The Day Toronto Got Cable TV

There was a time in Toronto when television reception was less about entertainment and more about engineering.

If you wanted to watch TV, you needed two things: a television set and the patience of a saint.

Perched on top of the TV were the famous rabbit ears—two metal rods sticking into the air like the antennae of a confused insect. Some houses went one step further and had an antenna bolted to the roof, pointing toward some mysterious location in the sky that Dad insisted was “the direction of Channel 11.”

And then came the day Toronto got cable television.

It was a technological revolution.

No more rabbit ears.

No more rooftop antennas.

No more standing behind the television holding one arm in the air while Dad yelled:

“DON’T MOVE! THAT’S PERFECT!”

You could finally sit down.

Maclean’s Wired converter boxes began appearing in homes, and suddenly television looked like something from the future.

The cable guy would arrive, run a cable into the house, connect the converter box and explain the complicated new system.

“Just turn the box to the channel you want.”

That was it.

No more getting up every five minutes to change the channel.

Of course, this created another problem.

The remote control hadn’t completely taken over yet.

So the kids were still needed.

“Hey, Johnny!”

“What?”

“Change the channel.”

“I’m doing my homework.”

“You can do your homework after the show.”

“But I’m watching this!”

“Not anymore. Change it to Channel 5.”

And Johnny would get up, walk across the living room, turn the dial and return to the couch.

Two minutes later:

“Johnny!”

“What?”

“Go back to Channel 9.”

Eventually, every kid in Toronto realized that the real purpose of childhood was apparently to be a human remote control.

But cable was different.

Suddenly there were more channels than you could imagine.

Instead of the same handful of stations, there were channels devoted to news, movies, sports and programs you had never heard of.

And the picture!

Beautiful.

No snow.

No ghosts.

No horizontal lines rolling across the screen.

No picture that looked like it had been transmitted through a thunderstorm.

You could actually see people’s faces.

Television had gone from:

“Can you see it?”

to:

“Holy crap! Look at that picture!”

The whole family gathered around the television like they were witnessing the moon landing.

Dad was impressed.

Mom was impressed.

The kids were thrilled.

And the rabbit ears?

They were finally retired.

After years of being twisted, bent, adjusted and occasionally slapped, they were tossed into a drawer—along with old batteries, mysterious electrical cords and that one screwdriver nobody knew what it belonged to.

Cable television changed everything.

Suddenly, staying home on a Friday night didn’t mean watching whatever happened to be on.

You actually had choices.

Of course, eventually we got more channels, bigger TVs, colour televisions, cable boxes with more buttons, remote controls, digital cable, hundreds of channels and eventually thousands of things to watch.

Today we complain:

“There’s nothing on.”

Back then, we had five or six channels and somehow thought television was fantastic.

And maybe that’s the funniest part.

We didn’t need 500 channels.

We didn’t need streaming.

We didn’t need a smart TV.

We didn’t even need a remote.

We had a television, a cable box, a couch and a kid who could reach the dial.

And when the picture got fuzzy?

Nobody called technical support.

Dad simply walked over to the TV, smacked the side of it and said:

“There. Fixed.”

And somehow…

it usually worked.