THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 26, 1995 TAG: 9504260471
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
A friend lamented the other day at having lost the remote controller - the ``clicker,'' she called it - with which to change TV channels without getting up to push buttons.
Mine's lost, too. What we need is a remote controller to find the remote controller. It is the most shifty inanimate object ever devised.
There is reason to think it ought to be within my powers to track the clicker.
In the early 1950s, a decade or so after television invaded American homes, somebody gave us an old set with which, we discovered, I had a peculiar affinity.
The set snowed heavily at unexpected times. In TV's infancy the screen on some sets often filled with a snowlike effect, as if everybody in the program was struggling through a blizzard or as though a white-tufted bedspread was disintegrating in a washing machine.
In that early set we saw so much snow we might as well have been at the North Pole. Viewers even got up and put on their overcoats.
It was like being in a Charlie Chaplin movie, ``The Gold Rush.'' One sensitive neighbor complained of getting chilblains.
One evening, returning from work, I entered the living room and, suddenly, the snow-filled screen cleared as if a weather front from the south had moved in. I took two steps forward and the snow resumed.
``Hey, back up to where you were,'' one of the boys ordered.
I did, the snow stopped. I moved forward again, the snow started.
``Your father,'' cried a neighbor's child, ``is a human TV aerial!''
The youngsters - half a dozen were sprawled about the room - became more interested in me than they were in the TV.
They clustered around and began moving my arms and legs, as if I were a pair of rabbit ears atop the TV set, to get the best possible picture.
It developed that if, standing in that specific spot in the room, I also raised my right foot about six inches, the TV screen not only cleared but brightened with a more precise definition of detail.
MY RIGHT FOOT WAS THE FINE-TUNER!
As each day waned, a frantic call would reach me at work: ``This house is filled with children waiting to see Davy Crockett. Come home!''
And so I would resume a stoic, storklike stance and hold it until the final strains of ``Davi-e-e Crockett, king of the wild frontier. . . ''
It helped some that I could put down my foot during commercials.
Near 11 p.m., the telephone would ring and from across the street would come the voice of Larry Gould, one of my bosses, who always checked the local TV newscast.
``Get over here, Friddell. It's almost time for the news and my set is snowing!'' he'd say.
In time, technology eliminated snow from TV, a relief. And yet, it had been good, in a sense, to be wanted. by CNB