The Time Channel

A man wearing a dark suit with a brightly colored tie sits behind a news desk alongside a honey blonde with dreamy eyes. “It’s now 11:14 on the East Coast,” he is saying. “Right, Clark,” she replies. “Let’s go out to the West Coast and see what time it is there.” The screen changes to reveal a weathered man in corduroy slacks and a tan outback shirt standing in front of a rugged mountain vista. “Hi, Jeanette and Clark! I’m here in the Sierra Nevada where the sun is just peeking through the low clouds and it’s a quarter after eight.”

It has occurred to me that if TV can manufacture a 24/7 show on nothing more than the weather, then there is no limit to the possibilities. There already is a Golf Channel, a Fishing Channel, and a Poker Channel. Why not a Time Channel? I mean, if you can spin round-the-clock programming out of a bunch of guys trying to knock a ball into a hole in the ground, then certainly something as basic to our experience as Time is worthy of the effort.

Consider the possibilities. The Weather Channel offers a feature show called “When Waether Changed History”; the Time Channel could counter with “When Time Changed History.” Much more to the point, don’t you think?. If the Fishing Channel can run a special on striped bass in the Florida Keys, certainly a feature on the invention of the water clock by medieval momks is in order. Interviews with Mick Mickelson and Tiger Woods are staples of the Golf Channel; why not one with Antoine Francois Reynaud, the Paris keeper of the international cesium atomic clock?

One issue I have with The Weather Channel is that they run the same shows over and over. How often can you watch “Life Guards to the Rescue” before you’ve pretty much seen it all? But for time, the possibilities are, well, infinite. You’d never run out of them. There are 10,000 years of recorded history to draw upon and four billion years of prehistoric information before that. Meanwhile, we are every moment adding to the reservoir of past time. Then there is the future: cosmological theories about how the universe will evolve and hypotheses about parallel universes that exist simultaneously with ours.

Everone complains about the weather, annoyed that the meteorologists so often get it wrong. Many a child has awoken in anticipation of the eleven inches of snow that the weatherman predicted the night before, only to discover that nothing has happened and school is on as usual. (“Well, Todd, the storm took a more southerly track than predicted.”) With the Time Channel, you’d never get it wrong! As he climbs into bed, that youngester can be sure that tomorrow morning at eight o’clock it will be eight o’clock. That’s information he can take to the bank.

The Time Channel could be a real money maker, all right, far out-eraning the Weather Channel. Watch makers, finacial advisers (“It’s never too early to prepare for the future”), doctors and pharmeceutical companies (“Do you have a genetic history of risk for diabetes?”) would be lining up to buy advertising time. These are folks with Big Bucks. Who would you rather have underwriting your venture, Chaptstick or Ferris, Baker, Watts? No contest. I don’t know why no one has thought of it before, but I’m going to jump on this idea before someone else beats me to it. I’m heading to the patent office and registering this baby right now!