The difference of PAL haves and SECAM have-nots in the transition-era Estonia

This post is a reply to a YouTube comment under a clip from a "MacGyver" two-parter "Legend of the Holy Rose". [Updates in this blog in square brackets.]

I was watching this episode in Estonia, if not perhaps in 1989, then close to that time, from Finnish tv.

Estonia was the only country in the entire USSR that could receive terrestrial Finnish channels, and then only in the north of the country.

Wealthy households could afford a satellite dish made in Estonia (the name of the satellite dish company was "Merge"). In the south of the country, I remember seeing those dishes atop private housing, and cable tv with German satellite channels in a middle-class housing block — everyone who lived in that apartment block, must have all had it.

What follows, is a recounting of some tv history, and bittersweet nostalgia.

When colour tv was in development in the USSR, the USSR chose SECAM-D/K, as it was/is a French television standard and not that Western, because it was incompatible with PAL. (I hope I haven't mixed upu D/K and B/G)

This incompatibility ensured, that people in the Eastern Bloc wouldn't be able to catch the PAL-B/G video and audio of the "rotting West", or probably because de Gaulle, then the long-time leader of France, held anti-American sentiments.

[I speculate, that] The French developing and promoting SECAM, was also because post-WWII France was very weary of post-WWII Germany[, which had adopted PAL].

The Finnish MTV3 was a commercial channel started in 1986, and aired in PAL B/G, but not all households had tv sets with this PAL support: the picture in a SECAM set was black and white, very wobbly, and there was no sound. I learned of MTV3 only after I'd gone to school, from classmates.

OTOH, the picture out of YLE2, which aired MacGyver, was stable, and an old Soviet-made SECAM-only set could show it in black-and-white, with sound and all.

As a kid between seven and eleven, soon-to-be-introduced to MacGyver, I knew very little about the U.S./Soviet competition in space, and wasn't aware of lasers until a few years later.

Instead, I loved to collect stamps, because they opened me up to the outside world. The Soviet-era stamps promoted the USSR space programme, and I liked all stuff to do with space. There were plenty of foreign stamps, too, [including probably U.S. space-themed stamps, which made me aware of separate U.S. and Soviet space efforts, but not about the Space Race proper.]

The Estonian kid's journal "Täheke" ["Starlet", supposedly after the Red Star] only had child-oriented content when I was reading that one, but no space stuff.

But the one popular kid's journal that our family had been ordering from Moscow (I'm from a bilingual family), was "Murzilka", the titular character and mascot of which was/is a yellow anthropomorphised kid-height furry wearing a red Soviet beret.

"Murzilka" had plenty of Soviet propaganda well into the late eighties, though less during the latter years of the USSR, as it inched closer to collapse. But there always was plain non-political kid's stuff, even a comic series about computers featuring Murzilka and an 'almost-evil' witch trying to manipulate her three-headed dragon "computer".

Par for the course, the journal promoted the Soviet space programme, carrying interviews with cosmonauts. [The interviews were meant for the USSR propaganda to promote the commie way of life, but I passed those long-form interviews with too mnay words by to look at and read the set of "Murzilka" comics in the middle of the journal.]

Can't remember if this was the last form of kindergarten, or my first class of school. I lean towards kindergarten. So the teachers took us to the local cinema, which showed a very eerie Soviet space film that apparently had been rated as appropriate for children. [To the mind of a six- or seven-year-old me], it was very, very eerie, because it apparently showed aliens carrying big globes for some reason, and I was a bit squeamish watching them. The imagery stuck with me.

On many days, probably when sick, I was bored, and rummaged through the family bookshelves for books with pictures. (We had lots of books, as did most well-educated families in Estonia.)

I discovered a large Estonian hardcover about the history of space exploration, and loads of colour pictures of real-life spacecraft [either] in the middle of the book[, or throughout. I think it was titled "100 kosmoseaparaati" ("100 space vehicles").] It was easy to look for those images even from a closed book, because photos and pictures of any kind were printed on special paper, which was whiter, thicker, and shiny. [It seemed to be the Soviet tradition to put colour pictures in the middle of any book, but print on shiny glanzpapier was probably expensive. Well into my current adulthood, I've realised, that this style was common also to pre-WWII and Tsarist-era print, and not unique to Soviet typesetting.] Among other things, there were pictures of U.S. spy satellites. Can't say if this was before or after I'd had my first taste of 'Trek ca 1988...1991.

Then I got my hands on Dad's entire stash of nearly all editions of "Horisont", the pre-eminent Estonian science / popular science journal. (alas, his fine collection was irretrievably lost to the dark side. RIP and RIP.)

Right, and so, during Gorbachev's Glasnost and the late-Soviet era, "Horisont" began having copy about two things: introductory stories about computers, and a lot of stuff to do with UFOs, mentioning the names of then-eminent ET researchers (one, whose name stuck, was Däniken). I was browsing those editions for the otherworldly pictures, [mostly paintings].

And then in the country during Summer, I'd bought a boulevard gazette, where its cover featured a well-designed sci-fi image of an alien with very abstract, almost square body and facial features, and small and very luminescent green eyes. Or perhaps he was green, and the luminescent eyes were blue.

The 1997 "MiB" movie line about yellow journalism always having copy about UFOs rang very true well after the fact.

The above tidbits set me up to be even more receptive of space stuff. Real space stuff.

Now, back to regular programming..

Due to the differences in the tv sets that mine and most of my classmates' households had, as ours had a much older SECAM-only "Raduga" color tv ("Radugas" were later infamous for catching fire [due to a design flaw]), I could not see fancy stuff, unless I succeeded in making a cordial visit to a classmate. (This lasted for a very short while, and quickly ended for various reasons.)

Seeing TNG for the first time at a good classmate's home made me a lifelong fan of Star Trek and space-based sci-fi. By sheer coincidence, my first Star Trek episode was "Q Who?" — the very first Borg episode. This entire experience was massively fantastic: [USS Enterprise 1701-D was a fantastically beautiful and sleek-looking ship; and the Borg Cube, a rightly menacing, gigantic and powerful vessel defying all the rules of streamlined design.]

Of the seven young men in my earliest class makeup (there were 25 kids in all), the classmate who invited me over so I could see "Q Who?" (he and I didn't know the title of the episode before the fact), remains the only mate whom I remember only with good words.

The difference [say, the PAL/SECAM divide, not unlike the digital divide] was even more stark, in that YLE2 only showed "MacGyver", which I could see and did watch, just because it was there, plus action-adventure; while the commercial MTV3 aired "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (TNG), which I wanted to see more than anything else, but couldn't. [as our home didn't have a set that would show PAL and MTV3]

MTV3 also had "Knight Rider" in its lineup, which, for some reason, was almost never missed (in the sense, that I didn't crave watching it). ["Knight Rider", locally called "Ritariässä" after the localised Finnish title of the show, was apparently very popular with my classmates and almost all the male youth in Estonia. I'm not sure if the show and its episodes were ever discussed amongst them during recess. I knew I couldn't see it, and it's possible, that I'd switched myself out of the others' discussion, if the show ever passed my ears. Ultimately, compared to the very high quality of Star Trek: TNG, "Knight Rider" didn't seem very appealing.]

Yet in the very early 1990s, I got stickers from Spanish chewing gum, because Michael Knight was very masculine, and I wanted a piece of the West with me. Any piece, in part only because I couldn't watch that show, and many other guys could.

Because of an older tv at home, I didn't miss too much the Finnish ads for all the foods that people in the USSR never got access to, and we Estonians could then only salivate over. I saw those ads only at classmates' places, and then, too, very rarely.

[Oddly enough, there are particular Finnish foods that I like, but which were never shown in the few Western and Finnish ads that I remember. For example, I tried "Snickers" once in the early 1990s, and it was wholesomely yucky.]

As it was, most everyone did crave any and all stuff that was Western.

Of the few Western/Finnish ads I saw, I recall them depicting idyllic scenes of happy people enjoying tasty things, or something adventurous (there were several ads for "Tupla" chocolate bars). These were the years of transition in Estonia, and I wanted that kind of happiness, too. [one "Tupla" ad was modelled after Indiana Jones films.]

What I missed, therefore, was the experience of eating the advertised berry yogurt and watching something I couldn't.

The tv sets with PAL support always set any classmates' households a notch above those of anyone else: because they had a window to the world that I didn't. Two [or three] of those homes must have had access to hard foreign currency, showing off their nouveau-riche status to the fullest extent. It seemed, as though they were filthy-rich.

And it was massively disappointing, that other kids could get to watch the best sci-fi that there ever was, and I could not, which made me really unhappy. [I didn't mind them seeing and enjoying it, just that it was difficult to live with the knowledge, that I could not. I cannot recall envying them for this, more, that I genuinely missed seeing great science fiction.]

TNG kept running, and I continued not seeing it, while the local TV guides taunted me with its entry for each Saturday.

As an interesting alternate, these were the years when, from at least 1991, I'd caught a local retransmission each evening of VOA Europe, which played then-popular and chart-topping tracks, thus gracing me with a unique taste in expensive sound. (Our household didn't have a cassette deck until 1993 or 1994, I think, so it was the radio for me.) Eventually, there was mutual estrangement with those classmates, so I'd never learned what music did the others like.

Eventually, to the credit of the good classmate, who, along with other dudes, had seen "The Best of Both Worlds", he retold me the entire two-parter in vivid detail. [I was incredibly happy to hear the whole story from him, and to see his happiness in having seen it, and in retelling it to me :) ]

All this set me up to having a general interest in sci-fi, space, and woo.

I couldn't see any of "Star Trek" properly and at home until a few years later, but that's a different and overall happier story.

While interested in "MacGyver" as a pre-adolescent, it stopped catching my imagination in my teens and twenties. Reason was, that [I'd become a teenager, and] "MacGyver" the show was not as realistic in terms of dialogue, and it felt outdated, whereas TNG and DS9 were the future.

Then again, in the early-to-mid-1990s, I loved "The A-Team" (the parents didn't super like it for its unrealistic dialogue and scenes, but sometimes kinda-sorta tolerated it), and my favourite was "The Equalizer", which always aired at 22:00, which was too late for me.

Then followed "Homicide: Life on the Street", sort of capturing the very realistic feel of early-to-mid-1990s America, hope and anxiety. But its airtime was also late.

[I could not reconcile the fact, that "The A-Team", "The Equalizer", and "Homicide" were very late to me. Especially the latter two, which were high-quality fare. While I massively craved to be in that other world of suspense and adventure, where the good guys were good and well and genuine, and the bad guys always lost.]

"MacGyver" now retains the charm of mid-to-late eighties' Americana.

"Knight Rider" was perhaps similar, targeting the same or somewhat younger age brackets, but was even more outdated and wackier in terms of dialogue and scenes.

The eighties were full of tv shows featuring a man on a journey, usually across America, and fixing all kinds of problems in his way. [Or several men, plus a woman sometimes.] One of the common themes was their being a Vietnam veteran. There were fewer of those shows in the 1990s.

"MacGyver" and "The Equalizer" had a more worldwide appeal: the activities of both often intersected with politics and spycraft: The Equalizer was usually based in New York, and featured plenty of foreigners visiting the city, whereas MacGyver travelled the world.

["MacGyver" introduced me to fixing things by way of tinkering and ad-hoc solutions. Sometimes, the solutions that I had made, worked, and had served me for some years, flawed or perfectly prescient some of them were. As I'd eased into my middle years, some of my wonderment of discovery in tinkering has faded, and the world has offered a plethora of ready-made solutions that are not to be tinkered with.

[Looking back, the PAL/SECAM "analogue" divide took me on a different path of life than that of most of my classmates.

When a year of school ended, and the Summer break began, my family went to the countryside, which was a whole world unto itself. The parents were no longer exposed to nervous city life, and I got to sleep longer, and sleep in. It was bliss.

The countryside offered such a different and blissful existence, that I subconsciously protected it from all of my other classmates. My birthday is sometime during Summer, and when it came to thinking of the people I'd invite to celebrate getting older by a year, I could not think of anyone from the city (the school).

My childhood logic was always, that all the kids I knew from the city (the classmates) 'were too far away, and that it would have been impractical for them to come over.'

The countryside felt like a different country, one, that was inaccessible to the kids (the classmates) I knew from the city.

I've realised in adulthood, that not one of my classmates was a friend to me, as some of them and I had both failed to develop good relationships on the basis of mutual trust. There might have been potential for this, but I let go of some of the opportunities, as did they.]