Infomerzak

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Much like any generation, there’s one amongst us today that pines for the particular décor of an identifiable past, the garish well taken for granted for so long, so long ago.  Then, one day, up comes a still image or a preserved video capture on YouTube or Facebook of that inescapable icon we’ve managed to erase from our memory for the last forty-five years, and *bang..!*……we’re back in senior year, or maybe middle school…..perhaps we’re square into that eve of the math test in the fifth grade……all provoked by a the long forgotten sound or image we’d never forget.   And there’s that moment…..the one that teaches or reminds us of the gratitude of time and perseverance….how far we’ve come from that foolish little anguished night…….or how blessed we are to suddenly feel as empowered as were on senior week in high school…..or the day after we got through that Regents Exam in the eleventh grade.

And perhaps we owe it all to a television commercial.

Or maybe some captured, unabridged spot break off the local TV station you watched that very week, that very day, that someone miraculously, astoundingly preserved and benevolently shared on YouTube for all to admire.

But wherefore art the admiration in this once-denounced video litter..?  Even as young teens, in real time as it were, we knew this ubiquitous flicker on our bedroom black-n-whites to be disparageable trash.  And there was no getting away from it.  Every day, every weekend, every same interval, there it was, the same damn Odd Couple rerun promo with the same damn clip we all knew by heart, the same damn trade school promo filmed in 1969 and running for the past fifteen years daily, the same damn spot for Automobile Club of America with that actor screaming “Did ya’ have to be that good…?!?!?”

Those sights and sounds were the crushing classmate in our lives, the one that cheerily trailed us every single day, the one we tossed off disinterested, with almost embarrassed disrespect. 

Forty or more years hence, for a good many of us, it’s now our crush.

It’s the Professor Higgins syndrome, pure and simple.  We’ve become accustomed to that face.  The one that hounded our awareness every day, reminded us it was time for school, time for homework, Friday night at last, suppertime…

And the fact is, it could be any historic fixture sprouted on that world-wide-web-scouring-tablet.  The one that only we know the way we know it. A thirty second advertisement, a little local station promo from our hometown…

Maybe even an infomercial…

Why not..?? Those are TV shows, too..!  On radio, now more than ever.  As industrial as their design and intention might be from the outset, the standard ubiquity of those consuming presentations have by now rendered themselves just as recall-and-appreciation-worthy of some of our favorite old sitcom reruns.  They do in fact have channels devoted strictly to exclusive product informercials just about all day and night.  They’re not about to break format for anything.  If heaven forbid a national crisis or incident were to summon all news channels to attention, The Kitchen Squasher infomercial will be playing on and acting natural, for all the glued viewers indulging in their news blackouts.

Infomercials, as the title was coined somewhere in the late 1980s and cemented in the 90’s, compose a genre that broke ground over forty years ago, in the pioneer days of public-access cable television. When product sales and consumer response began to skyrocket, television stations, network flagships in top markets accepted the fact that programming old movies and even any leased first-run syndie fare would never turn around as much revenue as an infomercial time-buyer laying down some good hard green for an acre of air time in the middle of the night.  Farewell to Kirk Douglas at 3AM on Channel 2 once and for all.  Hello to the “Kernel Cooker” for an hour….followed by “The Best of The Hollywood Palace” for thirty minutes…..then maybe the “Cap Crusher” demonstration show, with that guy that drops the bottle every time……..that’s because it’s the same damn half hour show every single night…!  But last night it was at 1:30.  Tonight it’s at 3:30.   Tomorrow it might be on at 2.  Who’s to say..?  Is anyone actually directing the programming of these things..?  Whatever happened to “audience flow”..??

That went the same direction veered by newsprint.  Over-the-air television has succumbed to overnight flea-markethood. It is today one huge video airbnb. 

Disparage it some of us will, lament the absence of that huge, overnight mall of obnoxious record-offer-spot-break-disrupted movies we shall.  We’ll also become fixated in the absence of anything else, and then…?

They become nostalgia.  Our nostalgia. 

Did I ever, as a young bachelor of twenty-four in the early 1990s, indulging in the solitude of my new little flat, arriving home after work past midnight, with no VCR, but simply my treasured five-inch-screen black-&-white, with no recourse before me but the least-objectionable presentation of the Super Sweeper half hour ever imagine that I’d now face a nostalgic yearning to see it again..?   What’s worse….I’m ready to go onto YouTube and look for it.

The radio side of things bears it’s own history with these program formats.  I was just a rookie on the control room scene when these slick little broadcast pageants began to seed, replacing in many cases the extensive public-affairs presentations the small stations couldn’t really afford to front, and the airtime traditional Tabernacles and Ministries couldn’t afford on Sunday mornings anymore.  Back then, this sort of thing was pretty new stuff, and a welcome cache of business clients.  To me back then, it was all in a day’s work………the sound of being on the job.

A few of those single, recognizable moderator-and-expert spokesperson half hours or more must have done well for the presenters, because those very half-hour shows, or “blocks’ as they’re respectfully termed would soon sprout in more locations on the broadcast schedule. Sometimes a few in one day.  It’s just another form of spot advertising, and it’s likely an extremely effective one.

Is it possible that some late-night listener, wracked with insomnia, with nothing but a pitch black bedroom, a glowing digital clock flickering away the sleepless night, and a spirited discussion between two nondescript voices about some amazing health-restoring product can be a gateway for purchase persuasion..?  Much like TV, whether those discussionists are celebs or not, they become the viewer’s trusted companions.  Not like the angry Judge Judy or judgmental Dr. Phil, but rather the familiar friends whose immensely predictable conversations we can relax and find solace in each night. Almost like a favorite movie with that unforgettable scene we can always watch…..or a hit song that’s found it’s comfort in the couch of our mind.  No political fights, no scary weather reports.  Just a trip to that faraway holodeck known as………The Informercial.

And back then..? It must have been good.  Especially if some of us can be quite that secretly nostalgic for those thirty-plus-year-old little presentations now.  But unless you literally rolled tape on that obscure little TV or radio half hour and kept it forever, good luck reuniting.  Of course, I’m not necessarily unable to implement my best recall, the kind that blocks my memory of where I left my phone an hour ago, to recall note-for-note the industrial production music that opened that little show I’d hear at work each Sunday night around nine-thirty when I was young, free, and without care of where I’d be at middle age. And a fine and cherished memory it is.

Only an elder acquaintance of mine who long ago minded the front end of an urban supermarket day after volatile day in her cash-strapped youth might understand. With empowered excitement, she one day notified me, albeit buried in her daily professional crises, that she stumbled upon that song……that very piece, the obscure Muzak arrangement that played regularly over the store P.A. during her shift in the mid 1980’s.  She found it suddenly on YouTube one day and her “whole world stopped”. According to her report, she was (and I’m paraphrasing..) reborn.

Resigned over the reality of so much these days, the one wish I don’t naively hold is that of locating the audio of those long-gone infomercials of my upward-gazed youth. No matter what’s on today, nothing’s quite like the vintage stuff.  In comparative truth, they’re probably indiscernable, and for all I know that vintage is still playing somewhere, and wallpapering the ears of some young impressionable lad such as I.  I don’t know him, but if that’s the case, it’s a bond well shared.

Indeed, there’s hope for all of us.

 

Noah F.