And that Eico CW novice transmitter sitting on the desk in the Sheriff's office on the Andy Griffith Show...
There was a My Three Sons episode where one of 'em was a ham.
Sky King and Penny were always ratchet-jawing on radios, as if the airband was CB or something.
The Outer Limits -- episode "Feasability Study." A bunch of people, and the gated neighborhood they live in, are teleported to a distant planet. Aliens are studying them to see if humans will make a good slave species. Some of the residents take a neighbor's portable generator by force, intending to break into the home of a ham operator (who was fortunately not at home at the time of the mass kidnapping) and try out some of his equipment.
The Twilight Zone --
"Three Leather Jackets." Three guys with motorcycles (who are part of an alien race's advance force about to invade Earth) rent a house in a suburb and set up all sorts of antennas. The neighbor (played by Denver Pyle) speculates that they're hams and makes rude comments about TVI.
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." Suburbanites panic when a strange power outage hits their street, causing them to fight each other out of fear. And the aliens watch from their flying saucer parked on a nearby hill, controlling it all. One of the more rational of the people, played by Claude Akins, turns out to be a ham operator so naturally he's suspected of being in cahoots with the invaders. My thinking was, that kid Tommy did the most to panic everybody.
The Waltons
There was an episode where some folks were in the "radio hobby." They didn't call it ham or amateur radio. They had no explanation for WWII era radio blackout either.
McHale's Navy
"A Da-Da for Christy," episode 72. One of McHale's men wants to talk to his baby at home in the states who is just learning to talk. The guy's wife is at the home of a ham operator. The baby eventually says "da da!" a number of times, leading to the usual exasperation on the part of Captain Binghamton and perplexment on the part of the Japanese listening in. Again no mention of the fact that a ham operating stateside in WWII would have been summarily arrested.
Gilligan's Island
"Quick Before It Sinks", episode 42, first broadcast October 28, 1965. This is the episode where they thought the island was slowly sinking into the ocean. In an effort to make the other castaways think they'll soon be rescued (don't ask why, no plot device had to make sense on this show), the Skipper has Gilligan hide under a table while the Professor contacts him using a phony radio. He refers to Gilligan as a "French Radio Operator" and the Skipper infers that the guy is in a ham shack.
Numerous episodes where the Professor turned that Am-FM radio into a worldwide allband phone transceiver, too. He could do things like that but building a boat somehow was beyond his abilities.
The French Atlantic Affair
This was a 1979 TV miniseries from Aaron Spelling (executive producer). It must have been a pretty forgettable production (like a lot of Spelling's productions, including his daughter Tori) because I can hardly find anything on the Internet concerning it. Telly Savalas was in it, and that's just about all there is. Based on the novel by Ernest Lehman.
The ham radio aspect of it came to my attention when I found an article in QST, August 1977, "The French Atlantic Affair", by Lenore Jensen W6NAZ. The plot called for a ham operator aboard a cruise ship making contact with other hams. In the development of the screenplay they were being careful to use proper amateur radio procedures. One sticking point was the use of authentic callsigns. They decided to use some real ones with the consent of those licensees.
Facts of Life
In an episode from 1980, Molly Ringwald, daughter of Bob Ringwald K6YBV, played one of the girls at a school, providing emergency communications during a storm. She even used her dad's callsign!
Frasier
"Ham Radio." This episode had nothing to do with amateur radio per se, but was a wordplay based on the bunch of buffoons (Frasier Crane, Roz, Bulldog, and other people from the radio station) trying to perform a live old-time dramatic radio program in honor of the station's anniversary. I thought I'd mention it because of the title.
Of course everything went wrong! Hilarious episode.
Thanks to David Bartholomew, AD7DB for all but the first three of the above:
http://www.qsl.net/ad7db/hamsontv.html
