TV while home

 We didn't go out a lot while I was up at my mom's - she tends to stay home a lot these days. I managed to do the same without going too bonkers. (At home, here, I tend to bounce off the walls a bit if I'm home too long, but I think that's partly my house is smaller and there's no one to talk to)

During downtime not doing other things, I'd cast about for background noise on the tv to knit to, and I wound up finding some of the "weird" channels my mom gets - she has DISH - and they carry lots of things, some of the nostalgia channels that I know are broadcast ('over the air') in some markets because friends have talked about them - COZI, and Me-Tv, and something called FOLK.

I wound up watching two shows from my childhood (well, the episodes of one were from before I was born): Little House on the Prairie on one of the Christian-adjacent channels (I suppose they consider it wholesome) and old (late 60s, so before I was born) re-runs of the Carol Burnett show on FOLK. 

Little House on the Prairie struck me - I read the books numerous times as a kid, and I'm sure I watched the show, but I remember little of it other than that Pa didn't look like the Garth Williams drawings (which show a leaner, and bearded, man) and Carrie falling down on that hill, and the music. The music especially struck me - it's nostalgic to me because it "feels like" 1970s family-show music, but it's really rather anachronistic for the time period in which the show was ostensibly set. Oh, it's not that I don't like it, it's just with more life experience, I go "shouldn't they have used different instrumentation, and maybe a folk-tune modality?" But then again, there are a number of anachronisms - some of the things people say don't ring true to me, and the kids seem maybe a bit more uninhibited (I think in one episode I saw, Laura punched Nellie Oleson) than I think kids of that era might have been, at least in front of adults. And the storylines feel really contrived and simplistic compared to modern dramas. And I now know the "frontier" (which I guess was supposed to be Minnesota based on what some of the characters said about towns and such) was the California hills (I think also much of the Waltons was filmed there, and I realize now that my childhood picture of "rural America" was the California hills on the backlot of some TV station). But again - that's familiar, and in a way, the way things looked, the dustiness and toned-down colors, that's more memorable to me than any particular storyline.

And yet, with all the issues with it, there is something comforting about it. Most of the problems seem to be wrapped up neatly, and even if some of the stories are literally fantastic ("The James Gang hides out in Walnut Grove, and the kid who grows up to shoot them dead later on was a classmate of Mary's!") it's entertaining enough. 

And the old Carol Burnett shows - these were on late in the evening on FOLK, which is a channel that seems to largely exist to show older programming (I guess they also show some infomercials; a lot of those channels do). One thing that struck me about the 1967/68 episodes I saw was how brightly women dressed then - Burnett has some really amazing dresses, sort of mod-style, and in colors like hot pink or electric green, and I admit I rather liked them - and some of the women in the audience were also brightly dressed. I don't know if the bright dresses Burnett wore in the opening segments were sort of a high fashion/theatrical thing, or if women's clothing was just more strongly colored in the late 70s. Also the men - and even the young boys, one or two got asked up on stage so she could give them her autograph - were in ties and either a suit jacket or a sweater. Yes, it's 55 years ago but it strikes me how more formally people dressed. 

Of course most of the rest of the show segments (and it felt like these were repackaged, maybe cut down from an hour-long to half-hours? Some of the closing shots showed the cast in costumes from a skit that had not been in that show) are costumed in various ways; there seemed to have been a running bit with Carol and Harvey Korman playing a married couple with Carol's "sister" (I think she was played by a v. young Vickie Lawrence) got into various scrapes. 

I was also struck that some of the humor bordered more on the risque than I would have thought for network tv in the era. There was a bit where Burnett and Korman played space aliens that had taken on human form, and part of the bit was they "kissed" by touching elbows, but the reaction to the elbow touch was much.....stronger....than you'd think a kiss would elicit. (And the gag being a neighbor came over, and in the course of the sketch, wound up accidentally bumping both Burnett's and Korman's elbows, with predictable results....)

It was interesting, though. I don't get nearly all the channels my mom does and I admit there are times when I might want to just relax with some pleasant background noise and knit (though apparently FOLK can be streamed? I don't know).