Irish: hi i'm participant number f c six seven dash p one

Irish: hi i'm participant number f c six seven p two

Irish: please call stella ask her to bring these things with her from the store six spoons of fresh snow peas five thick slabs of blue cheese and maybe a snack for her brother bob we also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids she can scoop these things into three red bags and we will go meet her wednesday at the train station

Irish: please call stella ask her to bring these things with her from the store six spoons of fresh snow peas five thick slabs of blue cheese and maybe a snack for her brother bob we also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids she can scoop these things into three red bags and we will go meet her wednesday at the train station so i think we were had decided to talk about some television memories from when we were kids and what it was like kind of growing up in ireland in the late seventies and eighites

Irish: yeah

Irish: and then the major discovery of uk and american television when we were both about ten years of age so um i was just remarking kind of how bleak it was back in say the late seventies and early eighties for kids and children's programming even educational stuff there wasn't much of it on irish television do you think

Irish: no not much and it was very rare even that you'd get imports like sesame street the closest thing they had was i don't know if you remember bosco

Irish: yeah i do

Irish: yeah

Irish: everything was centered around puppets

Irish: sure

Irish: um for early irish television because it was obviously cheaper but yeah i think bosco was the main educational thing wasn't exactly sesame street standard but i think they were really limited in their budget on on their production

Irish: oh (()) and imagination by the looks of it as well <laugh>

Irish: yeah

Irish: but yeah i remember bosco it was fine if you were like a preschooler or in you know babies in in primary school but once you hit maybe five or six you kind of grew out of it and there was nothing really that stopped the gap until we were much later much older

Irish: yeah i mean it shows there was a lot of i think a serious lack of imagination when it came kids were kind of an afterthought um when it came to television and radio and entertainment back in those early days and i guess the biggest change for the two of us would've been when we were kind of exposed to english television and by default american television

Irish: yeah

Irish: and in my house that i was about ten i think when that happened so that would've been about mid eighties about nineteen eighty five

Irish: yeah

Irish: and we had to get an aerial put on a roof it was a whole day out and there was a man who had to come and put it up and i had to run in and out of the sitting room and shout up at him when the picture was good put that first weekend i got up really early and watched my first weekend of english children's tv and it was a revelation

Irish: yeah i remember when we got it first it was just so colorful it wasn't as

Irish: yeah

Irish: drab or dreary as irish tv with their you know limited budgets and cheap sets i remember uh saturday swap shop with noel

Irish: yeah

Irish: edmonds and that just that was

Irish: yeah

Irish: eye opening but it was always so depressing when you were a kid in ireland that you couldn't join in you couldn't enter competitions you sometimes you couldn't even find some of the stuff they used for the artsy craft

Irish: the materials that were impossible

Irish: yeah you couldn't i never knew what a pipe cleaner was we never saw pipe cleaners

Irish: no i think that was my early exposure there was a show called number seventy three

Irish: mm mmh

Irish: and it was just i'd say like you said the biggest memory initially was color and excitement and it seemed to be like almost an adult format but it was designed for kids

Irish: yeah

Irish: and there was so much stuff happening and wacky stuff and funny stuff and it used to switch from cartoons to comedy to drama and then the mandatory make and do stuff but the same thing all these materials it all just seemed really exotic and england seemed like a long long way away

Irish: <laugh>

Irish: but i was really jealous i thought to myself i'll never get to go 'cause they used to have kids on the set in the audience and they used to win like fantastic prizes and go on holidays and stuff like that too and like you say i was always really envious looking across the water so to speak at england and it just seemed really exciting and exotic and kind of far from where we were at

Irish: totally and what was even more exciting was where we grew up we got the northern ireland feed for the uk

Irish: oh yeah yeah which was was separate as well <overlap>

Irish: which was separate yeah they had like

Irish: yeah

Irish: utv and itv but mainly

Irish: yeah

Irish: it was like a lot of their productions were from northern ireland why don't you and those kind of things

Irish: yeah

Irish: but if if you went to visit family up in dublin they actually received the bbc whales or the itv from london

Irish: oh wow

Irish: and that that got you some serious cartoons yeah

Irish: yeah

Irish: that you wouldn't see on irish tv a good caliber

Irish: no yeah

Irish: quality of cartoons you know

Irish: and we market on irish cartoons because after we got the english channels you'd kind of rarely go back to irish tv if you were a kid but i don't know if you remember back in the late seventies and eighties they used to buy in these cartoons from i think it was places like czechoslovakia and poland could have even been from the former soviet republic but the strange thing about them was that there were political kind of cartoons which is no speaking and strange animation and really disturbing music

Irish: mm mmh

Irish: and they used to put those on for kids um and the contrast when you saw some of the stuff that was coming in from america as well through the english channels that was just such an eye opener it was huge in the mid 'eighties

Irish: yeah

Irish: and that was the thing you'd talk to your friends about it on a monday morning you'd go to school and you'd talk about all the cartoons that you saw i guess then tv shows you're starting to get exposed to especially american ones do you have any immediate favorites

Irish: well i remember one of the first times seeing the flintstones

Irish: sure right

Irish: when when we were growing up the flintstones were around for a long time but i didn't understand that i didn't know that there was such thing as a rerun i didn't know what it meant

Irish: yeah yeah yeah

Irish: so when i saw things on tv i assumed that you know they were made especially for me nevermind that there were just the first viewing of them

Irish: yeah

Irish: and i remember my dad came into the room when i was watching the flintstones and he went oh i used to love this when i was a kid that blew my mind as like

Irish: yeah

Irish: you you saw this when you were a

Irish: yeah

Irish: child and he he used to laugh his head off at the saute tiger kicking fred flinstone out the window <laugh> at the very end

Irish: yeah

Irish: that that used to crack me up but just to get anything from the states was was huge especially when rtp

Irish: yeah

Irish: off their budget and they managed to import things so yeah

Irish: yeah

Irish: but i

Irish: but i think they had to there was so many people opting for 'cause the original old old sky television was just on the horizon

Irish: mm mmh

Irish: and you could also avail of kind of uh like you said english channels and welsh channels in northern ireland so irish broadcasting kind of had to up its game a little but it still didn't do too much for kids or children's programming but i think one of my all time favorites and one that crosses generations is obviously sesame street because

Irish: oh yeah

Irish: that was just huge when you were a kid that had everything that had fun learning puppets uh comedy humor drama uh brilliant animation and yeah that was a huge influence when i was a kid

Irish: yeah

Irish: you know

Irish: well especially when you saw it and you saw where they lived in sesame street and the thing you wanted the most as a kid was to live there or to knock

Irish: yeah

Irish: to knock on big birds door and you know

Irish: yeah

Irish: to say yeah i i see mr schuffman because too you're not the only

Irish: yeah

Irish: one these little things they used to really

Irish: yeah

Irish: involve your imagination when you were a kid it was amazing and the catchy songs and even not just the puppets and muppets that really but the humans were endearing like mr hooper and

Irish: yeah

Irish: the beautiful red shiny apples he used to sell in his store

Irish: yeah

Irish: you just wanted to go in there and buy something it was just a it was like a fantasy but it was somewhere that was achievable it was attainable in our minds you know

Irish: yeah and also was just there was so much humor in it too

Irish: mm mmh

Irish: and it kind of related to another one of my favorites that would've crossed over from the parents' generation too which was the muppet show

Irish: yeah

Irish: and it was kind of had i used to kind of confuse the two i used to always <overlap>

Irish: so did i

Irish: muppet show

Irish: yeah

Irish: the muppet show was an evening version of sesame street you know <laugh>

Irish: it was the grown up sunday evening

Irish: yeah

Irish: but the the main difficulty was you grew up an only child whereas i had siblings i had two brothers and buck rogers in the twenty fifth century was scheduled on at the same time as the muppet show so there was blue murder every sunday evening over who got to watch which

Irish: yeah i was blessed because there'd be large parts of the day that i would have the television just to myself so i didn't have to compete so what was that that must have been tough when you've got two siblings and you're both of slightly different ages

Irish: mm

Irish: and obviously there's no recording facilities then and

Irish: mm

Irish: that was the thing i think kids probably don't appreciate these days that you you had to be there you had to see it once

Irish: yeah

Irish: and if you missed it you missed it and that was the thing with tv back then that um you wouldn't know when something might be shown again

Irish: mm

Irish: it it's not like if you could look it up it might be shown once and it could be three years later before it's it's shown again so yeah

Irish: <laugh> well i remember growing up in the uk you'd often see on the british channels you know mention of the radio times

Irish: yeah

Irish: and we did have we did have some kind of an equivalent called the rte guide

Irish: yeah

Irish: but nobody nobody bought us only at christmas to get the bumper maybe three weeks

Irish: it was firm that's what it was yeah

Irish: spread of what was on yeah so you get it for the whole month but nobody used to buy it so nobody would even i don't know if they even showed the tv schedule in the papers back then it was very rare

Irish: well i was actually thinking of that there was so 'cause there would've been approximately maybe at most ten or eleven channels so at one point in time the paper near the back page used to have a whole page just devoted in six or seven columns and you could read down what was on so that was a daily thing and the paper always seemed cheaper than the actual tv guide itself

Irish: mm

Irish: you know so

Irish: when you're reading the paper for other things as well so i think they shared around the family

Irish: and then there was so yeah there was so many channels then it was simply not cost effective to kind of to print it

Irish: mm hmm

Irish: you know what i mean and regarding like american stuff especially like

Irish: mm

Irish: drama shows where you got out of the kind of cartoon age and then you would've all these shows like say macgyver and the a team and sci fi stuff as a girl

Irish: uh wonder woman wonder woman