As the General Days of My Children's World Hospital Turns

Reading of late about the demise of the venerable daytime drama As the World Turns, my mind is drawn to a funny memory from the early days of my broadcasting career, at the ABC affiliate WSIL-TV, in southern Illinois.

A brief education about TV stations: Master Control is the room in a TV station through which all the stuff you see on a given channel passes. There is an audio/video switchboard that controls which a/v circuit is sent to the broadcast antenna, and then out to the viewing public. And, in some capacity, there is a human watching over that switchboard.

At WSIL, Master Control was almost 100 percent manual; the Master Control Operator had to manually load all the individual local commercials into individual videotape players, and had to manually cue up all the players, and had to manually roll them when their time came to play, and had to manually switch to them with the a/v switchboard when their commercials started. The Master Control Operator also had to monitor the signal for any errors that might be coming from our station, or our antenna, or even from the network, if a network program was on the air.

When I started as the Promotions Coordinator at WSIL, I was informed that I would also be a backup Master Control Operator, to fill in for the regulars when ill or on vacation. I already had master Control experience from my days as a student Master Control Op, working at the PBS station on campus. Nevertheless, I wasn’t too happy with the specter of Master Control hanging over my head again...and it was worse at advertiser-supported, ABC affiliate WSIL; PBS doesn’t have commercials!

Early one morning I received a phone call. God-awful early. That’s never good; I feared my father had quickly followed my mother into the grave. But, fortunately, no. It was merely to inform me that Vanessa, the sign-on – to – mid-day Master Control Operator had quit, effective immediately. I had to fill in for her that day...and every day until a replacement could be found, and until that replacement could be trained. By me.

Thus began the torturous schedule of 4:00am wake-ups for 5:30am sign-ons, and harrowing mornings of lining up and running the breaks for the morning newscasts, Good Morning, America news cut-ins, Live with Regis and Kathy Lee, some other morning shows, and the dreaded afternoon Daytime Dramas. But, actually, since the daytime dramas were pre-recorded, the network provided supremely accurate break schedule information, so they were vastly easier to do than the erratic, crazy Live with Regis and Kathy Lee! That show was sometimes next to impossible to run a clean break, especially near the end, when they had to cram in all the scheduled breaks they put off at the beginning!

So, when the daytime dramas started, it was actually a time to relax! And since it was my responsibility as the on-duty Master Control Operator to monitor the signal, I had to watch. And a funny thing happens when you have to watch daytime dramas: you get sucked in. When you’re resistant to them, like I was... am ...you don’t realize you’ve been sucked in until one or both of two things happen: there is a surprise plot twist in the story (and aren’t they all?), and you hear yourself say out loud, “Oh, SHIT!” or “You BITCH;” and someone who cares about a particular show asks you what happened in today’s episode. And you can answer them. In detail.

Jim showed up one morning behind my boss, Ron. I knew Jim from our days at Southern Illinois University in the Radio-TV curriculum as well as at the public TV station operated by the university. His circumstances had kept him in the area after he graduated, where he had been stuck in minimum wage jobs outside of our career field. Ron had brought Jim in to introduce him to me as Vanessa’s replacement, indicating silently that Jim had finally landed a minimum wage job within our industry. Training commenced the next day.

Having worked in Master Control at the public TV station, I was spared having to teach Jim the ethos behind the job. All that was left was the nuts and bolts of the job: turning on the transmitter, signing on the station, and familiarizing him with the beast that is Big Network television broadcast schedules.

I worked with Jim for a couple days, letting him just watch me, and involving him more and more with the routines: loading the commercial tapes on the rolling cart in the order of their scheduled airplay; marking the daily air log to show when the spots ran, and when there were errors or discrepancies; putting the air tapes away when they were finished; recording programs we were to air later in the day....

Then we switched chairs for the easier part of the day, and I let him run some breaks. More and more as the week progressed. By the end of the second week of his training, we had reversed roles, and I was watching him run the breaks and set everything else up, and helping him during the moments when he got overwhelmed.

Finally, after Ron asked me if I thought Jim was ready, Ron came in to Master Control and watched Jim work. After a couple breaks, Ron stood up, said, “Good,” smiled and walked out. I told Jim to just call me down any time he needed help or had a question. And then I asked him if he had any questions before I left him on his own. He didn’t, but he expressed concern about making it through the “stupid” daytime dramas each day without killing himself or, worse, falling asleep and missing a break.

I said, “Jim, inside of three weeks you will be so wrapped up in those stupid shows, you won’t believe it.”

Jim shot back, “Oh, HELL no! I can’t stand those things.”

I smiled at him. I said, “Okay. Whatever.”

I walked back to my desk, a seemingly alien place after a whole month in Master Control full-time, and I marked my calendar for three weeks to the day of my conversation with Jim: “Ask Jim about All My Children.”

A day before the event, I set my VCR at home to record All My Children, and that evening I watched it in order to catch up on what was happening on the show.

The next day, just as All My Children was about to end, I went in to Master Control under the pretense of checking to see if some promos had been updated. Then I asked Jim how things were going, how he liked it, and so on.

Then I “noticed” the program on the air, and I asked a pointed question, something like, “What did Erica say to so-and-so about his affair?”

Jim answered me quite readily, and with some attached emotion. So I asked a follow-up question, regarding another character, and again, with a bit of excitement, he answered me, without even a hint of curiosity about why I would ask. Then I smiled at him.

He looked at me. “What?” he asked, an uncertain smile crossing his face.

I pointed my finger at him. “Gotcha.”

He closed his eyes as the earlier moments of our conversation played back in his head. He was indeed wrapped up in the daytime dramas, and he knew I knew it.

We both had a good laugh, and I forgave him his failure, telling him I, too, had denied any possibility that I would care anything more about the soaps beyond whether or not our signal faded while they were on. But they’re irresistible; if you have them on and audible, as we were required to do, and you plop yourself down in front of them, you’re going to follow them. It’s juicy gossip of the most harmless kind, and you know everybody’s secrets, and you don’t have to worry over whom you might tell. It’s what made them so successful in the first place. It goes deep down into our collective social psyche.

The fortunate part is, once you are able to pull yourself away from them, their draw fades quickly. I was able to leave Master Control and move on with my life and my assigned duties. Jim didn’t have the luxury of training his way out of it until he was ready to move up or move on.

And, no. I don’t watch the daytime dramas any more.



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