Hey, It’s Photo Friday!

For many years, PBS broadcast THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY BEE (later titled THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BEE). Like the Scripps Spelling Bee, the GeoBee was a national competition – but instead of spelling it put young people through their geographical paces. The Bees were held beginning in 1989 and recently discontinued (not all were aired on PBS, I believe – I know we didn’t air them every year). Most were hosted by Alex Trebek (Soledad O’Brien and Mo Rocca in later years). They were always fun and interesting and often made you realize how little geography you actually know.

A while back, I came across this sweet memo kit from Maryland Public Television, the producers of the THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY BEE. It’s small, about the size of an address book. It’s also a very cool reminder of PBS past.

Hey, It’s Photo Friday!

We’ve got a piece of broadcasting history this week, folks. Not a particularly important piece of broadcasting history, nevertheless, it’s possibly something those outside of the industry have never seen and those who are fairly recent arrivals to the profession have likely never seen in this form.

What you see above is a script for a promo. The right side of the page features the copy that will become the voiceover narration for the spot. The left side shows the video that will make up the promo. This is how we used to compose scripts back in the day. Nowadays such a script would probably not even be printed but might be sent to the voice talent as a digital file.

As you can see, the date is the early ’80s (that’s before my time!) and it’s not even a show that we aired on what would have at the time been the UNC Center for Public Television. Even though the name of the broadcaster is lost in the upper left corner (I found this script among some old papers I inherited when my original supervisor left years ago), a quick online search shows that UP ON THE FARM was a Maryland Public Television series. I’m not sure how long it ran but I’d guess there are those in the agricultural field (no pun intended) with fond memories of this slice of public television history.

Hey, It’s Photo Friday!

I’ve mentioned before that many of the neat little souvenirs I come present here are created to promote public television programs. They might be given away at a PBS conference as swag or sent out to station personnel in hopes of persuading them pick their series to broadcast. Whether it works or not, it’s always interesting to see what they come up with and how they tie it into their particular show. These two oven mitts were obviously produced to publicize cooking series, which seems like a pretty apt idea. And I do know that PBS NC has aired both programs in the past. Sometimes it’s a good thing just to get your name out there.