The TV Jeebies

by Paul Ritts, Ed Sullivan (Foreword), Dick Strome (Illustrator)

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1951

Reviews

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 2 out of 5]

This showed up in a pile of donations and I was intrigued, not because it was someone's memoir about working in television but because it was someone's memoir about working in local television (Philadelphia)... written in 1951, which is when the medium was so young that the DuMont network was still on the air. This intrigued me to no end so I had to read it. Unfortunately, Ritts thinks he's funny, and his sense of humor goes little beyond "take my wife, please" shit. (His accounts of his career are interspersed with "relatable" commentary on what it's like to be the neighborhood homeowner with a TV set.) The drawings are great. But apart from the fun sensation of having TV "explained" at a point when no one quite knew what its place in the culture was going to be yet, this really doesn't illuminate much. News flash: early live TV, both nationally and regionally, was incredibly rusty and amateurish.

I forgot to mention, there's a whole thing in this about people calling the station angry because they're playing silent movies, which is a good reminder of how my cultural alienation would've been complete and absolute no matter what era I lived in.