Geoff Berne of Hamilton, Ohio
As New Jersey Network faces the threat of privatization, hanging in the balance is a plan that’s been evolving over the past year for the rebroadcast of an historic television series on bluegrass music from 1977 to which I had the honor of contributing as scriptwriter, narrator, and producer-for-stage, roles similar to the ones I played as host and producer of weekly shows in Monmouth County at the Englishtown Music Hall in the mid-to-late 1970s.
Praised in the New York Times and New Jersey’s main newspapers (the Trenton Times called it “a model for the presentation of music on television”), the eight-part series that emerged from this first-ever bluegrass festival created specially for television was called “Bluegrass at the Englishtown Music Hall.” Taped live and on location at the hall in two nights of live performances, it was aired weekly on what was then called New Jersey Public Television (NJPTV) and on the public stations of the Eastern Educational Network (EEN), in 1978 and 1979.
Thanks to having a public station willing to take the leap into a musical field that was then attracting hundreds of thousands of Americans to outdoor festivals all across the country while being ignored by network TV, viewers in New Jersey and EEN member states were treated to weekly broadcasts by more than a dozen top masters of “pickin’ and singin’ bluegrass-style” for a half hour at a time without commercial interruption.
Since the discovery last year that the original audio and video masters from the show exist and are in mint condition, efforts have been underway at NJN to find funding for rebroadcasting the series and to develop a new show looking back at the Music Hall’s history and at performers from the show today. With the changes taking place at the station and its undetermined future, these plans have been put on indefinite hold.
Would privatization of NJN mean the end of original New Jersey programming like this, and make the station’s programming indistinguishable from that of the network stations? Would new management of the station have respect for the archive of past NJN productions such as the Englishtown series and would the NJN archive even survive in private hands?
For me, New Jersey’s not-for-profit broadcasting organization showed more than 30 years ago that a state-run public station could equal and even surpass the for-profit networks in quality, originality, and content. Furthermore, “Englishtown” happened in New Jersey. It was audiences from New Jersey that made the Music Hall a place of renown. Without a channel like NJN that broadcasts hour upon hour of first-class programming on New Jersey events, people, and cultures, the purely New Jersey phenomenon of bluegrass at Englishtown, which would surely not have been aired on the New York or Philadelphia stations, would not have made it to television at all.
Watching from Ohio, I’ll be hoping that the people of New Jersey and their elected officials will not let public broadcasting at NJN go down.
Geoff Berne
Hamilton, OH
