Bernie Czech and Other Czech Media Darlings

Back at home in the USA we didn't get TV reception and I won't buy cable until it's free and comes without unsightly cables, so we got our video fix by getting DVDs from the library or video store. We also still carried with us some of our old, idealistic anti-TV feelings from back when we didn't even have a means to watch videos and had to content ourselves with playing games, reading, and talking to one another.

Well, we're in a new country now with a different culture and different language. Just like billions of people worldwide learn about America through such shows as Dallas, Little House on the Prairie, and The Simpsons, we turned to the TV to bring Czech culture and native speakers into our living room.

We get three channels: CT1, Nova, and Prima. Programming is like US TV with the following notable differences:

• shows don't necessarily start on the half hour, or even the quarter hour, they can begin whenever
• because of the flexibility they have more shorts (usually children's shows or news) that may only be 10-15 minutes long
• commercial breaks don't occur every eight minutes or whatever the interval is in the US, they are much less frequent, but when they occur, you may as well get up and do the dishes or go for a jog, the breaks are long
• in addition to shows produced right here, they have programming from all over the world dubbed into Czech.
• there are a lot of cop and criminal investigation shows on
• they have more PBS style programming for kids on the commercial stations (it may be that all the stations are partially supported by taxes).

The brightest star in the Czech television sky is our good friend Večerniček, or, as Silas calls it, "Bernie Czech." This TV show has been on Czech TV since 1965 and airs at 6:45 p.m. each night. It starts with a little guy greeting the children by saying "Dobry večer" (good evening) (Click here to watch on YouTube). They then show a short, usually animated (often stop motion) show from somewhere in the world. They are cute stories for small children. Each one is self contained, but they might run a series with the same characters for a week or two. The show ends with the little guy saying "Dobrou noc" (good night) indicating it is time to get ready for bed (Click here to watch on YouTube).

This show is a cultural institution here. It's not just kids that watch it, whole families gather on the couch, children in laps, grandma in her chair, to see it each night. Sometimes the episode they show is old, from when the parents were kids. It's delightful.

Another show that we like is called Zpivanky. On TV a couple of times a week, each one takes a Czech folk song and puts actions with it. They are sometimes cute, sometimes just weird, but they maintain a cultural literacy that would otherwise be at risk of disappearing. It's interesting also, given the history of the Czech people, that when their culture was being exterminated by the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of the things the Czech nationalists did was to scour the countryside writing down the words and music to the old folk songs (as well as stories and the language). Now many hundreds of folk songs are known. Antonin Dvořak (and others) took advantage of that work and incorporated some of the melodies into their classical works (like what he did using American folk tunes in the New World Symphony). Here's an example of one of the episodes of Zpivanky.

Finally, there are the fairy tales. Many Czech fairy tales (some of which are variations on the ones familiar to us from the Brothers Grimm) have been made into short movies for TV. Each Sunday at 1:05 they show one on CT1. During Christmas they were on all the time.

The Czechs have also produced plenty of movies. They have a distinctive humor - which I usually don't get. I watch them anyway though, hoping to someday understand what they are saying.

Peter