Happy 42nd Birthday to Friday Night Videos

A lot of people know that MTV made its debut on August 1, 1981. What a lot of people don’t know, or seem to have forgotten, is that very few people had access to MTV in the early days. You may remember MTV’s “I Want My MTV” campaign, where musicians would say that phrase before asking people to call their local cable company and ask them to carry the station.

Now, you could say I was lucky or unlucky depending on your point of view, but in the late 70s my dad purchased an antenna that allowed us to get HBO for free. We watched a lot of HBO and then one day — August 1, 1981 — the feed we were getting switched and instead of getting HBO we started getting this new weird channel that showed music videos 24/7 called MTV. I think we got cable pretty soon after that and were lucky enough to have both HBO and MTV.

But like I said, not everybody in the early 80s had cable, and not everybody who did got MTV. Of course MTV was not the only place you could see music videos — HBO launched their show “Video Jukebox” three years earlier in 1978 — but it was the only place to see them 24/7. That being said, MTV’s popularity lead to lots of knock-off shows, one of which was Friday Night Videos.

There were a series of events at NBC that made Friday Night Videos possible. Infamous NBC executive Dick Ebersol was co-producing a Friday night show called The Midnight Hour. In 1981 he left that show to co-produce Saturday Night Live with Lorne Michaels, and canceled The Midnight Hour. To fill the now vacant timeslot, NBC signed a two-year deal to broadcast a Canadian show, which got viewers SCTV from 1981-1983. When that deal ended, NBC needed a new Friday night show and, based on the popularity of MTV, launched Friday Night Videos.

Friday Night Videos ran for 90 minutes every Friday night. In the beginning they didn’t have VJs like MTV; they just showed videos, which were introduced by an anonymous, off-screen voice. Over time, the show began to add more MTV-like features, like head-to-head battles where two videos would be pitted against one another and viewers were encouraged to call a 1-900 number to vote for their favorite. After a couple of years, the show added celebrity hosts.

In the 1980s I knew lots of people who had not yet adopted cable. Cable television was a huge shift in that people were suddenly paying for television. Before that, all the major broadcast stations like NBC, ABC, and CBS were free. There were also lots of rural areas where cable simply wasn’t available. For those people, shows like Friday Night Videos were the only way they could see music videos at all.

Friday Night Videos had one of the most memorable opening segments and songs I can remember from the 1980s. Synth-rock filled with stereo panning played over a stylized animation. I don’t know who recorded that song but if they made other songs like it I would stream it 24/7. The 80s were rad, yo. And while few TVs had stereo speakers at the time, the show was also broadcast on the radio which (a) sounded awesome in stereo and (b) was an easy way for a kid like me to record new songs onto cassette tapes.

Friday Night Videos evolved throughout the years. In 1987 it got bumped to an even later timeslot to make room for Late Night with David Letterman, which up until then had only been broadcast Monday through Thursday. To keep the show fresh, new features like clips from stand-up comedians and live musical performances were added. Each segment that was added meant fewer music videos were played. The show was renamed multiple times (Friday Night, Late Friday) and by the end, just like MTV, they stopped playing music videos completely. On a show originally called Friday Night Videos.

I didn’t have cable television in my bedroom until I was in middle school, and that was only because a friend of mine went up into our attic, added a splitter to our incoming cable feed, and helped me run coax cable down into my bedroom. Before that, we only had cable on the television in our living room and while I spent plenty of time watching MTV, cartoons, and lots of other things, when grown-ups wanted to watch something we had to defer to them. Every Friday night in my bedroom I would stay up and watch Friday Night Videos from 11:30pm-1:00am (Central). Most of my friends did too and it was always fun to watch the show and imagine all my friends at home watching it at the same time.

Wikipedia says Friday Night Videos aired from 1983-2002, but that includes those later less-music-oriented incarnations. Friday Night Videos “proper” aired from 1983-1990, which for me was fifth grade through my junior year — the perfect age for music videos, style, and rock and roll.