When I was little we got just one TV channel. It was a Moncton station whose logo was a lobster. (We'd also spent a year in Britain, and I remember seeing Rolf Harris on TV, along with Tintin and Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men.)
Then, when I was seven, we got a CBC channel. Or rather, we got a CBC affiliate from Saint John that didn't always carry the regular network's shows, much to our annoyance. (I think the station, like half of New Brunswick, was owned by the Irvings.) We also got two channels with a poor-quality signal: a Radio-Canada station--the French CBC--in Moncton, and a full-fledged CBC station in P.E.I.
We got a wider range of channels for a year when we lived in Mississauga in the mid-'70s, and got cable TV. Then we returned to New Brunswick and went back to two full channels and two weak ones for another three years until cable TV came to our town. Even then, it was another five years before we got PBS!
All this we were seeing on a black and white Silvertone TV set. I remember seeing the butterfly at the start of CBC colour broadcasts, which we couldn't appreciate on our TV. We only got a colour set in the '80s! But I'm just as happy with that: you hear about young people who've seen nothing but color shows all their life, and are uncomfortable watching classic black and white movies as a result.
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