The Broadcast – Or how Capt. Kirk saved us a Load of Embarrassment.

Anyone who’s been around the block a time or two knows Mr. Murphy. If you don’t know about him, let me introduce you. Murphy came up with the most fundamental law of the universe. Forget Einstein and Hawking. Step back Voltaire and Nietzsche.

This kid has came up with the law that explains how the Universe really works. His law states simply, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” He also said “If it can go wrong, it will do so at the worst possible moment.”

He might have added that “When it does, it’s a bet it will cause you all manner of embarrassment and humiliation.”

And so it was in 1977.

I was in college at the time and like so many college students, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I took a lot of hard sciences, math, physics, that kind of stuff. I also took a lot of psychology and Sociology course. And I dabbled in theater and did a fair amount of acting.

Just a side note, I’m almost 66 years old and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. The only thing I am sure of is I graduated from Acid Rock to Acid Reflux and as a result, pizza and I aren’t the best of friends anymore.

Anyway, I digress.

That kind of searching has turned me into an expert on almost everything. What’s the definition of an “Expert?” Well, someone who knows nothing about everything. And so I was and I am. I know enough about everything to be truly dangerous and still be dead wrong most of the time.

Of all the courses I took, one of my most enjoyable was TV production. I’d read books like The Making of Star Trek and the making of Space: 1999 and I thought it would be fun to do that for a living. Since we didn’t have a movie production course, I studied broadcast journalism. I have to admit, we were a bunch of amateur’s when it came to this and our equipment showed it. We had two cameras, a switch box, two reel to reel tape machines, a back projector, and a lot of spunk.

The local cable station that did little more than air a weather clock, gave us three hours a day to broadcast on over their channel. And we did all kinds of crazy things.

A local theater class put on a puppet show for local kids. We were there to record it and broadcast it. We had local musicians come in. Professors came in and gave talks on everything from art to physics. We went on location and of course we did news.

But no matter what we broadcast, we were fairly certain that our viewership was low at best. Our broadcast time was opposite one of the most endearing Sci-Fi sagas of all times. I’m talking, of course, about Star Trek.

We all knew that at exactly 4 PM daily, every television set in town flipped over to watch as Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Bones zipped around in that high tech magic carpet called the Enterprise and traveled to distant worlds full of danger, excitement, and pretty girls.

How could we possibly compete against that?

As things would turn out, Captain Kirk would save us a whole lot of problems.

One thing we did on a seemingly constant basis was scramble for programming. No matter how hard we tried, we never seemed to have enough going on to fill the full three hours. So, in the time honored tradition of TV stations everywhere, when we needed to fill some time, we ran a rerun.

And so it was on that Friday afternoon. We had roughly twenty five minutes left in the broadcast day. We were debating what to do with it when someone looked at the logs and said, “Hey, this interview with Professor so and so should fill it.”

Great idea. We found the tape, cued it up, and when the time came, switched to it. We settled back, drinking our coffee and letting the broadcast day come to a close as the prof droned on about something.

One of us had a headpiece on and was monitoring the volume levels for the interview. We’d heard that interview before and it was slightly less exciting than watching a faucet drip.

Suddenly he sat up, put his hand to his ear, and said, “Hey, that’s not right.” We were about five minutes into the interview and knew it by heart.

We all looked at him, wondering why he had this sudden confused look on his face. He looked at the on air monitor and his eyes went wide and a squeak of surprise came out of his mouth.

Someone else looked at what was going out over the air. That person’s eyes bugged and she choked on her coffee. “Oh, my God!” she gasped through coughing attacks.

We all leaned in to see what they saw.

There, on the tiny on-air screen, the one that showed us with the world was seeing, was a show of truly epic pornographic nature. And we were broadcasting this out to the local community in the middle of the day over a cable network everyone in town got.

And worse, we recognized the players. It was one of our cameramen and his girlfriend.

It was obvious what had happened. He’d taken a camera home, borrowed a tape from the library, and he and his girl made themselves a movie. Long before celebrities were embarrassing themselves with sex tapes, he and his girl had pioneered it. And like so many of those celebrities in the years to come, he didn’t erase the tape.

Instead he returned it to the library for us to pull, thinking we were airing an interview.

There was a mad scramble to cut to the station ID. The embarrassed cameraman slunk out of the studio and we sat red-faced and waited for the world to cave in on us.

But it never did.

The phones didn’t light up with a thousand people complaining. The cops didn’t show up to shut us down. Worse, our prof never asked anything about it, nor did the Cable Station.

I don’t know which was worse. The fact we’d aired something so embarrassing or that we had it proven to us, that thanks to Captain Kirk, our viewership was indeed, zero.