RadioMatthew.com » Start Here

In October 1997, my family packed up and left Northern California for the other side of the world. For me, this meant leaving behind the only life I knew for a strange, foreign land. We became a new military family living in a city called Kitzingen, Germany, and I began attending school thirty minutes away in nearby Würzburg. A classic American commodity, television, didn’t quite follow us to Germany. Sporting the slogan, “We Bring You Home”, the American Forces Network or “AFN” is the only over-the-air (called “terrestrial” in Europe) most Americans can receive without shelling out extra money for cable. In 1999, a deal was reached with a German cable providor to allow free access to three other AFN channels to anyone with a cable hookup and under no obligation to subscribe to cable services. These three additional channels, called AFN Spectrum (which was basically a film and family channel that repeated it’s programming three times a day or every eight hours), AFN NewSports (a channel showing news and sports) and AFN Pacific (same as AFN, but time shifted for people living in Japan and Oceania) gave us a total of four channels. Occasionally, my family would splurge a few extra dollars per month to gain access to British television channels that aired American shows like SKY One and the UK’s answer to Cartoon Network, but with under 15 English-speaking channels to choose from, television was definitely not something that was a commodity in Europe. Since 2004, though, AFN has expanded it’s channel guide–splitting apart NewSports into two separate channels (AFN News heavily relies on FOX News, but big surprise there) and launching AFN Freedom, a channel targeted to US troops in Iraq.

AFN was, and still is, pretty well known for showing televison programs on a heavy delay. Anyone with access to an Internet connection knew well months in advance that Richard won the first Survivor series on CBS before AFN ever got around to airing it. There were, however, two times watching AFN was a pleasant experience. The first of which was when AFN Pacific would air Saturday Night Live, which was always a week ahead of AFN’s airing despite only being about 8 hours ahead of Europe. The second of which was late night television, which would consist of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” at 10:30PM and “The Late Show with David Letterman” at 11:30PM. It seems so mediocre that it’d be a privilege to stay up late enough to see Letterman, given how I can now see both shows in the same timeslot on two different networks now that I’m back in the United States, but when I was in junior high school, it was a big deal.

One of the things I can remember enjoying about the Late Show with David Letterman was the continuity of Dave’s feud with talk show host Oprah Winfrey. This morning, doing my usual browse of YouTube videos, I stumbled across an interview legendary and Emmy-award winning Detroit television anchor Bill Bonds conducted with Oprah when she was just starting out. This led me to search for other clips Oprah has appeared on, and I stumbled across one that threw me into a flashback to when I’d watch the Late Show in Germany (I don’t watch late-night talk shows anymore). After sixteen years of “feuding”, in late 2005, Oprah finally appeared on the Late Show upon opening night of her Broadway show “The Color Purple.” It’s such an unexplainable feeling of nostalgia to be able to see something like that, even if I am a year off, given the sheer joy I had for four years watching Dave Letterman while stationed overseas.