My television viewing career began at the bottom, on the living room Perser. The older ones in my family, and that was all but me, gave me instructions as to when to change programs. Our television did not have a remote control, but it was me and not so many occasions to switch. There were only three programs in our broadcast area. A few years later, a friend of mine had a box with a few buttons and a cable on it. At the time, shared flats were mostly behind the modern state of the art due to a lack of financial means; wireless controls were located elsewhere on the coffee tables that could be cranked up and down.
I was far behind the technology in my first room in a shared apartment, which I moved into after graduating from high school. Somebody had got me a tube box that only sounded and a second one that only showed the picture. I put the two devices on top of each other and over time learned to let the picture come first and then the sound. Because if I didn’t keep this order and a certain distance between the switch-ons, the goal in the sports show only fell acoustically and the image only built up well after the slow-motion repetition, then only Heribert Faßbender could be seen.
They wanted a portable television, cheaper than the big boxes, small and with a handle. In the summer of 1983 I had enough money for a used vehicle thanks to a job, but they were hard to come by in the warm season because campers needed them for their holidays, and they were sometimes even more expensive than the large used ones. Portable televisions – do they still exist? Yes, yes, they are no longer so clumsy and in the figurative sense they are now in the vast majority, since people can no longer watch TV in their caravan, but everywhere with their smartphone or tablet.
Fresh crime scene
You can watch almost anything at any time, depending on whether you are willing to pay for it or prefer the public broadcasters. Non-linear or time-sovereign, as ARD calls it in its media perspective (PDF), 78 percent of people between the ages of 14 and 30 watch these days. On the other hand, 97 percent of people aged 69 and over watch what is being broadcast on their television. Just under half of the 30 to 39 year olds watch with a delay, among the 40 to 49 year olds it is just under 40 percent, in the 50 to 59 age group 15 percent and the 60 to 69 year olds watch 12 Percent time-shifted television.
In a small survey of friends and family this picture was confirmed, many of them only watch the “crime scene” when it comes fresh, and some also watch the sports show and Weltspiegel and Tagesschau beforehand. Some do not want to do without the direct broadcast of their favorite evening monzette or the latest findings from the scientific masterpiece Harald Lesch. No wonder that the outcry was great when Til Schweiger said that the “Tatort” opening credits with Klaus Doldinger’s 50-year-old music should be renewed. However, Dieter Bohlen was allowed to compose the opening fanfare of the also sacrosanct “Sportschau” – bo-bou.
Probably the intersection of soccer fans and crime fans is not that big. Whereby the term “time sovereign” is euphemistic, because television remains a non-linear time eater; after all, it’s not exponential. Rituals can also be set up with content from the media library, but many can still be guided by the broadcasters’ circumstances. The question now is whether the generations that are so “time sovereign” remain unritualized, since they can freely combine their content. Is your life fraying?
Local band salad
I also still try to hang in front of the TV in time for the weather forecast on Sunday evening. Better still with a little advance notice to have chips and drinks ready. Sometime in the mid-1980s, one of my brothers gave me a used VHS video recorder that could be used to schedule programs. Of course, that didn’t always work, which is why it was always exciting to see whether the box had done its job well during my vacation time. Sometimes a brief power failure would delete the program data, there was a mess of tape, or I made the mistake of forgetting to rewind the tape. But we were conditioned by the video stores that were sprouting up everywhere and charged an extra DM 1 if the returned film was not at the beginning again.
The video recorder also helped to better endure the films sometimes shown on private television, because the many commercial breaks could be fast forwarded. The announcement was at the beginning of the commercial break, “soon” or “immediately” or even “now” it goes on, although about 10 minutes of advertising followed. A good example of the reinterpretation of words by marketing, which also wants to sell us nuclear power as nuclear energy or technology as technology. In any case, the film first had to be completely recorded in order to be able to stop it in between. In a very special case, the sports show, this was not possible for cultural reasons, because the tension on the soccer results could not be postponed; there was also always the danger that someone who knew better would trumpet the results and thus kill off all the tension.
When the rights for the men’s soccer Bundesliga changed from ARD to Sat.1 in 1992, soccer broadcasting was Beckmannized, that is to say, the match day was badly splintered with advertising. Since nothing could be fast-forwarded, the group of football enthusiasts, who had always come to the advertising-free ARD sports show over the years, frayed more and more over time, because the friends at some point from the refrigerator or toilet where they wanted to use the commercial break didn’t come back after the second or first commercial block.
TV like in the 1950s
Speaking of football and Sat.1. At the end of the 1985/86 season, SV Werder was within reach of the second championship title and had to play in Mönchengladbach on the third from last game day. The game was to be broadcast live, the DFB gave the small broadcaster the broadcasting rights for a lot of money. Sat.1 could only be received via cable, but not everyone in Bremen had that, including me. So I found myself with a group of Werder supporters on Bremer Obernstrasse in front of the shop window of the electronics retailer Brinkmann, in which there was a television showing the game. Just like it used to be at important games, when hardly anyone had a television.
The game ended tonelessly 1: 1, the direct rivals from Munich also played a draw and remained two points behind Werder, so that on matchday 33 in a direct clash between the two Werder players, the championship could have been won. Thousands of people gathered in Bremen’s Domshof in front of a coarse-pixel video wall that only offered a reasonably good resolution from a certain distance. So it happened that shortly before the end of the game, when referee Volker Roth pointed to the penalty spot in the Bavarian penalty area, many believed that Michael Kutzop had chipped the penalty kick in the goal and cheered unrestrainedly. Then slowly word got around that the ball had not landed in the goal. Final whistle, everyone trotted home without having achieved anything, because the free beer promised in the event of a Bremen championship title was canceled.
I also had cable television in the late 1980s. The fiddling with the indoor antenna was no longer necessary. So did some of the roof acrobatics of the family fathers who, when called from the living room, bent around metal masts until the grunt stopped or a transmitter went in at all. At the same time it was possible to prove that the noise on the screen, contrary to what is often claimed, has nothing to do with the background radiation from space.
The short autumn of anarchy
Not only Sat.1 was fed into the cable, but also GDR television, which could only be received terrestrially in Bremen under very favorable circumstances. For example, it showed the film “Ghandi”, which was not shown on West German television. And above all, it soon became clear what television can make really exciting. From the beginning of September 1989 the television of the GDR broadcast the youth magazine “Elf 99”, from mid-October Erich Honecker resigned and there was an increasing number of live broadcasts, for example for the first time full-day of the debates of the People’s Chamber, of roundtables and protest demonstrations, and there were actually unadorned reports about the conditions in the country.
I also watched the legendary press conference of the Politburo member Günter Schabowski, which triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall, directly on the television. In his media studies seminar, our Professor Franz Dröge said at the time that the events on GDR television had shown directly and massively what the media can be capable of. In addition, such an abrupt change from a state radio that is kept dust-dry by censorship and convention to a lively stage of democracy is unprecedented. The openly lived democracy on television soon came to an end, and the East German broadcasters were incorporated into ARD. The short autumn of anarchy has come to an end, television was tamed just as the Internet was later commercialized by the large Internet companies.
From Schabowski’s mumbling activation of the wall to the first hard disk recorder, it took me about 15 years, the Fujitsu Siemens Activy Media Center required some maintenance and sometimes in-depth software and hardware knowledge to run smoothly, but it made it possible to pause a program that was in progress: Me had arrived in time shift, a kind of transition period between video recorders and media libraries and streaming services. Later I got a Mac mini with Eye TV as a media center. It came at just the right time for the 2010 World Cup, which was held in South Africa, because there was a Vuvuzela plug-in to download that tried to filter out the constant roar of the horns in the stadiums for TV viewers. The software also recognized and marked the commercial channels and deleted them if necessary.
Because that’s the way it is, advertising works. I’ve known that since I once saw a Dallmayr commercial. A neatly dressed servant of the delicatessen is picking at the shelf or the display. Only the voiceover can be heard from the off and contemplative music, but the images are more telling when a man in a chef’s hat comes in and disgusts the servant. It may be that the commercial went a little differently, but that’s how I remembered it. In any case, since then I’ve been very careful not to buy any Dallmayr products, especially after #metoo.
How it was when the GEZ man stood in front of the door one day, and whether all the financial expense for television is worth it, read more tomorrow.
(anw)