VDT VIEW

By Terry Richards
VDT View

The question of who invented television is one of those muddled historical things that, until now, has never been adequately answered. A number of names and countries of origin have been tossed around, with egos bruised in the process.
However, I can now lay the argument to rest once and for all. My own research of private records, diaries and family histories reveal that television was first publicly demonstrated in Valdosta on Oct. 27, 1864, through the efforts of a Confederate Army officer, Lt. Col. Philo Baird Lipkow.
Lipkow was a member of the Signals Branch of the Confederate Army, largely dedicated to relaying messages on horseback, by flag-relay and via the crumbling telegraph system under constant attack by the Union forces. Lipkow, an amateur inventor, had been playing with the idea of using telegraph wires to relay moving pictures since the 1850s, and had convinced his superiors in late 1864 that his proposed “tele-vision” system would be a tremendous boost in morale for the homefront.
He made his proposal to President Jefferson Davis in April 1864 in a letter entitled “A Means of Showing the Southern People the Ultimate Disposition of Thousands of Godless Yankees.” A test project would have Lipkow using his equipment to send images of an overwhelming Confederate victory back to his hometown of Valdosta, where experimental receivers - informally nicknamed “Gray Lanterns” - would be set up in saloons and boarding houses for public consumption.
President Davis granted Lipkow permission for a single field trial, plus a small advance of precious Confederate currency to purchase needed supplies.

By Terry Richards
VDT View

As I sit here in the 24th century and telepathically dictate this column to my mind-reading robot typist, I pause and reflect on how far man has come in his mastery of time. Why, kids, I can remember when humanity could only travel forward in time, one second after another.
For those of you who may be in the 21st century reading this, I’m not going to divulge my secret method of time travel, since you’re obviously not ready for it, other than to say the device that makes it possible is buried at the bottom of my office filing cabinet’s lower drawer, the one that doesn’t have a handle, which is why I keep an old-style paper fan from a funeral home jammed in the way so the drawer doesn’t close completely, leaving me unable to open the drawer and make my escape through history.
But you 21st century Earthlings should be at least familiar with the basic concepts of time travel, since there have been several popular 2-D noninteractive video dramas built around the concept:
• “Doctor Who.” This legendary, long-running British science-fiction series from the BBC debuted the day after the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and ran continuously for 26 years, until 1989. It followed the mysterious Doctor, an alien time traveler who battled the forces of evil across past, present and future in a secondhand - some say stolen - time machine called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions in Space), a spaceship which should be able to disguise its appearance wherever it goes, but has numerous breakdowns and is stuck in the form of a 1950s London police telephone box.
After it folded in 1989, “Doctor Who” resurfaced in 1996 as a one-shot TV movie from Universal Studios, a “backdoor pilot” for a new series that never came about. In 2005, the BBC restarted “Doctor Who” as a weekly series which has become very successful internationally.
• “The Time Tunnel.” This one-season wonder from Irwin Allen aired in 1966. It centered on Project Tik Tok, a massive Manhattan Project-style U.S. government secret effort to build a working time machine. When two of the project’s chief scientists (played by Robert Colbert and James Darren) use the tunnel, they become lost in time; the Tik Tok command staff can push them from one time period to another but can’t seem to get them back home.
Shoved about through the centuries, the two travelers board the Titanic, deal with Lincoln’s assassination, fight various alien invasions and even try to sabotage an Eastern Bloc scientist’s efforts to build his own time tunnel a full decade before the U.S. effort.
• “Voyagers!” Another one-season wonder, this time airing in 1982 and aimed at the kids’ education audience. “Voyagers!” followed Phineas Bogg (Jon-Erik Hexum), a member of a secret society of time travelers who move about through the centuries making sure that history unfolds properly. He’s assisted by Jeffery Jones (Meeno Peluce), an orphan and history buff he meets when Jeffery’s dog chews up Bogg’s history handbook.
Their travels are made possible by the Omni, a small time machine about the size of a fat pocket watch. If a red light on the Omni is flashing, they know history is off course (such as the Russians beating the Americans to the moon) and our heroes have to work to undo the damage, bringing about a green light on the Omni, signaling success.
• “Quantum Leap.” This series, which ran from 1989-1993, was very much an updated take on “Time Tunnel.” Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) tests his experimental time-travel system, only to find that some “higher power” has hijacked the thing and is “leaping” him into other people’s lives throughout recent history, giving him a chance to set right things that once went wrong.
The only friend he has along the way is Al (Dean Stockwell), a Navy admiral working on Project Quantum Leap whose holographic image is beamed to Beckett through time.
• “Peabody’s Improbable History,” a segment of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” from the 1960s. In this cartoon, the superintelligent dog Mr. Peabody takes “his boy” Sherman on adventures through time and bad puns with the aid of the WABAC machine.
Well, I’ve gotta go. Got some unfinished history business to attend to. It comes to my attention that the Braves never won another World Series after 1995, and the Omni’s flashing red.

By Terry Richards
VDTView

Well, the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” sailed off into the sunset last week, wrapping up most of its storylines. The evil robots were destroyed. The good guys were stranded on Earth and decided to make the best of it. The heroes’ spaceships were sent plunging into the sun, and 150,000 years later, the final scene showed robots dancing in Times Square to the sound of Jimi Hendrix singing “All Along the Watchtower.”
Used to be that TV shows didn’t end, they just stopped. Petered out. There was no big finale, no tying off of storylines, no big hurrah to say goodbye. The last episode would be as unexceptional as any other. Part of this, in the days when the Big Three networks ruled all, was the timing of cancellation - studios wouldn’t find out that a show wasn’t coming back next year until it was too late to film some closure. The cast of “Gilligan’s Island” didn’t find out the show was killed and they were out of work until they read about it in the trade papers.
Still, a number of television shows staring down death have managed to tidy up their affairs at the end:
• “The Fugitive.” This late 1960s thriller was the granddaddy of “man-on-the-run” shows, following Dr. Richard Kimble (David Jannsen), a man wrongly convicted of killing his wife. When the train carrying Kimble to the state prison derails, he escapes, and starts a cross-country odyssey of false names, menial jobs and laying low while trying to track down the one-armed man who is the real killer - all the while pursued himself by a dedicated lawman, Lt. Gerard (Barry Morse).

By Terry Richards
VDT View

Game shows have been a staple of television since the early days of non-HD non-color non-digital broadcasting in the late 1940s. Compared to dramas and comedies, game shows are - or used to be - relatively inexpensive to produce, making them ideal for daytime filler on what used to be the Big Three networks.
They are also, by and large, mind-numbing. I don’t know anyone who has listed “Watch ‘Deal or No Deal’ faithfully” on their resume for a job at NASA. While I’m not claiming that game shows should be for Ph.Ds exclusively, there’s got to be a more dignified way of winning the bonus round than by hitting the paddles for a 20-foot-tall pinball machine (NBC’s “The Magnificent Marble Machine”).
Thankfully, a few game shows in broadcast history have not insulted the viewers’ intellect. In fact, some of them could have been used as teaching aids.
The original “Jeopardy!” Viewers who are only familiar with the current “Jeopardy!” with Alex Trebek and a stage set that pulls more wattage than the Las Vegas Strip would probably laugh themselves silly if they saw an episode of the original show, which ran from 1964-1975 on NBC’s morning lineup. Hosted by former Winston cigarette pitchman Art Fleming, Merv Griffin’s original “Jeopardy!” featured tacky sets, lounge music, a decidedly low-tech game board (made of plywood with stagehands out of sight pulling slats to reveal the answers) and a whole, whole lot less moola than today -”I’ll take U.S. Presidents for $10, Art.” Yeah, no kidding. $10.

By Terry Richards
VDT View

A few random notes from around television land:
• The Sci-Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” returns with its final 10 episodes starting Jan. 16. Unlike the original “Galactica” which aired for one season in 1978, Sci-Fi’s rag-tag fleet of war survivors actually managed to find the fabled planet Earth before the show was over (the original “Galactica” had the colonial survivors finding Earth during the Reagan Administration in a bad, bad, awful followup series, “Galactica 1980.”)
Unfortunately for the Sci-Fi Channel’s gang, their Earth appears to be a scorched, roasted, charred radioactive hulk with abandoned and decaying cities. Either they’ve landed in rural New Mexico or something’s very, very wrong with our future.
• Speaking of “something’s wrong with our future,” we’ve only got about a month before the government shuts down all television. Or at least that’s one misunderstanding I’ve heard about February’s switch to all-digital TV broadcasting, abandoning the analog system which can trace its roots all the way back to 1895 with Marconi’s spark-gap transmitters.