I had all but forgotten about NBC's late-night music video show "Friday Night Videos" until I watched the intro on YouTube. Hearing the music that played over the introductory credits I was instantly transported back to the early 1980s, sneaking downstairs after my mother had gone to bed so that I could sit on the floor in front of the television and watch, rapt, as the music videos rolled forth.

 

We were one of many families that did not have cable television in the 1980s. In a household with a single working mother and a latchkey kid, cable TV was a luxury that I only experienced at friends' houses and at my grandmother's house when I visited for the holidays. 

 

(My grandmother's cable TV was controlled by a gigantic set-top box about the size of a big city phone book. It was "finished" with a label that had a faux wood grain. It featured ten cream-colored buttons that you pushed in to choose the channel. Each button went in with a "thunk" similar to the feel of a car's radio buttons, which I'm sure was intentional. She used this bit of technological whackery long after it had become archaic, well into the 1990s.)

 

If you were a kid in the 1980s, you knew that MTV was the height of culture. It was the single coolest thing in the entire world. It set trends in a way that is difficult to imagine, now that the hundreds of cable channels plus the internet have made American culture such a diffuse creation.

 

But for those of us without cable, we were not entirely without hope: there was Friday Night Videos. It was a distant runner up to MTV, for sure. It didn't have the star VJs that everyone talked about, and you couldn't watch it whenever you wanted. No, you had to wait for Friday night to roll around. But honestly, this made it seem more special.

 

Each episode of Friday Night Videos had a different celebrity host (or pair of hosts). The list reads like a "who's who" of 1980s pop culture, from Emo Phllips to Malcolm Jamal Warner. Each week featured an American Idol-style showdown between two videos: phone their special hotline to vote for the one you thought should win.

 

I never called in to vote, due to a very unfortunate earlier incident regarding the US Atomic Clock phone number and a shockingly high long distance bill. But I always pretended that I had at school the next Monday. Pretending to vote for the coolest video: sometimes, that is what childhood is all about!