The Kingdom of Snow and Ghosts

There may never again be a tedium so wretched and marvelous as that produced by television in the heyday of the aerial. It’s a cliché act of contemporary parenthood to inform one’s children—in our endless parental quest to engender in them that nameless emotion, the inverse of awe, whose purest expression is embodied by the four timeless words Who gives a shit?—that when one was a boy there were only three channels, or four, or at most five. Five channels! Can you imagine? Three network affiliates, the public station (NET before it became PBS), and the local independent, generally to be found on the UHF dial. In our house along the corridor between Baltimore and Washington we had two sets of everything: two trios of network stations, two educationals, and two low-rent, ultrahigh frequency outlets, Channels 20 (DC) and 45 (Baltimore).

Even with ten channels—and this is generally the point made by this brand of parental reverse-bragging—the inventory of desirable programming for a child of eight or nine was easily exhausted. Today my children could turn on the television at any hour of the day or night (if we let them) and find a program to enjoy. At 1:30 AM, if every law of civilization were abrogated and all rational conduct in our house ceased, and the earth’s magnetic poles reversed, and their parents fell into a wormhole, my children could tune our satellite service to PBSKids and find an episode of Sagwa cheerfully waiting for them. At one thirty in the morning, when I was a kid, you would have been lucky to find anything but static.

It’s strange, given that I have envied or pretended to envy my children this television bounty (24-hour Nickelodeon! 24-hour Cartoon Network!), but a moment’s reflection suggests that there actually was a fair amount of available programming for kids at the time: Saturday morning cartoon programs, after-school reruns of old sitcoms, Wonderama, our two local Captains (Captain Twenty in DC, Captain Chesapeake in Baltimore) with their wooden manners, glacial pacing and endless replayings of old Warner Brothers cartoons and Three Stooges and Lil Rascals shorts; “educational” offerings like The Friendly Giant and later The Electric Company, regular Sunday morning screenings of Shirley Temple and Francis the Talking Mule movies.

But somehow or other, bounty is not what I remember. What I remember is sitting on the living room floor, stunned into dull rapture by a Sunday morning show called The Christophers, which opened every week, as a monastic hand in a dark flowing sleeve brandished a flickering taper, with the words, intoned by a sage and kindly voice: Better to light one candle then to curse the darkness. I don’t remember much else about the program, only that it had the kinescope graininess and chiaroscuro of early black-and-white reruns, that it was slow and unfathomable, laborious and talky, obscurely religious, and yet preferable to the show about sewing that was its chief rival for interest in that time slot. The fact is that, given the liberty, a child will watch anything in preference to watching nothing, and if there is nothing to watch, The Christophers will do, if for no other reason then because it serves to introduce the endlessly ponderable mystery of how and why one would go about the business, so appealing to contemplate, of cursing the darkness.

The lack of variety, the interminable series of identical Sundays that induced a small boy regularly to tune into The Christophers or Lilias, Yoga and You, is what most parents my age remember, for their children, about the tedium of the age of the aerial. But there was more to that marvelous tedium, to that state of youthful consciousness that Pete Townshend once described as “magically bored,” than a simple lack of alternatives. The television itself was an object rich in monotonous mystery and miracles of frustration. It was regularly subject, like a medieval kingdom, to plagues, hauntings and afflictions: roll and static, partial eclipse, ghosts and snow. The image on the screen would periodically shiver and dissolve, lurch and turn over on itself. Fainter duplicates of the characters’ eyes would appear in the middle of their foreheads; the ghost of a grin would open horribly in a cheek or chin.

In the town where I grew up, you were not allowed to mount an exterior antenna on your house, and so we had to throw ourselves on the mercy of a pair of “rabbit ears.” We had a fancy set, mounted on a wooden box with a big dial you could turn, with impressive clicks, from one to ten, each setting producing a picture worse than the one that preceded it in some novel and lurid way. The television cabinet itself was fitted with an entire row of knobs designed to intensify whatever problem you might be having. If the programming choices grew unbearably thin, you could always try dialing up the horizontal roll on the host of the Fishing Report, then the vertical, then both at once, faster and faster until his face was smeared into vapor. You could turn up the contrast on Lilias until she went supernova.

Whenever something went wrong with the reception or picture, narrative—the progress of a bomb plot in Gotham City or of Mr. Snuffleupagus’s sustained Gaslight-style campaign to drive Big Bird out of his mind—would be arrested, fragmented, denied. The dream that you had been dreaming, of a Japanese boy and his faithful giant robot on Johnny Sokko, or of the road from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe to the fabled land of Someplace Else, would fray at the edges and unravel, leaving you stranded in the living room with a flat taste of electrons at the back of your throat.

And yet the freaky electronic weather of the cathode ray kingdom, the abrupt losses of information that stripped meaning away and dissolved the dream, had in themselves a kind of meaning, or seemed to offer some kind of information about the world. I remember reading, at the time, an account (in a key text of my childhood, C.B. Colby’s Strangely Enough) of a mysterious television broadcast that had been received by viewers in England in the early 50s, the call letters and test pattern of a Houston, Texas station that had gone off the air three years earlier. That came as no surprise to me. Every so often, desperately groping along the UHF dial through the blank blizzard that raged all around Channels 20 and 45, I would come across the mirage of some program, a fata morgana Dick Van Dyke or Marlo Thomas flickering in and out of visibility, like one of those Kryptonian villains trapped by Superman’s father in the nebulous Phantom Zone. Sometimes the phantom station’s promo card would materialize for an instant and I would see that the signal was coming in from some far-off place like Hagerstown or Norfolk, VA.

Owning a television connected you to an invisible world of forces that no amount of dials and wires could control. But in order to encounter them, to rise, or sink, to the level of consciousness required to propel you into that kingdom of ghosts and snow, you needed first to be bored—acutely, hopelessly bored. You needed first to experience the endlessness of a single minute watching a gray professor expound the teachings of Heraclitus on Sunrise Semester.

I don’t know if contemporary children can attain that kind of bored satori. My own kids often advance grandiose claims in this regard, but I’m obliged, by experience and parental statute, to doubt them. And even if they were capable of such feats of consciousness-altering tedium, our television set would not permit them to explore secret wavelengths and phantom signals. There are no ghosts with HDTV. I’m not sure, in the end, if this is such a good thing. Maybe there is no mystery, no transcendence, without the spur of tedium. Maybe those early, boredom-fueled hours spent tuning into the invisible forces loose in the atmosphere helped prepare me for exposure to the sudden losses of meaning that befall you in adulthood, to the hidden radiations of violence, desire and bad luck that are so difficult to control with our paltry range of dials, to the ghosts of memory and regret that haunt the heart, that flickering idiot box. There will never be an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood broadcast in high definition. I hope this doesn’t mean that my children, that all children from this time forward, never learn the way to Someplace Else.