The Blue Tube

The names sound as if they would be more at home on sleazy Times Square marquees than in a TV log: I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue), The Conjugal Bed, And So to Bed, How to Succeed with Sex and Naked and Free. For thousands of viewers of UHF Channel 79 in Toronto, however, they are as familiar as The Flip Wilson Show.

Channel 79 delicately calls its Friday-midnight show The Baby-Blue Movie, underlining the fact that it draws the line at hard-core porn. "We try to come by material that is mildly salacious," says Managing Director Moses Znaimer, "yet still carries a bit of a story line and a touch of production value." Indeed, the Friday-night movie is only a small part of 79's programming, which leans heavily on coverage of community affairs and controversies.

Despite the fact that most sets in Toronto are not equipped with UHF converters--limiting 79's audience to about 426,000 homes, v. 900,000 for the VHF stations--The Baby-Blue Movie has, after 5 1/2 months on the air, already topped the late-Friday ratings and changed the viewing habits of Torontonians. A minister who used to make the rounds of three nursing homes Friday night now finds, for example, that all the old folks are glued to the tube.

There have been relatively few complaints, and many of those have come from over the border from the U.S. Canadian law prohibits obscenity on TV, but fails to define it, and Canadian officials, like the viewers, seem unconcerned by the Toronto movies. Station officials, meantime, are happy with their soaring revenues--but a little uncomfortable with their risque image. "As soon as people regard this as the porn station," claims Znaimer, "then I'll cancel the blue movie."

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