Originally Posted by KarlHyde:
“Thanks, DocumentaryFan. I remember Yugoslavia regularly taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest, and of course winning it in 1989.
How was Yugoslavian television organised in the 70s and 80s (number of channels, broadcasting hours, different languages and regions)? What kind of foreign programming did they show from Eastern and Western countries? Was dubbing or subtitling the preferred method of localisation?”
In Yugoslavia, each of the six republics and both autonomous provinces had their own broadcasting organizations. The broadcasters from the Serbo-Croatian-speaking republics (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro) operated a more-or-less joint television network -- a bit like ARD's Das Erste in Germany --, but with their own evening news since the late 1960s.
TV Ljubljana in Slovenia and TV Skopje in Macedonia were far more independent and had their own separate TV services because of the language issue -- the Slovenian and the Macedonian languages are different from Serbo-Croatian. They were members of JRT, but they did not carry the full "JRT network". Instead, they only aired occasional programs from the other Yugoslav broadcasters, often subtitled.
All of the broadcasters above operated at least two channels. Some began to operate third channels in the late 1980s, but those were mostly experimental, staffed largely by enthusiastic young people, and with limited reach.
In addition, three broadcasting organizations aired TV services intended primarily for minorities: TV Novi Sad in the Serbian province of Vojvodina broadcast mostly in Hungarian and in the other minority languages of that province, TV Pristina in the Serbian province of Kosovo broadcast mostly in Albanian, while TV Koper, based in Slovenia near the Yugoslav-Italian border, broadcast mostly in Italian.
In addition to covering Croatia, TV Zagreb's first channel was also redistributed in Slovenia for Serbo-Croatian speakers who lived in Slovenia but who did not understand Slovenian-language television (members of the military, for instance). It also gave viewers an extra choice.
Only TV Belgrade had a morning show and only since the late 1980s. It was a regional program -- for Serbia only -- and was not carried by the rest of the JRT network. The other broadcasters went on the air at around 9 A.M. with educational programming and cartoons. In the afternoons, they would show old movies, often American, and repeats. (Before the late 1980s, they would cease broadcasting for a few hours every afternoon.) The prime time lineup was varied -- it ranged from political discussions and films to foreign series and sports roundups.
In the 1980s, a late-night, "commercial" bloc of programming was introduced, It went on the air after the late news (at around 10:30 or 11:00 P.M.) and consisted of popular imported programming --
Alf, Only Fools and Horses, Garfield cartoons,
Die Schwarzwaldklinik, etc. This bloc resembled Western commercial television in concept and approach -- it was full off slick commercials and it even had MTV-style graphics between programs. The various JRT broadcasters took turns in producing this bloc, but TV Ljubljana, again, had its own version because of the language situation -- it used Slovenian rather than Serbo-Croatian subtitles.
Speaking of which, all foreign programming in Yugoslavia was subtitled. The exception was programming for younger children, which was usually dubbed. (That is still the case in all the countries that emerged from Yugoslavia.) It is said that Jim Henson liked the Slovenian-language version of
Fraggle Rock more than any other foreign version.
Yugoslavia always imported programming from the West.
Peyton Place, for example, was hugely popular in the 1970s, while everything from
Dynasty to
Miami Vice was shown in the 1980s. Some of these series arrived in Yugoslavia after a delay because the broadcasters didn't want to spend too much hard currency -- but not because of any ideological reasons (although the authorities didn't like
Peyton Place). If Yugoslav TV was late in acquiring some popular series, many viewers in Slovenia and Croatia would simply watch it on Austrian or Italian television, which could be seen in large parts of those republics.
Imports from the Eastern Bloc were not as common. They consisted mostly of films and cartoons (mostly Czech, Polish, and Hungarian).
