I have community access TV again

I got my Community Access TV back again. I switched back to cable and got rid of the satellite dish. It all stinks, of course. It costs a lot and even with 80 channels, there's nothing on.

I watched the tail end of a video of a TV writer discussing his craft followed by an elderly movie producer who got his start in B movies in the 1940s talk about his career.

A few years ago, I tried to work out how to do a dramatic series on Community Access TV. Several people have done locally produced soap operas over the years, but I was never able to follow them.

One of these amateur soap operas was on for several years, has a page on imdb.com and had several actors go on to bigger and better things. The producer was a young fellow who had been a child actor and played Neo Harrington on Days of Our Lives. At 12, he appeared in a martial arts movie.

That soap opera started out very well, but got worse and worse over the years. I've never talked to anyone involved, but I suspect it was all the work, week after week, of arranging schedules, getting actors together when no one is getting paid and everyone has a job and a life to work around. In the end, the show consisted of almost nothing but scenes of actors alone on camera talking to themselves or talking on the phone about their situation, which I was never able to follow anyway.

I rented two quasi soaps on DVD, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the soap opera spoof produced by Norman Lear, and Dark Shadows, the gothic soap opera from the late '60s.

Dark Shadows seemed to consist almost entirely of conversations between two people at a time. It was filmed "live on tape"---it was videotaped as if it were a live TV show. They never shot re-takes. They left in flubbed lines, scenes of actors trying remember their lines, microphones and studio equipment appearing on camera. It's amazing that they did so well, really.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had a bit more going on. I did notice it had scenes that went on for twenty minutes and episodes that had only two or three characters appear.

Watching videos of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, a British sketch comedy show where all the sketches have only Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

Along those lines, there was a Community Access TV show called Two Kids with a Camcorder which had two teenagers doing what teenagers think is funny. The show was generally cute.

Come to think of it, there were two English guys on You Tube who did a pretty good video, maybe 20 minutes long. The thing is, it was just the two of them. They didn't even have anyone to operate the camera for them, all the scenes were doing with only one of them appearing on camera at a time, sometimes in disguise if they were playing a different character. Poor guys didn't get as many views as they deserved and I wasn't able to find their video last time I looked.

There was a group of college students who had a long-running sketch comedy show. It was a bit controversial. A local cop turned on the TV while getting ready for work and had it on.

"I was in the Army and I've been a cop for sixteen years, and I didn't know there were that many words for masturbation," he said.

What are these soldiers and cops doing that make them think their experts on euphemisms for masturbation?

Anyway, there was nothing anyone could do. They can only ban legally obscene material from public access TV. Everything else stays.

There was once a live broadcast from the studio. Some local anarchists thought they were making some brilliant political point by showing naked women mud wrestling. Maybe they were attacking repressive attitudes toward sex? I guess. But that was their downfall because the feminists turned against them and their group disintegrated.

The public access TV station is in the back of the high school, so outraged school officials stole the mud wrestling videotape from the station and spent several days watching it in outrage until they were finally forced to give it back.