• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Worst TV stations ever

Bob1370 said:
"I just returned from a road trip and was watching WTVH in Syracuse. WTVH (WHEN) was once the jewel in Central N. Y. television. They were a prestige organization -one of the best TV stations I had ever seen. They were so good, they were actually the # 2 station in nearby Utica. Because of the sale of the station and the retirement of longtime anchor Ron Curtis they started going down hill in the 2000's. They are now just a sub station of WSTM -3. They simulcast Ch. 3's newscast with a CBS 5 logo in the bottom of the screen. Outside of CBS programing all I saw were infomercials."

What you saw this time around, was the result of the Chapter XI bankruptcy of Granite Broadcasting Co., which bought the station from Meredith and proceeded to wreck it even more thoroughly than they damaged WKBW-TV in Buffalo, which remains alive though somewhat crippled.

When Meredith owned WHEN radio and TV, both stations were market leaders. WHEN-AM was a pioneer full service adult contemporary station, one of the very first in the format nationally in the early 1970s (along with WGAR in Cleveland and WGR in Buffalo); it had a 24/7 newsroom, which I remember well because I worked there in 1973 and 1974 as weekday afternoon newscaster. The radio station's now a satellite-fed Fox Sports outlet owned by Clear Channel with little local programming, no news, and no content to compete with now-sister station WSYR. The same thing, in an even sadder way, has happened to what was once the pioneer TV station in the city. Both stations should be sold to people who'll try to make the most of them--but neither one will as long as we allow concentration of ownership even in markets small enough to allow one or two companies to form oligopolies or even monopolies.
Click to expand...

That is where Al Roker got his start and you were there the same time as him z!
 
rnigma1 said:
I used to watch WTVY. It was the first 24-hour station in the area and ran old Warner Bros. movies and cartoons in the wee hours back in the 70s. That was one of its good points.
Aside from straw-hatted Gene Ragan and screaming good-ol'-boy Red Holland (we used to call him "Red Hollerin'") one of the station's longest lasting personalities was morning show host Ann Varnum, who wore the worst wigs this side of Sam Donaldson. And station owner Charles Woods would make occasional appearances - a plane crash in WW2 left him minus his hair, ears, and an eye.
The commercials - aside from those featuring Red, there were the spots from King Furniture featuring the owner's son Howard King. He would be up in the loft of the store's stockroom, or sitting on a stack of mattresses, and his dad yelled "Hey Howard, whatcha doin' up there?" and Howard would go into his spiel he read off cue cards. At the end, a shot of a $20 bill with a superimposed Clutch Cargo mouth saying "A $20 bill free if you can find anyone who beats our prices!"

However, the worst show they ran (I think it ran on both WTVY and WDHN) was probably "Fort Rock" - an attempt at a religious kids' show. The cast consisted of three or four rednecky guys wearing camo uniforms with "God's Army" on the name patches. To diversify the cast, they added Rufus... a hand puppet of a black man, speaking in an Amos-&-Andy dialect. I kid you not. The production values were as horrid as that stereotype. And this aired in the mid-late 80s!

After Gray Television bought WTVY, things weren't the same.
Click to expand...


WTVY did change for the better after Gray TV bought it.
 
rnigma1 said:
I used to watch WTVY. It was the first 24-hour station in the area and ran old Warner Bros. movies and cartoons in the wee hours back in the 70s. That was one of its good points.
Aside from straw-hatted Gene Ragan and screaming good-ol'-boy Red Holland (we used to call him "Red Hollerin'") one of the station's longest lasting personalities was morning show host Ann Varnum, who wore the worst wigs this side of Sam Donaldson. And station owner Charles Woods would make occasional appearances - a plane crash in WW2 left him minus his hair, ears, and an eye.
The commercials - aside from those featuring Red, there were the spots from King Furniture featuring the owner's son Howard King. He would be up in the loft of the store's stockroom, or sitting on a stack of mattresses, and his dad yelled "Hey Howard, whatcha doin' up there?" and Howard would go into his spiel he read off cue cards. At the end, a shot of a $20 bill with a superimposed Clutch Cargo mouth saying "A $20 bill free if you can find anyone who beats our prices!"

However, the worst show they ran (I think it ran on both WTVY and WDHN) was probably "Fort Rock" - an attempt at a religious kids' show. The cast consisted of three or four rednecky guys wearing camo uniforms with "God's Army" on the name patches. To diversify the cast, they added Rufus... a hand puppet of a black man, speaking in an Amos-&-Andy dialect. I kid you not. The production values were as horrid as that stereotype. And this aired in the mid-late 80s!

After Gray Television bought WTVY, things weren't the same.
Click to expand...

Howard now owns King's and does radio ads for them. I found an ad on YouTube and it is either his sister or his mom hollering that.
 
crainbebo said:
Yup. Once The Disney Afternoon ended and Rugrats mania took over on cable, it was all downhill for the syndicated/network weekday cartoons. Sure, Power Rangers kept Fox Kids profitable on Saturday mornings, but eventually the audience went to cable.
Not to mention the higher numbers of kids in after-school programs and sports leagues, which took away any chance of watching afternoon cartoons (unless Kindercares had TVs and turned them on for the school-age program). I found it baffling that cartoon blocks began at 3:00, when 80% of the audience was either wrapping up the school day or still on the bus! Of course, a child in one state may get out of school half an hour earlier than a child in another state, so I guess the '3 to 5' was customary across the board. At summer vacation time, it didn't matter...

*ALSO way off-topic...
Click to expand...
In New York City both Ch. 5 and Ch. 11 started airing cartoons as early as 2 - 2:30pm.
 
Wright County Guy said:
1987. Weatherman with mullet. Game, set, and match Trapper12.
Click to expand...
I know this has been a long time ago, but I remember that station (didn't grow up there, but saw it a few times). I don't think there's anything particularly bad or goofy about this newscast. It's just a basic, no-frills, small-town local news program. For what it is, it's not bad, there's nothing "wrong" with it. Minimalist in a good way.
 
TVCOOL said:
In New York City both Ch. 5 and Ch. 11 started airing cartoons as early as 2 - 2:30pm.
Click to expand...
At one point, in the mid 90's, KSMO-TV, Ch. 62 in Kansas City, MO was airing cartoons as early as 5AM on the weekdays. I believe that their kids blocks were, at the time, from 5-10AM & 1-5:30PM.
 
RadioPatrol said:
That's interesting Dr. Dean Edell I had no idea ABC syndicated his segments for non ABC Owned stations too. I knew Dr. Dean Edell was best known for doing segments for KGO-TV San Francisco though and he at one point also did a talk show for KGO-AM too.


Click to expand...
Edell had a national talk show on ABC Talkradio, but it was bought out by Ed McLaughlin, who would go on to syndicate Rush Limbaugh
 
Jman8606 said:
Don't get me started on Gene Reagan! That theme was overly bombastic!
Click to expand...
My opinion is ksla in texarkana. They cut the audio on network programs to broadcast a weather alert in audio which repeats 6 to 8 times about every 10 minutes. The other local stations state there are no weather alerts in our area. I just wish channel 12 could hire someone that has the skills to put a text weather alert on the bottom or top of the screen so I could watch the program instead of missing the audio for a bogus weather alert.
 
My more modern day opinion of bad TV would be the entire Fox network (not necessarily programs produced by Fox O and O's).
 
The reference to Danny Williams makes me wonder if that Miami station was airing wrestling from Oklahoma City. Danny Williams was the announcer on the matches on Channel 4 (now KFOR) in addition to his daytime show "Dannysday." I still think it was George Becker and Johnny Weaver; I never heard of a wrestler named Art Becker, although they sometimes worked with Sailor Art Thomas.
 
In the not worst but certainly underfinanced dept.:

Looks like nobody's mentioned WLXT-TV 60 Aurora, Ill., on the air from May 1969 through July 1970, when it ran out of money.

This was a barebones independent owned by a handful of businessmen in the suburb west of Chicago. The tower for the underpowered station was the WKKD-FM tower. There was one color camera, plus a color film chain.

WLXT was on the air from late afternoon to 10 p.m. weekdays and from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. weekends. Occasionally it came on earlier.

I stumbled on it when we received a new TV in June 1970. In part, the weekday lineup was "Cartoon Magic" at 5 p.m. (an artist telling a story while drawing cartoons), "Adventures in Paradise" at 6 p.m., local news at 6:30 and 9:30. I can't recall the 7 to 9:30 shows, but they were shows long off-network. Somehow, the station cobbled together a black-and-white live mobile unit with, I think, two cameras. I recall seeing a neighbor running in a drag race at the Oswego Dragstrip one Sunday afternoon in the short time between my discovering this experiment and it going off the air.

Despite the short time on the air, there are a couple of notable alumni: news director Christine Lund ended up at KABC-TV, and weatherman Tom Skilling, an 18-year-old high schooler who was planning to major in meteorology, is a WGN-TV legend.
 
b-turner said:
Tell us about KVVV TV 16 in Galveston. Never seen it. Why is it the worst?
Click to expand...
Owners apparently didn’t know how to market the station to potential advertisers. Transmitter on the far south side of the metro area didn’t help. Probably unfair to call it the worst, though. Surprised it wasn’t sold to new owners…this was when religious broadcasters were starting to show up on the UHF band and were buying struggling stations. KVVV might have survived to this day in such a scenario.

I wasn’t living in Houston at the time, but a number of co-workers over the years have said they remember Channel 16. I think I might have caught some fuzzy glimpses of KVVV in Austin when tropo kicked up.


History of UHF Television

uhfhistory.com uhfhistory.com
 


Back
Top Bottom