Television Presentation From Defunct Countries and Regimes

Here's a Soviet-era commercial for a portable radio, with a tie-in to the 1980 Moscow Olympics and its mascot, Misha the Bear. The brand, Sokol (meaning "falcon" in Russian), uses a badge typeface strongly resembling Sony's famous script. Some Soviet radios were apparently well-made, but the build quality of this model doesn't appear to be all that great:



Some more Soviet commercials from the 1980s:

Soviet 80's ads are...interesting.

The second one seems less like an advert and more of a bizarre, techno music video.

That clip that appears briefly at 3:41 - pretty sure that's the Nickelodeon silver ball closedown sequence.

Here's a Soviet commercial for a folding camper trailer to the tune of "Eleanor Rigby":



And speaking of Communist-era commercials with pop instrumentals, here's a 1970s Yugoslav (Slovenian) car commercial with "Killing Me Softly":

Here's the main Soviet evening news -- in its entirety -- from 1983:



And from 1975:

And here's an interesting study in contrast: Let's cross the Berlin Wall to West Berlin and watch the evening news from the very same day -- May 1, 1989 -- as seen on SFB (Sender Freies Berlin), the regional ARD broadcaster serving West Berlin (now RBB). Note how the West Berlin news, in contrast with the propagandistic East, wasn't afraid of showing less-than-positive aspects of West German reality:



Also note that a map showing all of Berlin is shown in the title animation.

(The track of the recording with the background sound is a bit too high compared to the spoken word track.)

Here is a map showing the reception of West German television in East Germany -- the black-colored areas are the only parts where receiving West German television was not possible:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/West_german_tv_penetration.svg/602px-West_german_tv_penetration.svg.png
Image: Wikipedia.org

Perhaps surprisingly, people from the areas with no Western TV reception were the most likely to try to emigrate to the West. One theory is that they were not exposed to some of the negative facets of life in the West (such as the riots seen in the SFB clip above). Another theory holds that people in other parts of Germany could at least "escape" to the West through television, while the people in the black zones felt even more fenced in.

East German TV sets at a trade fair, 1968:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-G0301-0001-009%2C_Leipzig%2C_Messe%2C_RFT-Sortiment%2C_Fernseher.jpg

Source: German Federal Archive, Wikipedia.org

And here's an extended East German TV ident from the 1980s:

Love the ident - pretending to be a nice flashy cube-twist, except the video isn't actually being mapped onto the surfaces of a cube.

Here's more 1980s East German TV continuity, including an updated "cube twist":



Apparently, East German TV was one of the first broadcasters anywhere to have a custom font designed specifically for on-air use:

http://www.husfl.net/DDR-F/Videtur.jpg

Source: http://www.ddr-tv.de.vu/

I always thought East German TV had the toughest job of all of the Eastern Bloc TV operations, as they had to compete with West German TV on a far more level playing field than in other countries. Large chunks of East Germany were able to watch West German TV (albeit often in black and white because early East German colour sets were SECAM only and West Germany invented PAL - though AIUI B&W sets were not uncommon anyway...) and it was obviously in the same language and the two halves of the country shared huge amounts culturally (if not in contemporary terms)

The fall of the East German regime, and reunification were hugely significant events for Astra, as uptake for satellite dishes to receive TV from Astra 1 (which carried and continues to carry lots of FTA German terrestrial broadcasters) rocketed.

The whole point of the infamous "Der Schwartz Kanal", of course, which broadcast ARD and ZDF news reports with commentary propaganda in favour of the SED government.

Perhaps surprisingly, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, some of the areas that could not receive West German signals were cabled to receive ARD, ZDF, and even a few of the commercial channels from the West -- some via satellite. In the 1980s, the East German authorities began to encourage this practice because, as we've seen, the desire to emigrate tended to be lower in towns where West German TV was available.

This was in sharp contrast to the situation before the early 1970s, when watching West German television was officially banned. (Back then, children were sometimes asked to draw TV logos in school. If they drew the West German TV logos, the authorities knew that their parents were politically suspect.)

Here's a 45-minute ZDF Info documentary about the reception and the influence of West German TV in East Germany (in German):