When I was a bit older, my parents never much enforced a curfew and I sometimes watched the news, weekend movies or shows like SNL. Between midnight and two am or so, television programs would end. They would show the Flag and Patriotic Symbols Of Great Importance, play the anthem, announce CRAP was ending its transmissions for the day and broadcast an unpleasant shrieky noise until they resumed programming at six am or whenever.
Sometime in the 80s (?), this became less frequent. There was money to be made showing infomercials of enthusiastic audiences of obvious stooges extolling the virtues of Deal-A-Meal or cheap knife sets. These days, few channels go off the air. I guess they once assumed no one watched this crap, but a lot of people work shifts and nights or sleep haltingly and enough did to change things.
Since the practice was basically every channel, though, I always assumed TV channels were required to go off the air. But if this is true, the first infomercial had to come from somewhere. So is it true that channels had to do this, or was it more about peer pressure or a lack of perceived profits? Did VCRs play a role here?
In the U.S., at least, I don’t believe that there was a legal or regulatory requirement to sign off; my understanding is that it was simply that it was believed that the late-late-night audience was so small, that it wasn’t worth paying to keep the transmitter running, staffing the engineering room all night, etc.
When I was a kid in the late '70s in Green Bay, one of the engineers at one of the local stations convinced his manager to let him (the engineer) run an all-night movie show on Friday nights. It was called “TJ and the ANT” (“Television Jockey and the All-Night Theater”), and “TJ” would host short segments, after commercial breaks, which were him, sitting at the control panel, with a single stationary camera pointed at him, as he talked about the movie, the Packers, or whatever he wanted to talk about. His show was the first time that any of the local stations had done something like that; it gained a cult following in town, and ran for several years.
Infomercials were probably a key factor in changing things, as you note, but it’s important to remember that the informericial companies are buying that airtime from the station for their programming – in other words, the infomercial folks are/were paying the bill to keep the station running all night.
I have an electrical engineering background, so I’d say part of it in the early years of television they were much more reluctant to run their equipment 24-hours a day. Just like some computer services had planned down-time, overnight may also have been time for maintenance and upkeep. It may also be a holdover from when AM stations would go off the air, typically at sunset, so powerful clear-channel stations could broadcast for greater distances.
Edit: The amendment allowed the stations to be unattended.
In the 70’s, long before infomercials, I went through a stage of staying up until the sun rose and sleeping in past noon. One of the local (Honolulu, Hawaii) national stations, used to be on all night, though not every night. I suspected and it’s probably confirmed by the above, the engineers were working on something. There were never any commercials. Most of the programming was short travelographys and PSAs.
Interestingly, when our local Korean TV station first started in 1986, they would scheduled programming until 9-10pm, sometimes going off the air for a short time, then start showing additional Korean movies, sometimes a bit risque, though never showing actual nudity. Again, I suspected that it was the engineers doing some after hours testing.
Even the local PBS station would sometimes go off the air, then show repeats of that day’s programs.
I don’t know if the transmitter was ever actually turned off, although perhaps it was. My recollection from childhood (even then I was a nighthawk!) is that after signoff, stations would broadcast a test pattern. I assumed this continued until programming resumed in the morning, but perhaps it did not. A very common test pattern that would be familiar to many of us oldsters is the “Indian head” image, which many of us probably remember seeing late at night on the tubes of our black-and-white TV sets:
Another childhood memory is reading a book that was written sometime in the 40s I think, stating that television would never be as ubiquitous as radio in terms of 24-hour programming because the production costs were just so high. Even then, a little over a decade later, and even as a kid, I could see that this wasn’t likely to be true.
Just looking at a few late 80s - early 90s TV guides, the stations running all night were not showing infomercials at all, they were doing a creaky old movie or two, some replayed sport, a few serialised shows well past their prime and other filler junk. Maybe, just maybe there was a rare old sci-fi movie worth the wait or something with tits, but mainly it was just dreck.
I assume (and here is where a commercial tv reptile could give us good insight) that even though this was showing to an audience of five drunk teenagers the TV station was paying for the right to broadcast. Probably not paying a lot, but it cost to put it on air. The arrival of infomercials would have meant that advertisers began to pay the station instead, a much more attractive proposition.
The first late night infomercials I remember seeing were simply longer versions of daytime low-value adverts, so there was already an established production market that just needed to adapt to the opportunity.
We had something similar in Toronto in the early 1980s. Channel 47 ran “The All-Night Show” between 1 or 2 AM, and 6 AM, then the channel would begin its official broadcast day. That made Channel 47 Toronto’s first 24-hour station.
The All-Night Show’s premise was that a couple of overnight security guards were goofing around one night, started pretending they were doing a show (one as host, the other as cameraman), flipped a switch they shouldn’t have touched, and without knowing it, started broadcasting. They’d show old TV shows (“Twilight Zone,” “Mr. Lucky,” “Peter Gunn,” and similar); old short films, like travelogues and old newsreels; and anything else they could find. Or, they’d just banter back and forth, talking about what they were showing, or whatever else crossed their minds.
It was fun, but sadly, it didn’t last forever. I guess infomercials paid more than the few commercials that aired during the All-Night Show.
This is what I remember in the Los Angeles market during the ‘70s. The independent stations would show Italian and French films from the ‘60s with some fleeting nudity that was worth staying up for a 13 year old. And more horror films than sci-fi. I’m not talking about the creature features with a host, but low budget exploitation films; many from the UK, like Horror Hospital. After 3am or so, programming could be really random with stuff like the animated Star Trek show or a public service documentary. When the Farm Report came on around 6am you knew the morning cartoons would start in about 15 minutes.
My thought was the video equipment of the day was hefty -to run all night, I assume someone would have to be there to change tapes every half hour or so. Then there was the issue of content - a lot smaller back catalog in those days, particularly of colour shows. Those cost money to broadcast, and I assume the license royalties were not worth the perceived payback in revenue from commercials.
(What I do remember is shows like Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, and Bewitched were ubiquitous at the time school got out, because they were cheap in syndication, there were enough episodes they were not repetitious (except in terms of theme) and school kids were not a big market for commercials.)
I recall a few news articles about the cable channel and vandalism. The cable company’s info-channel would sometimes be a camera automatically pnning back and forth between pin-ups of local news, weather, etc. Someone would break in and pin up porn on that bulletin board. (Later they went to a scrolling computer-generated text.)
Probably based on the idea that it all had to be done live, or someone would have to be threading the movie projector all the time. Said by someone who had no imagination that the amount of material “made for TV!” would exceed Hollywood big screen output.
As a kid there was something almost depressing about the whole affair. The TV itself had something like 78 channels - (UHF) without a goddamned thing on them, I know this because I checked every fucking one, and there were maybe 3 out of 9 on VHF. Then, the SOBs shut down at night.
I also remember the harsh reality of Daytime television - being home sick from school - Oh Boy! It’ll be great to watch TV all day, won’t it? Yeah, no. Soap Operas, and goofy game shows.
I don’t think that TV stations had to do this - or if they did, it didn’t last as long as until the 80s and had nothing to do with infomercials. Here is a TV schedule from NYC in 1976. Every day, there is at least one station starting a program between 4am and 5 am and at least one starting a program at 6 or a few minutes before. That wouldn’t happen if there was a requirement for stations to shut down, not unless the requirement was to shut down for a really short period of time, like an hour. My guess is that it always had to do with programming and audiences - maybe in large cities, for some stations there was enough of an audience to be worth producing or buying programming for 24 hrs a day and paying someone to be at the station 24/7 but that wasn’t the case for other stations or in other places.
There was a show on Toronto late night TV that was literally a guy driving his car around the city at nighttime for an hour. There was something oddly hypnotic about it.
Being a old fart working stiff now, I don’t know if or when this ended, but when I was a wee lad, 4PM to 6PM used to be an odd variety of syndicated shows. I’d get home from school and there’d be some combination of The Honeymooners, Family Ties, All in the Family (that was an afternoon staple into my university years: we’d sit around in the residence TV room, agog at Archie Bunker’s political incorrectness), The Little Rascals and sometimes Cheers, which were usually the Coach/Diane years but once and a while the affiliate would goof up (?) and show a really recent episode.
Considering what the Comedy Network (or whatever it’s calling itself these days) usually marathons, I suspect the afternoons are filled with Seinfeld and Big Bang Theory, but I’m not interested enough to check. If I’m home sick from work or on a day off, I’m streaming stuff and never alight on the local CTV affiliate.
I worked an overnight shift in 1984 where I was allowed to watch TV while the kids were sleeping (group home situation). That’s where I learned about Sea Hunt. I could also watch many other similar shows that I no longer remember. No infomercials that I recall, but I might have skipped over those channels. Chicago area, if it is relevant.
IIRC the magic number was 5. If a series lasted 5 years, there was enough material to broadcast 5 days a week in syndication for the whole year. By around 1964 it seems to me most shows new were in colour, but colorizing movies was not a technology until around 1990(?). By the 70’s, people did not want to watch B&W; after all they’d paid big bucks for that huge (Yuge!) 26" colour TV.
I don’t know what videotape was like in the 1960’s or 70’s, but I suspect it was like the Sony Umatic(?) which was good for maybe half an hour or an hour. So to show something all night required someone to change tapes and cue them. I often wondered how commercials worked. I assumed someone made a mix tape for each commercial break and flipped over to the other player for the commercials. (or made a mix tape with commercials added).
IIRC prime time was live feed form the main networks’ HQ - hence, Dallas could be a surprise, nobody got a tape of the spoiler episode the day before to watch. I assume some commercials were part of the prime time feed. I remember the CRTC allowed more commercials than the FCC, so watching new shows on Canadian channels, the station would cut in with commercials before or after the break. Watching some of these shows on syndication (like All In The Family ) I would notice “huh? That wasn’t in the show when I first watched it…”
But basically, overnight was a tradeoff between cost and logistics vs. possible revenue. The local radio station in the 60’s and 70’s could afford to put together a giant reel-to-reel mix tape and just let it run for 6 hours unattended. I don’t think TV tech was at that stage.
I also remember some Canadian channels, the nighttime signal after the national anthem was a sort of rainbow-coloured set of vertical bars.
The local NBC affiliate had Ampex tape machines. Bonanza was mailed to stations on reels that were about 24" across. I recall there being two machines in the station in the 1960s when I was a child.
