We subscribe to one of the popular satellite TV services and have hundreds of channels at our disposal. How is it, then, that we can never find much to watch on TV?

Most of today’s sitcoms just don’t seem funny, and the movie selection always seems to be substandard. How many times can a viewer watch “Pretty Woman” or “Sweet Home Alabama”?

Imagine our delight when my husband stumbled upon FETV, a Christian-based programming service, a couple of weeks ago and the evening lineup was all kinds of shows from the 1960s and ’70s. 

He was ecstatic to find old reruns of “The Lone Ranger,” one of his childhood favorites. After that we watched “Roy Rogers” and laughed about how dorky the story line was.

Night after night, we’ve been tuning in to shows we enjoyed 30-plus years ago when we were young and newly married, and a few shows from the mid-1970s we’d missed all together because my husband was stationed in Spain with the U.S. Marines during that time while I was working and going to school in Austria. Now we’re being entertained by classics such as “The Bionic Woman.”

I suppose our nostalgia for the ghosts of television past isn’t much different than my mother watching reruns of “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

It’s been fun reminiscing about shows we both enjoyed during our childhood. Most baby boomers like us couldn’t wait for “Wild Kingdom” on Sunday nights, followed by “The Wonderful World of Disney.”

I didn’t watch much TV as a child because we didn’t have access to our own television set until I was in junior high school. My grandfather lived in a separate portion of our gigantic farmhouse, and he was the one with the TV. I remember my mother bundling up my older brother and I so we could run around the house to grandpa’s quarters to watch “Captain Kangaroo.”

During my elementary school years it was a big deal for the entire family to gather around and watch “Bonanza.” And I recall that after I’d finished washing the supper dishes I was allowed to go to Grandpa’s and watch “The Red Skelton Show,” a variety show that ranked right up there with “Gunsmoke” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

By the time I was a young teenager our growing family had taken over more of the farmhouse and we had our own TV. I quickly became addicted to favorites such as “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Dream of Jeannie.”

Since I didn’t grow up being overexposed to TV, I’ve always had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward television.

It didn’t bother me a bit when we lived in the country during our years in Eastern Montana and couldn’t get cable or any TV reception even from a rooftop antenna. Our daughters weren’t exposed to TV until they were 4 or 5, though we rented plenty of “Care Bears” videos, so I don’t think they feel they were deprived.

Keeping television viewing to a minimum probably made us better students because we read books for entertainment. My middle brother read an entire set of Childcraft encyclopedias cover to cover one winter.

Even so, there’s a bit of a guilty-pleasure feeling when I come across some of the old reruns. On a quiet Saturday morning when no one’s around, you might find me tuned into “The Brady Bunch” or “Bewitched.” Just don’t tell anybody.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.