Overseas TV History

From SABC in South Africa, a 1981 edition of the 8 p.m. news:

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A frightening lens into the horribly racist society of SA of the era.

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Indeed. Notice how few black people there were in South African TV commercials of that era:

In fact, racism was one of the reasons why South Africa didn’t get TV until 1976:

I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s an interesting documentary about the early years of SABC TV:

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Staying in South Africa, a Sunday start-up/sign-on from SABC’s TV1 in the mid-1980s. The clip includes the day’s lineup:

Next, a lineup, ID and promos from Bop-TV, a TV station licensed to Bophuthatswana, one of South Africa’s Black “homelands”:

As Wikipedia puts it…

In the apartheid era, a sizeable number of white people watched Bop TV, which offered a wider variety of entertainment and current affairs programming than the state-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation, despite attempts to confine the signal to black areas such as Soweto.[2]

The following compilation includes bits and pieces of SABC from the 1980s–and at the very end, you can even see some incredibly rare clips from SWABC/SWAUK in South-West Africa, which is what Namibia was known as when it was under South African rule:

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Here’s a 1980 newscast from WNAC in Boston:

In 1982, the station lost its license because of its owner’s financial misconduct, and was replaced by a new Channel 7 licensee, WNEV.

Here are a few promos for WNEV, followed by their first newscast:

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A full bulletin of the English-language GMA Network News from the Philippines, aired in 1996.

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And here’s part 3:


An interesting 1970 promotional film for WFLD, now Chicago’s Fox station, then a spunky UHF independent promoting itself as an alternative to the three networks:

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It’s 7 p.m. in 1985 and Chicago’s English-language WPWR signs off for the day as UHF channel 60 is taken over by Spanish-language WBBS. (The channel was split-licensed.) You can see a promo for WBBS at the 0:47 mark:

In this 1983 clip, WFBN in Joliet/Chicago transitions to Spectrum pay-TV programming for the day. Before cable TV became widespread, some UHF stations would give up much or all of their program time to encrypted subscription services airing mostly movies and sports. Subscribers would get decoders boxes that enabled them to watch the pay programming:

Some services offered separate packages for, say, adult programming. Here’s an example from Los Angeles of a subscription service switching from one program category to another with a free preview:

By the second half of the 1980s, these subscription services were gone, killed off by the advent of widespread cable as well as the availability of pirate decoders.

France’s Canal Plus, on the other hand, proved that terrestrial pay-TV can work in some markets. Here’s its 1984 launch, which includes a look at its decoder boxes:

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Totally. A wonderful/awful/necessary time capsule.

Interesting that the second story in the news (after seemingly 10 minutes on the snow blanketing South Africa) was a substation fire and 4hr black out in NYC. Even more interesting they use footage from NBC4 NY where a black reporter interviews a black person. :no_mouth:

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Also note the hilarious sneeze at the 2:30 mark!

Staying in South Africa but moving to the post-Apartheid era, here are two 2008 promos featuring e.News’s American weathercaster Eric Van Dam and poking fun at his inability to pronounce South African place names:

And speaking of intercontinental TV news personalities, here’s a clip of New Zealand anchor Wendy Petrie anchoring on CTV Newsnet (now know as the CTV News Channel) in 2002:

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There was another African state in which the white minority held on to power by using racist laws: Rhodesia. Not much TV material from that internationally unrecognized country (which later became Zimbabwe) survives, but a few clips have surfaced on YouTube. This one consists of various behind-the-scenes photographs of RTV/RBC – note the almost total absence of Black people:

The quality is terrible, but here’s a rare off-air recording (or rather a telecine of sorts) of a 1970 newscast:

Here’s a lineup from 1965:


Image source: broaDWcast.org

And the Wikipedia article about Rhodesia Television (RTV): Rhodesia Television - Wikipedia

For some context, here’s a 1976 documentary about Rhodesia from the ABC:

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Several CNN promos from 1983:

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1 May 1980: at midnight, Buenos Aires stations ATC (channel 7) and Canal 13, along with several stations from across Argentina, switched to regular color transmissions. Here’s how 13 made the announcement, introduced by veteran TV personality Lidia “Pinky” Satragno (taken from a report aired by rival Canal 9 in 2019 that paid tribute to the long career of Pinky, where relatives of her are interviewed). 13’s first program in color was the 1964 movie “My Fair Lady”, while ATC kicked off with a tape of a soccer match (friendly) between Argentina and Ireland, played on 30 April.

The other metropolitan channels had to wait a bit more: Canal 9 started on 9 May that year, Canal 2 on 25 May 1980 and Canal 11 in mid-1981. Canal 9 used this particular logo to promote its color broadcasts.

canal9_1980_color9

Here’s an article from 10 May 1980 published by Clarin about 9’s switch to color. Apologies for the poor quality: it was taken from microfilm.

NOTE: color TV sets were very expensive at the time and the conversion may have taken a couple of years, especially due to Argentina’s constant economic problems.

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From 1988, a world news roundup from NHK in Japan featuring the news opens of several other overseas networks:

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The late news from POP TV in Slovenia, 2008:

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An ID and a newscast from the American Forces Vietnam Network in Saigon during the Vietnam War:

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Intro, headlines and brief excerpt of Canal 11 Buenos Aires’ late news from April 1985, which uses Giorgio Moroder’s song “Machines” as its theme music. The program is introduced by announcer/newsreader Armando Repetto (who welcomed viewers and mentions the regional channels where the news is being relayed) and presented by journalist Carlos Campolongo. Repetto was one of 11’s main faces, working there between 1963 and 1990. Campolongo was in charge of presenting and analyzing the items aired on the program: he was at 11 only for a few years before departing in 1986.

Over the decades, Argentine television news changed a lot: today’s premise is to attract young viewers, who usually don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the telly. It’s filled with crime, banter, social reporting and softer topics, as well as some modern music and flashy presentation. Here’s how Telefe’s late news was like 2 years ago (before the COVID-19 pandemic). By 2022, it hasn’t changed at all: it’s still crappy!

NOTE: in 1990, Canal 11 (a state-owned station since 1974) was privatized and was renamed Telefe. In 2017, it was purchased by Viacom (now Paramount Global).

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KABC-7’s 1957 logo. Inspiration for Seven’s 1970 logo?

KABC-7 1957

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Here are some vintage IDs from BBC – not the one in the UK, but the Banahaw Broadcasting Corporation in the Philippines, which took over from ABS-CBN after that broadcaster’s license was taken away by the government in 1973:

Staying in 1970s Philippines, here’s an ID for GTV mentioning the network’s three TV stations and its network of radio stations:

A local station identification break from RPN:

And the big one, ABS-CBN, after its return to the airwaves:

Here’s an introduction to the television landscape in the Philippines from Timothy Green’s 1972 book about TV around the world:


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