Dara E Healy
The film’s title was Inside de People TV. The opening sequence showed a working-class family watching their local station’s 7 o’clock evening news. Suddenly, there was their teenage son being interviewed, live, during a disturbance in downtown Port of Spain. "Wait!" the mother says, sitting up in alarm, "But is what we son doin’ inside de people TV?”
– Stabroek News editorial about the Banyan documentary
IMAGINE trying to explain to young people that viewers had to physically get up to turn the dial on a wooden frame to change the television channel. In an age when smart TVs are the norm – able to connect to the internet, streaming services or your laptop – this reality must seem a lifetime away.
For the UN, which marked World Television Day this week, it is essential to understand the significance of television as a tool and symbol of communication.
In TT, we continue to be confronted by a flood of foreign cultural forms and values from smartphones, streaming services and more. Is it too late for television to be a viable force in protecting our heritage and culture?
For almost 30 years TTT was our only television station. As children we felt connected to the songs, games and relationships on Sesame Street. At the time, we did not think about the fact that the people, locations, language, clothes and accents were from a completely different place and culture.
Still, television facilitated exposure to local theatre, the performing arts and humour as well. From Cultural Sprangalang to Turn of the Tide and No Boundaries, the 1970s-1980s was a vibrant period of local storytelling through television.
We were able to benefit from these groundbreaking productions because of the vision, determination and fearless creative perspectives of the people behind them. In spite of negative attitudes from mainstream television executives, Christopher Laird, Banyan co-founder, recalls that the Family Planning Association commissioned his team to create Who the Cap Fits.
The series was intended to address specific themes related to the family, in a way that would be entertaining and easily understood, but still convey important social messages. It is no doubt one of the early examples of how theatre practitioners engaged with communities and addressed challenging social topics through television.
Television replaced radio as the centrepiece of the home. In the early days, the "box" literally took centre stage, as families gathered around the screen to view their favourite shows. Marketers soon realised that people without families or a great deal of time could benefit from having quick and easy meals, so the frozen "TV dinner" was born.
Television helped fuel the various civil-rights movements by bringing the speeches and marches directly to global audiences. In TT, people rushed home to catch the 7pm news.
When TV6 was launched in 1991, it became the first independent station in the English-speaking Caribbean. It forever changed the way we engaged with television.
Today, television has shift
