A Winnipeg native’s love letter to 1970s TV
When Fred Willard died in May, at age 86, I noticed on my social media feeds that people paying tribute to his work often pointed to the brief yet memorable run of Fernwood 2 Night.
Brief indeed: It ran for 65 syndicated episodes in the summer and early autumn of 1977 and then for another 65 episodes as America 2-Night in early 1978 before disappearing.
Ahead of its time, it had a sarcastic and self-mocking tone like something out of Mad magazine — or like a precursor to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which came almost a decade later, or Letterman.
Martin Mull played a talkshow host, with Willard as his dimwit sidekick, Jerry Hubbard. They interviewed eccentric locals and the occasional celebrity from their base in Fernwood, Ohio. Tom Waits dropped by on the premise that his van broke down en route to a concert in Toledo. A Fernwood man named James Earl Carter was tired of being confused with the then-president and wanted to adopt his wife’s last name to become James Earl ray. A Fernwood mechanic showed off his battery-powered car. It wouldn’t start. When he lifted the hood it exposed his power source: 4,000 d-size batteries. He then proceeded to check the batteries, one by one by one.
People say we are in a golden age of television, but were the ’70s of Fernwood 2Night a golden age as well, or were they just a lowest-common-denominator wasteland, with limited choice and such dreck as Charlie’s Angels?
One always favours the art of one’s youth, but I would argue TV bound us in a way then that is not possible now.
For my adolescent friends and I in 1970s Winnipeg, our rolling roster of top shows featured All in the Family; Good Times; The Muppet Show; The Carol Burnett Show; wrestling; S.W.A.T.; Happy days; Mork & Mindy; Welcome Back, Kotter; and reruns of Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space. Also, yes, Charlie’s Angels. (A lot of my friends enjoyed M*A*S*H but it didn’t work for me — Hawkeye was such a jerk to everybody, why was that funny?)
Those were the shows whose catchphrases we repeated in the schoolyard each morning: Kid dy-nomite!; up your nose with a rubber hose; Edith, you dingbat!; Ba-ba-ba, ba-barbarino; Na-nu Na-nu.
I had a small black-andwhite TV in my bedroom that I could afford after selling the guitar my mom had bought so I could explore my musical side. I’m tonedeaf. The guitar was an investment in sound, yet not a sound investment.
The most popular 1970s shows had huge ratings by today’s standards, as there were so few channels. But the flip side of lack of choice was the ease of shared experience. The top-rated series of 197879, Laverne & Shirley, was watched by 30.5 per cent of u.s. households; three decades later the top-rated series of 2018-19, Sunday Night Football, drew 10.9 per cent.
yet even if our shared experience in Winnipeg was sourced almost exclusively from America, there were two important pockets of local content: the news and the ads.
Families watched the local evening news at 6 p.m. It lasted a full hour, with the sports news (which was the best part) at about the 40-minute mark. CKY-TV dominated the local market. Its anchors were real-life ron Burgundys, masters of the metropolis, lords of the land.
I remember once seeing the CKY sports anchor, Peter young, at a squash club in suburban river Heights circa 1978. It was the middle of winter. He was wearing the biggest fur coat I’d ever seen and swanning around like he owned the place. He knew he was a huge deal in town. But only in our town. In Vancouver or Toronto, he would just be a guy who paid too much for his winter jacket.
And the ads! (But wait, there’s more!) Our staples, even more familiar to us than the shows, included Pizza Place (“no better pizza anywhere from Winnipeg to rome!”), domo Gas (“we jump to the pump for you”) and Kern-hill Furniture Co-op, with Nick Hill in a cowboy hat, talking auctioneer-style as images of furniture whizzed past.
Fernwood 2 Night aired in the Manitoba market at about 10 p.m., a bolt from the blue. It was so much smarter than all the other shows. It pulled back the curtain on the rampant stupidity of so much of our era’s television. All those catchphrases!
Fernwood also appealed to the desire for locally rooted content — in the beginning it was nominally based in Fernwood, Ohio, a proxy for all those places that were full of average people/viewers like me and everyone I knew.
Nowadays I barely watch TV. Maybe if I’m on an airplane, or maybe something like Bojack Horseman that people are talking about.
Still, it’s hard to say TV was better then than now. There was no Sopranos of the ’70s.
Most of what we watched was pretty shallow — but in our defence, it was gloriously shallow.