media: tv shows

When I was a little kid I wanted to watch Pippi Longstocking on TV, because all the other kids were talking about it, but it was on at 7 o'clock, which was my bedtime. One day my mother had had enough of my whining, so she let me stay up until 7 o'clock, and then turned the TV on -- on the wrong channel. She said: "See? There is no Pippi Longstocking on our TV." I was very disappointed of course, but I believed her! (Unfortunately this will never work with my child, she'll probably be able to program the VCR by the time she turns 3!)

On the tv show blind date they used to have a part of the floor close to the audience that was black, I thought it was a gaping hole to stop the audience from running onto the stage.

As a child I watched Basil Brush regularly on Childrens Television. Years went by, the programme finished it's run and I never thought about Basil Brush again until he came up in conversation with friends. I was puzzled why they were talking about Basil Brush the fox though...I'd always thought he was a squirrel! Oh the embarrassment. Why did no one ever tell me?

When I was around 4 years old I would see the show 'Family Feud' on tv. What baffled me was how the answers on the board flipped over right when Richard Dawson called for them. Well for some completely unknown reason I figured it was a kangaroo back there flipping the answers over. Not just one kangaroo, it only made sense if there was a kangaroo mom and a little baby kangaroo back there.

I used to tell my Mom I was going to take the "Love Boat" to "Fantasy Island".

I used to watch Alf and he'd always mention lesbians so one day I asked my father what a lesbian was. He told me that people from Lebanon were lesbians and I believed him for a very long time after that.

I always thought the Love Boat sailed to Fantasy Island because it was on right after. Following this line of thinking, I thought Fantasy Island was a real place because I had seen the Love Boat in person!

My theory as a kid was that all TV shows were real - they were just taking place on other planets. Cartoons took place on a relatively distant planet, but live-action shows (like 3-2-1 Contact), being more life-like, were from a planet between us and the cartoon planet.

When I was five, my parents had a huge New Year's Eve party. The next day a couple of the guests were still there, sitting with my brother and I as we ate breakfast. One of the guests had a bandage across her forehead. I guess she had had a little too much to drink and had fallen over and hurt herself. I asked if she went to the doctor and my Dad told me that the men from the TV show Emergency had come by to take care of her. For years, I was so mad at him for not waking me up to meet them!

When I was 4, and I was watching The Dick Van Dyke show on a small tv on the floor, I thought that if I turned the tv upside down, the people on the show would fall on the ceiling.

When it first came out, I made my brother believe that "The Sopranos" was about our family because we're Italian and they always told us my great-great-great-grandfather was a mob guy.

I also told him our dad worked in "The West Wing." (it's very fun having brothers much more young and naive than you.) So whenever my dad goes on a business trip, my brother says, "Say hi to Donna (whom he has the biggest crush on) for me!" My dad still hasn't figured it out, and neither has my brother.

When I was really little I used to wonder if my life was part of a TV show that someone else was watching. As I got older we would go on vacation. By the time we got back to the hotel it would always be late. They didn't have movie channels back then so the only thing on TV was the news. I always thought that my home town was the only place in the world that had regular TV shows. I hated vacations because of that.

There was a persistent rumour at our school (that I believed) that Happy Days had been filmed in the 1950's and The Fonz had died in a motercycle accident shortly after it had finished.

I used to believe that when I watched a tv show, it was actually being played out and filmed under my house. I thought they had a live video feed hooked up just to my house, and only me and my family could watch it. Then I discovered the towers and the tv stations.

I thought that the "Champion the Wonder Horse" song went in part:

Like a shooting star flashed across the sky,
Like the swiftest arrow risen from a bow,
Like a mighty marrow forth he seems to fly...

I didn't know what large, green vegetable marrows had to do with horses but I was used to grown-ups saying incomprehensible things: I just assumed it meant something to them. (I still don't know what that line really was!)

i used to believe that the official start of the weekend was when Miami Vice came on Friday Nights at 10...after that it was "really" the weekend.