sydney, New South Wales a few months later, we managed to buy a coloured television on time payments, which we didn't finish paying for until we were in country Victoria a few years later. This is where we discovered the joys of VHS recordings, available for rental on a daily or weekly basis and we spent far too many hours watching them. 

I would never go back to a black and white television set, I'm not sure any are still available to buy anyway, but I do know of one rather eccentric person who has an old black and white TV, set right next to a colour TV and watches both to be able to compare the difference. Now that's overdoing it!