Thande

Donor
I'm not terribly surprised - even if there hadn't been a relative dearth of children's programming at the time, there were only three channels at the time (just two, before 1964) and I have no doubt that dedicated "blocks" of children's programming were hard to come by (stateside, it was just Saturday mornings and maybe after-school). And there was only one television set, so kids watched whatever the person who controlled the remote wanted to watch - which is to say, "adult" programming. It's easy enough to see this paradigm resulting in the youngest cohort of the first generation of Star Trek fans; there's a lot to appeal to children there. Bright colours, strange aliens, exotic locales (sometimes on location), and almost always at least one fight scene.
I think you may be getting the wrong impression of this - at the time when Doctor Who debuted in the early 1960s, the idea of dedicated children's programming and an appropriate timeslot had been around for over a decade in the UK. It started out of course as children's radio (Listen With Mother and Children's Hour, which goes back to the 1920s) and, like many things on the BBC even now, was transposed from a radio to a TV format with Watch with Mother. Almost all of the programmes on the latter are household names even now, with quite recent revivals despite long absences for things like the Flowerpot Men and Muffin the Mule. In fact that sketch I mentioned earlier by Mark Gatiss & co. for the 35th (I think) anniversary of Doctor Who, where they show the supposed original pitch meeting, starts out with the Beeb "firing" Muffin to show it's the end of the Fifties.

Anyway, my point is that it's not that the idea of dedicated children's programming didn't exist at the time, far from it--it's just that Doctor Who was not considered part of it. The difference between Who and Trek is that Who's writers realised from the start that children would be a part of their audience, whereas I think Trek was written with the assumption that its audience would be all adult. That may not be true on reflection though considering how Roddenberry pitched it as a Space Western and Westerns were massively popular with American (and other) kids at the time.
 
According to the best history of the program I've seen, (A Brief History Of Time) it was intended to bridge the gap between afternoon sports and their teenage music programme, and so was designed to try and attract the audience of both.
 
Who the hell is Martin DeAngelo?
See here:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?p=7842541&highlight=marlin+deangelo#post7842541

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?p=8110820&highlight=marlin+deangelo#post8110820

Essentially, to get Takei into Congress, Brainbin needed an empty district in the right year (1980). IOTL, Henry Waxman has represented that district from 1974 to present. Here, we introduced DeAngelo to essentially "benchwarm" the district from 1974 to 1980, then run for Senate....opening the seat for Takei. (And it's Marlin DeAngelo--like the fish.)
 
I'm not terribly surprised - even if there hadn't been a relative dearth of children's programming at the time, there were only three channels at the time (just two, before 1964) and I have no doubt that dedicated "blocks" of children's programming were hard to come by (stateside, it was just Saturday mornings and maybe after-school). And there was only one television set, so kids watched whatever the person who controlled the remote wanted to watch - which is to say, "adult" programming. It's easy enough to see this paradigm resulting in the youngest cohort of the first generation of Star Trek fans; there's a lot to appeal to children there. Bright colours, strange aliens, exotic locales (sometimes on location), and almost always at least one fight scene.

Well I actually said that there was something of a dearth of children's drama in the Sixties, not children's programmes in general. For example Blue Peter was first broadcast in 1958. Both BBC1 and ITV had dedicated blocks of time for children's programmes on weekday afternoons and, as Thande said, Watch with Mother was broadcast around weekday lunchtimes.

Since colour TV was a bit slower taking off in the UK, I don't think that the bright colours would make much of an impression. There was usually no remote to fight over either!

Cheers,
Nigel.
 
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Thande

Donor
Since colour TV was a bit slower taking off in the UK, I don't think that the bright colours would make much of an impression.

That's very true - it'd be interesting to talk to people who saw Star Trek when it was first broadcast in the UK in 1969, when the majority of people still had black and white TVs - did the lack of colour mean that they got a different impression of the show to Americans?

Of course having said that, I've seen episodes of Star Trek TNG on a black-and-white telly due to watching them at my grandparents' ;) ("The Nth Degree" is the one I remember in particular; they did have a colour TV as well, but I think it was broken or something at the time).
 
We didn't get a colour telly until 1974. The first programme that we saw on it as it was set up was the Star Trek episode with Glenn Corbett as Zephram Cochrane. Now I had enjoyed Star Trek in Black and White and actually it seemed too garish when compared to British programmes (BBC and ITV). I remember having to turn the colour button down for American Programmes(not just Trek) and back up for British ones!
 
That's very true - it'd be interesting to talk to people who saw Star Trek when it was first broadcast in the UK in 1969, when the majority of people still had black and white TVs - did the lack of colour mean that they got a different impression of the show to Americans?

Of course having said that, I've seen episodes of Star Trek TNG on a black-and-white telly due to watching them at my grandparents' ;) ("The Nth Degree" is the one I remember in particular; they did have a colour TV as well, but I think it was broken or something at the time).

ISTR I mostly watched Star Trek on the black and white TV that got relegated to the spare room when we got a colour set. It died before TNG, though.

There was an interesting article in Doctor Who Magazine a while back, which pointed out that, for those old enough to watch them at the time, the "first Doctor Who serial in colour" was entirely subjective.
 
I didn't think this thread would ever reach 200 pages, but so it has - and it quite literally couldn't have been done without your replies! Thank you all so much for your many and varied comments :D

Very interesting list. People who were Senators IOTL aren't ITTL and vice versa. Brilliant job.
Thank you - I must also take this opportunity to acknowledge vultan, without whose invaluable assistance that list would never have been compiled.

Anyway, my point is that it's not that the idea of dedicated children's programming didn't exist at the time, far from it--it's just that Doctor Who was not considered part of it. The difference between Who and Trek is that Who's writers realised from the start that children would be a part of their audience, whereas I think Trek was written with the assumption that its audience would be all adult. That may not be true on reflection though considering how Roddenberry pitched it as a Space Western and Westerns were massively popular with American (and other) kids at the time.
Westerns were a large enough genre (and they really were ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s, which is often lost on the modern viewer) that there were "kids' westerns" (where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats) and "adult westerns" like Gunsmoke and Bonanza (and, of course, Wagon Train and Have Gun - Will Travel). It's a fairly safe bet that Roddenberry had the latter category in mind when he pitched Star Trek as, well, a "Wagon Train to the Stars". Note also this promo predating the series premiere, trumpeting the show as "the first adult space adventure".

Since colour TV was a bit slower taking off in the UK, I don't think that the bright colours would make much of an impression. There was usually no remote to fight over either!
According to Wikipedia: "The impetus for a more complex type of television remote control came in 1973, with the development of the Ceefax teletext service by the BBC." This would indicate that remote controls were in widespread use in the UK by then. Stateside, the adoption of the remote control predictably coincides with television market saturation reaching critical mass (the late-1950s).

That's very true - it'd be interesting to talk to people who saw Star Trek when it was first broadcast in the UK in 1969, when the majority of people still had black and white TVs - did the lack of colour mean that they got a different impression of the show to Americans?
Well, how would they be able to tell which members of the crew were the redshirts? And which alien woman was the Green-Skinned Space Babe? :p

We didn't get a colour telly until 1974. The first programme that we saw on it as it was set up was the Star Trek episode with Glenn Corbett as Zephram Cochrane.
"Metamorphosis". Are you a fan of Corbett? I'm curious as to why you went of your way to name-check him.

Lindseyman said:
Now I had enjoyed Star Trek in Black and White and actually it seemed too garish when compared to British programmes (BBC and ITV). I remember having to turn the colour button down for American Programmes(not just Trek) and back up for British ones!
I've mentioned this before, but the garish over-saturation was a means to sell colour TV sets in the late-1960s and early-1970s. In time, American shows became at least as drab as British ones - a trend most likely kicked off by All in the Family, which premiered in 1971 and was mostly various shades of beige (and shot on video as opposed to film, which further degraded the image quality). Creator Norman Lear had wanted to film in black-and-white, but that wasn't happening in 1971 (the last black-and-white primetime network shows switched to colour in the mid-1960s).

ISTR I mostly watched Star Trek on the black and white TV that got relegated to the spare room when we got a colour set.
The fate of oh-so-many black-and-white sets once the switch to colour was made...

Daibhid C said:
There was an interesting article in Doctor Who Magazine a while back, which pointed out that, for those old enough to watch them at the time, the "first Doctor Who serial in colour" was entirely subjective.
The redoubtable TV Tropes credits Pot Black as being the "Killer App" (for lack of a better term) for colour TV in the UK, though on the whole it does seem to have been a more gradual process over there, in addition to having gotten off to a later start. (Also note which show TV Tropes credits as having been the killer app for colour TV in the US.)

Reading the credits of Are You Being Served? through the years helpfully informs me that the BBC continued to use the "BBC Colour" branding as late as 1977 - and, to my bemusement, that the BBC switched from Arabic to Roman numerals in noting the date of copyright that same year, making that practice Newer Than They Think.

---

For those of you who were overwhelmed by that very long Senate roster in my last post, I would like to present this much shorter election infobox for your perusal:

TWR US Senate Election, 1982 Infobox.png

---

Also, work proceeds apace on the next update, which covers the final instalment of the saga that is the Trial of the Century, and I hope to have it ready soon! Stay tuned.

TWR US Senate Election, 1982 Infobox.png
 
According to Wikipedia: "The impetus for a more complex type of television remote control came in 1973, with the development of the Ceefax teletext service by the BBC." This would indicate that remote controls were in widespread use in the UK by then.

It also goes on to say: "Early teletext sets used wired remote controls to select pages, but the continuous use of the remote control required for teletext quickly indicated the need for a wireless device. So BBC engineers began talks with one or two television manufacturers, which led to early prototypes in around 1977–1978 that could control many more functions", so it looks like the service came first and the development of the TV remote to cater for it came later. And there's no indication here that the earlier three-button remotes were in widespread use in the UK by 1973.

As a state-funded organisation, the BBC could afford to push the boundaries of technology, since they weren't required to make money from it. As with colour television (or indeed television itself in 1936), they could provide a service first and then wait for manufacturers and consumers to catch up.


Cheers,
Nigel.
 
On TV remotes, in our house we didn't get a remote controlled TV until about 1987! I think we were a little behind the curve, but from what I remember of my friends' houses at the time, there was about a 50/50 split in the mid-80s between those with remotes and those without.
As for black-and-white TV, our old portable came with me to university in 1996 as the license was a lot cheaper than for a colour set, though when I moved into a shared house the next year (and so was able to split the license fee 4 ways) I re-upgraded to colour.
One thing I remember quite well was first watching "Aliens" on the B+W, then only seeing it in colour a few years later. I was quite shocked to discover the Power Loader was bright yellow! I can imagine Star Trek viewers moving to colour getting a similar surprise.
 
On TV remotes, in our house we didn't get a remote controlled TV until about 1987! I think we were a little behind the curve, but from what I remember of my friends' houses at the time, there was about a 50/50 split in the mid-80s between those with remotes and those without.

That matches my memory as well. We were a little behind the curve in getting a colour TV, and the first colour TV didn't have a remote either.


As for black-and-white TV, our old portable came with me to university in 1996 as the license was a lot cheaper than for a colour set

Yes, Black-and-White TVs remained popular in the Seventies for just this reason. Since they were made to be cheap to buy as well, they often lacked advanced features such as a remote or Ceefax.


One thing I remember quite well was first watching "Aliens" on the B+W, then only seeing it in colour a few years later. I was quite shocked to discover the Power Loader was bright yellow! I can imagine Star Trek viewers moving to colour getting a similar surprise.

I remember being shocked by the garishness of Vorg and Shirna's costumes when I first saw Carnival of Monsters in colour. I know that this was done deliberately to contrast with the drabness of Inter Minor, but still I thought that it was a bit OTT.


Cheers,
Nigel.
 

Thande

Donor
I just about remember wired remote controls on older tellies when I was growing up. You certainly couldn't lose them!

Brainbin said:
The redoubtable TV Tropes credits Pot Black as being the "Killer App" (for lack of a better term) for colour TV in the UK, though on the whole it does seem to have been a more gradual process over there, in addition to having gotten off to a later start. (Also note which show TV Tropes credits as having been the killer app for colour TV in the US.)
Yes, there was a reference to that in Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse's recent programme The Story of the 2s about the 50th anniversary of BBC 2 (which I would highly recommend if you can find it anywhere, it's full of obscure jokes about TV trivia). They showed a snooker match on black and white TV and a dubbed over commentator saying "Now, will he go for the lightish grey or the slightly darker grey?" :D

Brainbin said:
Reading the credits of Are You Being Served? through the years helpfully informs me that the BBC continued to use the "BBC Colour" branding as late as 1977 - and, to my bemusement, that the BBC switched from Arabic to Roman numerals in noting the date of copyright that same year, making that practice Newer Than They Think.
I had a similar reaction when I saw programmes from the 70s on UK Gold when we first got satellite TV- I had assumed that they had always used Roman numerals.

I have a friend who's a primary school teacher who tells me that when he teaches them Roman numerals and they ask why they're learning it, he tells them "so you can tell if television programmes are repeats or not!" :D

Good luck with the next update.
 
I have a friend who's a primary school teacher who tells me that when he teaches them Roman numerals and they ask why they're learning it, he tells them "so you can tell if television programmes are repeats or not!" :D

Good luck with the next update.

Reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Krabappel is teaching them Roman numerals so they know when certain films were copyrighted!
 
Reading the credits of Are You Being Served? through the years helpfully informs me that the BBC continued to use the "BBC Colour" branding as late as 1977

It's worth noting that 1977 was the first year that the number of Colour TV licences issued exceeded the number of Black-and-White ones. Since Black-and-White TVs were still in use in households with Colour licenses, the licence figures actually underestimate the proportion of Black-and-White TVs in use.


Cheers,
Nigel.
 
As a state-funded organisation, the BBC could afford to push the boundaries of technology, since they weren't required to make money from it. As with colour television (or indeed television itself in 1936), they could provide a service first and then wait for manufacturers and consumers to catch up.

That certainly explains BBC Select, which was a public trial of encrypted subscription television.
 
I am impressed (but not surprised) by your thorough and excellent research on the alt-Senate, Brainbin! Seeing folks like Phil Gramm (D-TX) at the bottom of the seniority scale makes me wonder about the fate of conservative southern Democratic candidates (and their voters) ITTL.

Obviously, the AIP/ADP is a logical ideological fit, but it's difficult for me to envision someone as politically savvy as Phil Gramm ditching a major political party for a regional third party.

That being said: you have a 1976 Reagan presidency, which presumably cobbled together many of the same voting blocs as OTL, including driving a wedge between working-class Southern whites and the national Democratic Party. Reagan's Presidency wasn't perceived as the failure OTL Carter's was; he lost rather narrowly in '80. So these voters may be ready to ditch the Democratic Party even earlier than OTL.

On the other hand, Glenn looks to be headed towards a decisive (possibly a landslide) victory in '84, and you don't typically get to be a U.S. Senator without having pretty good political instincts, so perhaps the Gramms of the world will grit their teeth and stick it out in a "Big Tent" party.

Anyway, as always: great job!
 
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