AFN-TV (American Forces), Berlin: 1971 Schedules and 1980s Caps

[TVWorldwide]

From a commemorative site about AFN-TV, Berlin, here are some schedules from 1971 (when the station was known as AFTV)...

http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/Plaza/5246/afn_berlin/schedule1.htm

...and pics (with sound files) from the 1980s...

http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/Plaza/5246/afn_berlin/tvpix.html

Some of the links are broken.

According to a German site, AFN-TV was even available on some German cable systems for a while. Somehow, I don't think that made major studios and distributors too happy.

 

[Tom_Desmond]

> From a commemorative site about AFN-TV, Berlin, here are
> some schedules from 1971 (when the station was known as
> AFTV)...

That's interesting to see -- I remember watching AFN-TV in 1973/74 in Mannheim, West Germany. The picture was really snowy (because we didn't yet have our own Armed Forces transmitter, and had to pick receive the transmitter from another base) and they only broadcast in B&W. I remember some really, really old cartoons (like "Crusader Rabbit"), Saturday afternoon "Lost in Space" reruns being out of order (which really screwed up the end of show cliffhangers), and some of the corniest public service announcements ever ("Be the wise man not the fool, when you drive your car man, drive cool").

 

[rugrats1]

> ...some of the corniest public service announcements ever
> ("Be the wise man not the fool, when you drive your car man,
> drive cool").
>

Someone else mentioned that PSA, which ran through the late-1970s in some areas -- by that time, hippie talk and jive-talkin (the Bee Gees notwithstanding) was already becoming out of date.

I also read that most AFN stations used kinnies for imported live and videotaped programming from the US into the late-1970s or early-1980s.

It seems that the AFN stations of the era was there merely to entertain you and inform you in the government's style, without jazzing it up with newfangled innovations like color or videotape.

 

[Tom_Desmond]

> It seems that the AFN stations of the era was there merely
> to entertain you and inform you in the government's style,
> without jazzing it up with newfangled innovations like color
> or videotape.

There was a practical problem with offering color programming, which was the difference in TV standards between the US (NTSC) and most of Western Europe (PAL, except in France). The PX sold B&W televisions that had been modified to work with both NTSC and PAL broadcasts (an unmodified NTSC TV could be tweaked to receive the picture on PAL broadcasts, but couldn't receive the sound). Unfortunately, the technology of the time made it impractical to work a modification that would have allowed a color television to receive both standards in color. Sticking with B&W broadcasts made this standards conflict less of an issue.

As for using filmed programming instead of videotape, I have my guess on this -- and am hoping that we maybe have someone "in the know" here who can either confirm or corret me. Since I didn't have to readjust the vertical hold on my little B&W television when switching from ARD or ZDF (the main West German channels) to AFN-TV, I suspect that AFN was broadcasting a 625 line/25 frame per second picture as per European standards (but with audio subcarriers at both the North American and West German standard offsets). If so, running North American videotapes that are recorded in our 525 line/30 frame per second standard would have required converting between the two broadcast standards -- something that wasn't cheap with the technology of the early seventies. Going with film programming only would eliminate that particular problem.

 

[CrankyYankee]

AFRTS would make up packages of shows on film and rotate them to about 10 or 12 stations on a circut.

Berlin was lucky as it was the second station on a circut and the film was still in pretty good shape as only the Frankfurt station had used it so far.
(This said, we got a lot of reels of film that had been shown umpteen times and had lots of splices and a few hunks missing too.)

Pity the last station on the circut who got the film and it was scratched, spliced and sometimes scotchtaped back together.

I recall one really cold spell and the film had sat on the train or in an unheated truck for a long time. When we got it, the APO guys dropped a box or two and the film broke into zillions of pieces that we had to splice back together.

Sometimes the film still had local PSAs spliced into it from other areas, like Japan and more recently at that time, Vietnam.

I recall seeing a home-grown psa with George Jessel telling the troops to drive carefully in Vietnam that got left in some show.

After showing the film, it would be packed up and sent on to the next station, which I believe was in Iceland.

We would always have at least week of shows in house as a back up in case
"something" happened to the shipment, which now and then did occur.
(I heard about one shipment of film that was being transported by helicopter
in Vietnam. The side door was open, the cases were not secured and the chopper came under fire. The pilot took evasive action and the film boxes slid out never to be seen again.)

Berlin was also unique in that it had a large film library of shows and movies
because many of the shows in the weekly packages could not be shown as the
programs were trying to be sold to the German market. Each week we'd get a list of programs in the Television Weekly shipment(the TW) that we could not show.

However, what programs we could not show, would be fine for another station on the circut to show, especially if that station was at Fort Goosebump in Greenland or someplace where there was not
a large metro area, like Berlin.

As noted in a previous post, many locals would pay about a hundred bucks to have their TV's adapted to get AFN as many of them knew enough English to understand what was going on in the shows.

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