On Tuesday nights we watched the so-called ?Telecinemateca?, i.e. something like ?Home Cinema? that showed one-time silver screen successes. Saturdays and Sundays they showed cartoons with the indigenous Mihaela or Woody the Wood Pecker. Forget about football matches, forget about music videos or entertainment shows. The latter were particularly scarce, and usually you could only see them on the New Year?s Eve. We were given loads of Romanian period movies glorifying the historical past, there were also lots of Russian films and some American ones as well, except they were really old. The censorship was really tough back then. If the censors thought there was something peculiar about one specific film, they simply removed it off the schedule. There was also this folk music show hosted by Marioara Murarescu on Saturdays and Sundays.

Most people had their aerials tuned on the Bulgarian channels. The Bulgarians would broadcast longer hours till midnight. There we could watch music videos and sports. One year I watched the whole World Cup. For people living in Bucharest, the Bulgarian channels were that open window to abroad that we needed so badly.

All of us had black and white TV sets (Diamant or Snagov). They were antiquated devices with only 8 channels. Not once, while watching TV or listening in to radio, was the electricity cut off. (F. Z. N., 117)

When we were kids we lived in a condominium of 6 flats, and we all knew each other. It was nice, very much like a family. Back then I used to have this very good friend Mihaela Bucur, some 5 years our senior who would run slide shows for us, and we used to say the wall the slides were projected on was our color TV. When the projector broke down we weren?t helpless. We collected all our colored plastic bags and sellotaped them on the screen of our Diamant TV set and that?s how, we the kids saw the colored version of ?Captain Grant?s Children? and the Romanian less-than-loony tunes ?Miaunel and Balanel?, on a Sunday morning.

One night we were watching together with our parents a Charlie Chaplin film (there weren?t any red triangles, circles or triangles in the lower corner to indicate which productions were suitable for general audience and which not) and merely a quarter of an hour before the end the electricity was cut off. Mother took this really thick taper candle, placed it on a three-legged stool and a neighbor brought in a lantern. I was really small so I believed the filmed had never really stopped. What we actually saw were the reflections of our sad faces on the black TV screen, somewhat resigned at the thought that there was only half an hour left to the end of the whole TV program. It all ended at 10 at night. (A.-I. B., 106)