Like many twenty-something-year-old Australians growing up, my parents caught the six o’clock news when they could on the living room TV, which was featured center stage, the news of course conflicted with the Simpsons. They also had a fondness for game/quiz shows which I caught now and then, rarely did our interests in shows intersect. Sometimes we’d tape what my brother and I wanted to watch. But I’d also get in trouble for not double-checking what I was taping over, my bad.
As a kid, I remember coming home from school and we’d fire up ABC for its kid-friendly block of programming. By the time I was a teen we had gotten a second television which lived in the second living room which shared a wall with my parents’ room to make sure I wasn’t watching anything I wasn’t supposed to be; we were certainly not permitted to have a television in our bedroom. By then I had grown up on a steady diet of anime and other animated shows (namely Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and Digimon) on weekday mornings thanks to Cheez TV and later it’s spiritual successor, Toasted TV. Futurama would join the Simpsons in the evenings and on weekends I would catch the occasional Saturday morning cartoon or movie in the evening with my brother.
Yes, those were the days of the electric-sundial, there was such stability in programming on the major free-to-air channels (and on premium networks no doubt) that I’ve known many to recall knowing what time it was based on what was on. All things considered, the seasonal clothing and medication advertisements are telltale signs of the seasons too. But I digress.
Even outside of broadcast television my brother and I frequently used the TV to watch VHS tapes of cartoons and movies and subsequently DVDs when they became more accessible. In the tapes era, we used to watch some to the point of memorisation from top to bottom. It was also the avenue in which we were introduced to console gaming thanks to our sister who gifted us a Nintendo 64 in the mid-nineties.
With the advent of home broadband internet, the TV shifted from being one of the primary means of entertaining myself and became more secondary to a laptop. I was quick to discover my first few episodic web series or as I recall, vodcasts(?) via services and sites like YouTube, Newgrounds, ScrewAttack, GameTrailers and iTunes which kept me coming back many-a-time to their homepages waiting for more, but I will cut my thoughts there since that marks the shift into post-broadcast era. *Ominous music.*
