Originally Posted by KarlHyde:
“In prime time, there was a British TV movie and a Spanish-American western...”
In another chapter of his book
(The Universal Eye: World Television in the Seventies, 1972) , Timothy Green talks about Western programming on Eastern European television:
"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that a country is not toeing the communist line sternly enough, the Western (and particularly American) programmes are withdrawn overnight.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."