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Communist-Era Television |
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#176 |
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That's a great coincidence because I know the author of that 1985 article from a German forum...
![]() He told me that the first Russian channel (broadcast from Bratislava) could also be recieved in Vienna with a good aerial. http://forum.digitalfernsehen.de/for...ml#post6839292 |
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#177 |
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Interesting!
Since we were talking about Albania, here are bits and pieces of Communist-era Albanian TV (inlcuding the news), recorded in 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=332&v=nO3Zbr5jftw https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=359&v=ZriPzkQ0mv0 This clip includes a weather forecast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UQN4aPPoMw And here's Albanian TV news in the years after the fall of Communism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frnyi9rYGWs |
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#178 |
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Fascinating stuff! The News and weather ones from 1986 look as if they were from 1966. Was colour TV late to arrive in Albania?
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#179 |
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I have an old copy of the "World Radio TV Handbook" for 1979. The entry for Albania shows
"System B - Channel C - 0.05kw - TV sets 5,000 (new information not received" As I remember (it was a long time ago), there was an ideological split between Tirana and Moscow, Albania followed a "maoist" line aligned with China. I can remember Radio Tirana broadcasting long and tedious monologues attacking "soviet revisionism". |
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#180 |
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I have an old copy of the "World Radio TV Handbook" for 1979. The entry for Albania shows
"System B - Channel C - 0.05kw - TV sets 5,000 (new information not received" As I remember (it was a long time ago), there was an ideological split between Tirana and Moscow, Albania followed a "maoist" line aligned with China. I can remember Radio Tirana broadcasting long and tedious monologues attacking "soviet revisionism". |
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#181 |
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And for North Korean (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) telly, try this Japanese site.
http://www.elufa.net/ Richt click on the images to download the video (.asf) files. |
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#182 |
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interesting thread, link although most arent available on youtube anymore
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#183 |
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Don't forget that this thread was started eight years ago, so some of the links on the first few pages are bound to be outdated.
This is what North Korean news looks like these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awk4XCZF-M4 |
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#184 |
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Indeed. Albania under Enver Hoxha was a closed society -- the closest European equivalent of North Korea and, for a number of years, China's only outpost in Europe. Its brand of Communism was so dogmatic that it even ended up breaking with China and accusing it of revisionism when Deng Xiaoping jettisoned old-style Maoism and began to introduce economic reforms.
I have found another WRTH book for 1987 and albanian TV had expanded. Tirana had increased to 100kw on channel C and there were several other 10kw transmitters around the country including Kukes 10kw the only UHF listing on ch39. Daily programmes (PAL colour) 17:00 - 21:00 with 09:00 - 14:30 on Sundays. Around the same time Romania had also cut back to only a few hours a day on 1 channel. Were they having electricity supply problems? Three years later, everything changed... |
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#185 |
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Daily programmes (PAL colour) 17:00 - 21:00 with 09:00 - 14:30 on Sundays. Around the same time Romania had also cut back to only a few hours a day on 1 channel.
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#186 |
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Here is some more info from Joe Riley at pleasedontfront.com:
"Ceausescu also thought it was a great idea to implement drastic austerity measures in an attempt to pay off the foreign debts that he had racked up for the country. Food rationing and rolling blackouts of gas and electricity became the norm. Nearly all of the country’s TV and radio stations were shut down with the exception of two hours of television that aired each day. As if to add insult to injury, every Saturday, one of those two televised hours was filled by the Ewing family and their Texas mansion. The poverty brought about by austerity, when juxtaposed by the wealth and opulence of Dallas, spurred a revolution and overthrow of the communist regime. In December 1989 Nicolae and his wife, Elena Ceausescu, were captured attempting to flee the country, put on trial, and executed by firing squad." |
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#187 |
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At the time, Romania was trying to bay pack its large foreign loans, so Ceausescu introduced a strict austerity strategy at home, while emphasizing exports. Among other things, this entailed reducing TV transmissions to just a few hours a day -- I believe it was just two hours at its lowest point.
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#188 |
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As if to add insult to injury, every Saturday, one of those two televised hours was filled by the Ewing family and their Texas mansion.
![]() I knew Ceausescu was mad but that's one of the craziest things I've ever heard about his regime. One would have thought that he knew at least the basic prinicples of propaganda. Spurring envy and frustration clearly isn't one of them. But maybe he was a big fan of "Dallas", so he thought his subjects must have loved it as well.
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#189 |
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![]() I knew Ceausescu was mad but that's one of the craziest things I've ever heard about his regime. One would have thought that he knew at least the basic prinicples of propaganda. Spurring envy and frustration clearly isn't one of them. But maybe he was a big fan of "Dallas", so he thought his subjects must have loved it as well. ![]() http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/...-photo/3417111 "Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and Queen Elizabeth II leaving Victoria Station, London for Buckingham Palace, at the start of his four-day state visit to Britain". |
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#190 |
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But maybe he was a big fan of "Dallas", so he thought his subjects must have loved it as well.
![]() "Nicolae Ceausescu, the communist dictator of Romania from 1967 to 1989, was a fan of Dallas and its star character, the big-oil-cowboy J.R. Ewing. Now Ceausescu did not like the show because he thought it was great television, but because he thought it was absolutely awful — an American TV show that embodied everything that was wrong with capitalism: corruption, greed, and dysfunctional families." Apparently, his subjects didn't see Dallas quite the same way. |
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#191 |
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East German TV news ("Aktuelle Kamera") from 1963, beginning with a report on the Soviet Vostok space mission:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRjPERMeGGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRtHP25E0a4 And from December 1990 -- after the fall of Communism and the reunification of Germany --, here is the last-ever edition of Aktuelle Kamera (or "AK" as it was styled then): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV2LKic-lJw |
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#192 |
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And from December 1990 -- after the fall of Communism and the reunification of Germany --, here is the last-ever edition of Aktuelle Kamera (or "AK" as it was styled then):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV2LKic-lJw DFF 2 was relaunched as "DFF-Länderkette". Their main news bulletin "Aktuell" remained in the same timeslot (19:30 to 19:50), and even today, "MDR aktuell" on the regional channel for the southern part of the former GDR is broadcast at 19:30. |
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#193 |
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Schedule for DDR 1 & DDR 2 on Saturday, 24th May 1986 in a West German listings magazine:
http://www.bilder-hochladen.tv/pic/1...,-DDR-Programm http://www.bilder-hochladen.tv/pic/1...,-DDR-Programm In prime time, there was a British TV movie and a Spanish-American western... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfighters_of_Casa_Grande http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496635/...f_=tt_ov_st_sm |
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#194 |
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DDR1 and DDR2 often showed an English language movie and other programs in the original soundtrack during the late 70's when I was stationed in what was then, West Germany.
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#195 |
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In prime time, there was a British TV movie and a Spanish-American western...
"An old Humphrey Bogart movie on Saturday night, Peter Sellers capering about in Only Two Can Play on the midweek evening, Rubert Davies puffing hard on his pipe as Maigret. Television in London perhaps? Sydney? Rio de Janiero? No, East Germany. And the biggest fan club anywhere for Bonanza? In Poland. In the first two months of 1971 NBC supplied over five thousand photographs of the Cartwright brothers to Bonanza addicts there, compared with a modest two thousand in the United States. And the third largest batch of 750 went to Rumania, where the local cattle ranchers frequently write to the Cartwrights, care of NBC Burbank, for their advice on stock breeding." "Television in Eastern Europe does get bogged down sometimes in sermons on increasing tractor output but, compared with the Soviet Union, most of the satellite countries fit in a surprisingly high proportion of light entertainment, most of it from the non-communist world." "At any sign of pressure from the Soviet Union that a country is not toeing the communist line sternly enough, the Western (and particularly American) programmes are withdrawn overnight. Rumania dropped The Untouchables rather sharply in the early summer of 1971 at the first rumblings of a political shake-up. Czechoslovakia also became abruptly closed to most Western programmes after the Russian clamp-down of 1968." "Along with Bonanza from the United States, the Poles have become devoted to The Saint, The Baron, and Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, all purchased from British commercial television. [...] As for The Forsyte Saga, 'That,' a Polish broadcaster told me, 'was rather like an earthquake.' The Poles ran each episode twice a week; the first time through with Polish narration over the English soundtrack, the second night simply the full English-language version. 'No one in Poland would answer their telephone while that was on,' said the broadcaster." |
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#196 |
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Czechoslovak TV news from the first days of the Velvet Revolution, 1989:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpQEaq8PdQ |
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#197 |
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I can't remember the source but I've read that East German TV bought films from Leo Kirch, a notorious West German rights agent. Sometimes they got a discount because they did the dubbing for lesser-known films themselves and made the dubbed version available for the other German-speaking countries. Sometimes, two different dubbed versions were made for East and West Germany. For example, this was the case for "Cinderella '80", starring Pierre Cosso and Bonnie Bianco. As far as I know, MDR and RBB still show the eastern version, while regional channels from the west show the western version. East: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve5ycs5VFTE West: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZiHPPCP9zc While movies from the west were often shown on GDR television, US TV shows like Bonanza or Dallas were unthinkable. I'm not sure if politics or money was the main reason. And interestingly, Formula 1 and Grand Slam tennis tournaments were never shown live in the GDR. Football World Cups and European Championships were always covered extensively, even though the GDR only managed to qualify once (in 1974, when they actually beat West Germany in Hamburg). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE--go1OAGg Quote:
DDR1 and DDR2 often showed an English language movie and other programs in the original soundtrack during the late 70's when I was stationed in what was then, West Germany.
From the 80s, I only remember a regular block of programming called "For friends of the Russian language". on DDR 2 (once a week in the late afternoon). Soviet movies and documentaries were shown in their original version, with German subtitles. |
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#198 |
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Czechoslovak TV news from the first days of the Velvet Revolution, 1989:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpQEaq8PdQ
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#199 |
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Czechoslovak TV news from the first days of the Velvet Revolution, 1989:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpQEaq8PdQ |
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#200 |
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The Velvet revolution wasn't for another 4 years when the Czech Republic and Slovakia split.
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But maybe he was a big fan of "Dallas", so he thought his subjects must have loved it as well. 