The good ol' days?

Spending the evening flicking through the huge variety of TV channels made me think back to my childhood. Growing up in Portugal in the 80s meant I was extremely limited to what I could watch. Back then, in Portugal, the choice of television shows was, well, pretty lame to say the least.

When I first arrived, aged ten, I think we had a choice of two channels. RTP1 and RTP2. Both were bad. Really bad. At a later stage, they were joined by SIC and TVi but they weren't a great deal better (except on weekend afternoons but their commercial breaks often lasted a good 20 minutes!).

It was so bad that my family and I would actually get excited at about 8pm certain weeknights when the few American shows were aired. The programs? The Twilight Zone (the original 1960s version) and All in the Family (remember Archie Bunker?).

After a year or so we were ecstatic when they were joined by Moonlighting and Family Ties! Needless to say, our video was used endlessly. I'm surprised it didn't wear out altogether. Whenever we were given a video tape, that video tape would be played hundreds if not, thousands of times. The movies? Well, at one point my younger brother and I could recite (literally word for word) Robocop, Police Academy, Beaches (ok...perhaps not my brother but I loved it) and Footloose. For some bizarre reason we also had rather a large selection of awful martial arts flicks like Enter the Dragon. We could do pretty bad impressions of dubbed Japanese actors though!
Fast forward 25 years and we are absolutely spoiled for choice. We have cable TV, which not only offers those dire original four channels, but 50 odd others! There is so much to choose from that we often end up spending most of the evening trying to decide what to watch!
What was it like for you? What did you grow up watching on TV?