The only other program I remember seeing in those improbable circumstances was Jungle Jim—that same character played by former Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller who could be regularly seen at the Saturday arvo matinee. When he became too old to bare his chest as Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller put on a safari shirt and pants and played the same role and scripts as Jungle Jim in a series of B movies, and when they waned, switched to TV with a popular half-hour series in which he was constantly upstaged by his pet chimp. The price of winning gold at the Olympics. I soon discovered that other matinee favourites had also made the transition to transmission—Hopalong Cassidy, Captain Video and Superman. Maybe this television thing would work out okay after all.
Meanwhile now that I had discovered it was merely radio with pictures—many of the programs and serials made the direct transition—and I wasn’t ready to give up the wireless routines until they made television versions of Biggles, They Walk by Night and D24.
The first commercial network, Channel 7, followed straight on from the Olympic Games, but soon after, the government station ABV Channel 2 kicked off with the most boring array of programs conceivable. You would have thought a bunch of English teachers had chosen them. Amongst them all, only one was watchable—a history of World War II air battles, imaginatively called The War in the Air, which was really only an excuse to show all that terrific battle of Britain and bombing of Germany footage.
What they hardly knew was that a very different sort of war in the air had begun.
Then one of Horrie’s sisters, who had been wise enough to marry a dentist and was therefore rich enough to buy a television receiver, now suddenly became very popular for Sunday evening visits. It was one of those spotlessly tidy houses where children weren’t allowed to play or touch anything or do anything much. We three were added to four incumbent children, who seemed to resent our presence utterly. Certainly, they didn’t want to play any of the games we did. In fact, all we were allowed to do was sit quietly and watch the television, which seemed to be regarded as a gigantic a privilege. It wasn’t. We weren’t allowed any say in the programming and although two additional channels had started up, we had to watch the same programs every week. It was all a very adult event, and we were not amused.
There would be the news—what possessed adults to think such a catalogue of murder and motor accidents interesting confounded us children. Then an American comedy, such as I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners, which were and still are very funny as a rule, but we children were in no mood to enjoy ourselves under such duress. TV drama was far less mature and therefore we kids fared better with Whirlybirds, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon or Highway Patrol and even the strange narration by George Burns of the mad antics of his wife Gracie Allen. After that would be a painful Variety show and then a movie, and they were never any of the sort of movies that Uncle Kevin admired, but instead usually musicals with Fred Astaire or Bing Crosby. We hated it. What we wanted mostly was to get our fingers on the channel changer where surely other greater wonders were to be found. Little did we know.
