SHOW STARS EARLY DAZE OF PUBLIC ACCESS TO TV

There was a time when San Diegans were urged to sing, dance or say virtually anything on television for five minutes for free.

Today the wobbly, grainy, often bizarre video images of that era testify to the effort to shatter television’s high-technology barrier and make the mass medium available for laymen.

In subject matter, the programs ranged from the silly and self-indulgent to the poignant and at least semi-profound, such as programs on undocumented workers; and from rank amateur to professional in terms of quality.

A documentary has captured those salad days of public access and excess when San Diego was the largest public-access market in the country. Titled, “Beginnings: The Early Years of Access,” it will air today and next week on several stations. It was produced by Dennis McNabb, who was closely involved in public access at its dawn here in 1975.

“There was a certain idealism to the whole thing,” McNabb said. “The whole idea of community television is a basic American ideal--freedom of speech. If you can use television to express that, so much the better.”

McNabb got the idea for the hourlong documentary after he heard that about 200 hours of public-access tapes were stored in the Chula Vista Public Library. McNabb and Nora McMartin, the library’s audio-visual librarian, had worked with the Community Video Center, the group that coordinated most of the public-access programming in San Diego for cable companies during the early years.

“I saw a lack of knowledge of what had happened in San Diego,” McNabb said. “It’s not something we can take for granted. If the public isn’t aware of the potential for public access, it will dry up and blow away through atrophy.”

The documentary, which took McNabb 80 hours to edit, includes footage of the first public-access satellite transmission, broadcast live from the El Cortez Hotel in 1978 for three hours over HBO.

Claire McCance, who now works for a Los Angeles advertising firm, produced that satellite transmission from a national conference on public access held at the El Cortez.

“It was a huge endeavor,” McCance said. “The one piece of training I got out of (the video center) was that we had to learn to do everything: produce, host, edit, create the idea and publicize it.”

That is still the way of public access. Under Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cities and counties can require that cable television stations provide “public access” facilities so that citizens can produce their own television programs, which are aired on special cable channels.

San Diego County is no longer the largest public-access market in the country, but public access still goes into about 400,000 homes, according to the cable companies.

Several cable stations in San Diego, such as Southwestern and Cox, offer state-of-the-art studios and equipment to anyone who has completed the training required to operate the equipment and produce programs. The only cost to users is the blank videotapes they must provide.

Cable stations in San Diego offer about 35 to 40 hours of programming a week. According to McNabb, the quality still varies. The key, however, is not quality but access, he said. “Beginnings” shows clips of regular programs produced by PACE (Public Access by and for Elders), an amateur senior citizen production company. It also shows the work of elementary school students producing their own program and a “claymation” promotional cartoon by a junior high school class.

The problems with public access, McNabb acknowledged, include the range in quality of individual programs and an unknown audience. But the benefit is that it opens up a new line of communication.

“It’s putting a means of communicating in the hands of people with something to say,” McNabb said, “even if it’s only to someone down the street.”

“Beginnings: The Early Years of Access” will be shown at 10 p.m. Tuesday and Sept. 1 on Cox Cable (Channel 24); at 8 p.m. today, 7 p.m. Monday and 6 p.m. next Friday on Southwestern Cable (Channel 15c); at 9 p.m. today and 2 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday on Daniels Cablevision-Del Mar (Channel 37), and at 8 p.m. Tuesday and 6 p.m. Aug. 28 on Daniels Cablevision-Carlsbad (Channel 30).