In 1980, when I was 16, my father bought an apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and we decamped from Los Angeles to spend the summer there. This was where I discovered two things of major importance in my adolescence. 1) A place where I could buy weed openly and easily on 1st Avenue and 70th. And 2) Manhattan Cable TV, a public access service that broadcast really weird stuff late at night. The two went together very well. After my parents went to bed, I’d head for the roof and smoke out. Then, in my bedroom, I’d watch the genuinely freaky, seedy, kind of scary and fascinating programs that were a staple of public access television. Lots of sex stuff with really unattractive people–‘Ugly George’, Al Goldstein, Robin Byrd. Also weird talk shows like ‘The Tex Fenster Show’–I recall Tex often sitting in his chair and not really interviewing anybody but rambling to himself. There was the lousy cabaret singer and all around nutbag ‘Fantastic Fran’, ‘The Crank Call Show’ and many others that have disappeared from my memory. Above is a nice little 7 minute compilation reel showing bits and pieces of the world of local Manhattan Public Access from the late 70s through the 80s. Oh yes, the infamous swingers club ‘Plato’s Retreat’ of course bought air time to advertise their swampy swinging couples club. I didn’t yet quite understand what they did in that place but, like everything else on Manhattan Cable Public Access Television, it was clearly seedy, scary, wrong and fascinating.