the Seacoast is the latest front in a national movement to put cable TV in your hands.

On a Thursday evening in the white, gleaming studios of Bedford’s community access channel BCTV 16, the cast of “Granite Planet” are bustling about, filming the fifth episode of the only home-grown comedy show that’s broadcast across the state.

Dave Rogers and Lou Bortone, the show’s creators, are fiddling with cameras, tweaking mikes and adjusting the makeshift teleprompter that Rogers created using a couple of mirrors and a laptop. Meanwhile, a few feet away on the generic-looking set (a white wall with a couple of windows, some nondescript chairs and a coffee table), Becky Plourde is helping Kathryn Conway rehearse her lines for the skit they’re about to film, a commercial for a new drug called “Tamprin” that eliminates the symptoms of a woman’s menstrual cycle by altering the user’s genetic structure.

It takes more than an hour to prepare for filming. Rogers keeps switching a single power supply between the two laptops he’s using for the show (one for the teleprompter and one to put a background on the green screen); meanwhile, Conway’s having trouble seeing the words on the teleprompter, and the lighting isn’t exactly right.

Bortone looks up from what he’s doing. “Ninety percent is prep and 10 percent is taping,” he says. “Now you know why it takes a month to make an episode.”

This is the world of public access television, where anyone can produce a show about anything, unconstrained by the usual obstacles of a film crew, money to be made or even experience. It’s strictly a labor of love for public access producers like Bortone and the rest of the “Granite Planet” crew. There’s certainly no money and the potential for fame doesn’t extend far beyond being recognized by someone in the local grocery store. But once the episode is completed, “Granite Planet” will find its way across almost all of New Hampshire and to a few communities in Massachusetts.

The only place you won’t be seeing “Granite Planet” is the Seacoast.

During the last 15 years, public access stations have sprouted across New Hampshire like wild flowers in the paved-over landscape of big media. Residents of cities like Manchester and Concord and small towns like Chester and Londonderry all have the chance to exercise control over local television by producing their own programs. However, there aren’t any public access stations on the Seacoast, a fact that strikes many community media advocates as odd, considering the region’s reputation as an artistic hub.

There are signs of life in the public access movement in Portsmouth, though. The recently formed Seacoast Community Media Alliance has started lobbying the city to work with cable provider Comcast to set up a public access channel. Members of SCMA have been appointed to the city’s Cable Commission and are actively drumming up support for a community TV station. In Durham, town officials are looking to amend the rules of the town’s government access station to allow original programs on the air. The efforts in Durham and Portsmouth, along with the thousands of hours of programs produced by regular people throughout New Hampshire, are a microcosm of a larger movement across the country to put regular folks on the air and give us back at least a little control over what we tune in each night.

fighting for space in Portsmouth
In a city known for its thriving arts culture and progressive community, “the missing link is public access communication,” according to Nancy Beach.

Beach and Kathy Pearce are spearheading the campaign to bring community access to Portsmouth. The pair organized the Seacoast Community Media Alliance, which has so far attracted 20 members, according to Beach. And, just last week, Pearce was appointed to the city’s Cable Commission, which helps iron out the franchise agreement between the city and Comcast.

The two met as part of “Portsmouth Listens,” a collaborative effort to gather input for the city’s 10-year Master Plan. Beach and Pearce were members of the group that focused on “building community.”
“We’re fortunate in the things we have … but we felt there were a lot of things falling through the cracks that people don’t know about,” Beach says. “One thing that kept coming up over and over again was cable access.”

From there, the two began collaborating on ways to get a public access station on televisions throughout Portsmouth.

“There’s a number of us who feel strongly that there’s a huge voice that’s not being heard in corporate-owned media,” Beach says. “You turn on the TV or listen to the radio and it’s just bickering, people yelling at each other. It’s just all show, no substance.”

She envisions that the community station would be a “forum for people to sit down … (and) not just watch City Council meetings (on the government access channel), but create a show that could really have a dialogue.”

At the end of July, Beach, Pearce and other members of SCMA took a field trip to Londonderry’s community access station to get an idea of the logistics involved.

“Going to Londonderry was just like, ‘Wow,’” she says. “It was really incredible to see a community come together like that.”

John Gregg is chairman of the city’s five-member cable commission. He says the city is currently examining its three-year franchise agreement with Comcast, set to expire in 2007, to determine if Portsmouth has an additional public access channel available.

Like most cities, Portsmouth collects a 5 percent “franchise fee” from Comcast as part of the contract, which grants Comcast exclusive rights to provide cable to the community; last year, the city received $265,000 from the franchise fee. In cities with public access stations, that money is typically set aside for public, educational and government access channels, commonly known as PEG access. Because Portsmouth only has a government access station, much of the money goes into the city’s general fund, according to Gregg.

For Portsmouth to start operating its public access station, Gregg says Comcast must agree to provide the city with an additional channel. These sorts of measures are usually drawn up when the city renegotiates its contract with the cable provider. “The city doesn’t have a huge amount of bargaining power when it comes to negotiation … which is one reason there’s a lot of enthusiasm with Verizon coming in and being a competitor,” he says. “There’s some feeling that both (companies) would be interested in giving some additional perks to the city.”

However, Comcast spokesman Mark Goodman says the city’s current franchise agreement already allows for a public access channel. According to Goodman, it’s just a matter of the city using the money from the franchise fee to set up a station.

 “There’s plenty of funding available for access already given to the city,” he says. “We worked with the city in advance with its franchise (agreement) to foresee the possibility of adding a second channel.”
Goodman says the city doesn’t have to wait for the next round of franchise negotiations, set to start this fall, to get a channel off the ground. “We have the channel capacity and the licensing ability … it’s up to the city to decide,” Goodman says.

This is where the status of the city’s public access capabilities becomes murky. Although Goodman asserts that a channel has been set aside and it’s up to the city to make the first move, Gregg says negotiations for the current franchise agreement left things unclear.

“We had asked in our last negotiations if we could have additional channels, and where it was left was we would have to demonstrate we were fully using the current channel,” Gregg says.

Ideally, proponents would like to have three separate channels, one each for public, educational and government access. And while Comcast’s Portsmouth channel lineup shows space has been set aside, “that doesn’t mean they have been willing to let us use (it),” Gregg says. “If they’re now saying, ‘No problem, we’d be happy to let you use (it), it’d certainly be quite good news.”

Currently, Channel 22, set aside for government and educational access, broadcasts various city government meetings. Once Comcast allocates channel space for a separate public access station, the infrastructure of the station—which includes everything from how the station is funded and what its policies are to who’s in charge and where the studio is located—must be determined. Gregg says the city manager’s office is currently researching these areas and will present its findings at the cable commission’s next meeting on Thursday, Aug. 18.

Gregg, who previously served as chairman of a cable commission in Rye, N.Y., says that public interest is the most important factor in getting a station on the air. 

“There hasn’t been any strong degree of interest expressed by the public until now,” he says, calling the recent efforts by SCMA “a really critical component and exciting.”

To help communities like Portsmouth get a station on the air, there’s the New Hampshire Coalition for Community Media, a Londonderry group that promotes and fosters PEG access across the state. NHCCM director Dotty Grover says there’s no official count on the number of PEG stations in the state, but she believes the number is “in excess of 50.” That number includes everything from public access to stations that broadcast only government meetings. The number of towns providing public access is growing, according to Grover.

“I’ve been getting a lot more calls from people either looking to upgrade (their town’s PEG station) a little bit, enhance it, or start from zero,” she says.

Grover is also the executive director for Londonderry’s public access station, a full-time, paid position because of the station’s size. PEG stations are increasingly important because of media consolidation, she says. They not only protect First Amendment rights but also give people “an opportunity for a more diverse source of information.”

There’s no way to track the number of viewers tuning into public access, but Grover knows they’re out there watching.

“We don’t have Nielsen (ratings), so we go to the grocery store,” she says. “People will know who you are, they will be commenting on the programming. The other way we know people are watching is if we make a mistake. People will call right up and let us know.”

‘good tv’ in durham
Portsmouth isn’t the only town trying to generate interest in a public access station. Craig Stevens, coordinator of Durham’s government/educational access station, says the town is looking at ways to get more people involved at the station, and eventually, have them produce original shows.

“One area that we’ve sort of had some difficulty is in getting public involvement, and we’re pushing towards that. There’s only so much people can take of watching a town council or (zoning board) or planning board meeting,” he says.

Durham’s station, DCAT, broadcasts town government meetings and educational content on Channel 22. DCAT went on the air about five years ago. Stevens says DCAT is almost like two stations, with the channel’s signal split between the main DCAT operation center at town hall and a studio at Oyster River High School. Programs can be broadcast from either location.

So far, Stevens and other members of the DCAT committee have tried to get more Durhamites interested in producing original content. One of the committee’s members produced a piece called “Good TV” that was broadcast on DCAT as an example of what locally produced programming could do. At their last meeting, Stevens says committee members discussed the idea of handing out video cameras to people at the upcoming Durham Day festival and using the footage to produce a show on DCAT.

“It’s been difficult to get the public involved,” he says. “It’s something that we’re trying to figure out as to why it’s not happening for us. We don’t see that activity we’d like to see of people getting involved.”
Stevens says DCAT has previously offered to train residents interested in producing programs using the equipment and facilities at Oyster River. The idea was ultimately scrapped because there wasn’t enough interest in it, Stevens says. At the moment, the studio at Oyster River is used by the high school only to produce student projects.

One obstacle to getting local shows on the air is DCAT’s regulations, which currently require a resident to get 20 signatures from people in town before they can put something on the air. Stevens says the committee is in the process of changing its rules so that more residents can produce shows.

“I’d love to see more programs done by members of the community that’s of interest to the community. There’s so many things … people either don’t know about or could enjoy by watching a small segment on cable access. Most people right now have the idea in mind that the only thing on there is government and some school-related functions,” he says.

Even if just a handful of people started out by producing a few shows, Stevens thinks it would draw more people to the station.

“I think if it’s of local interest and flair, people will look at this and say, ‘Hey, I know this guy’ and … get excited by seeing it and decide they can do something also.”

a national movement
The Grassroots Cable Campaign is leading a national effort to help communities like Portsmouth and Durham, to promote community media and raise awareness about the activities of cable giants like Comcast and Time-Warner. The campaign is organized by media activist groups in four major cities—Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle—to force companies like Comcast to provide better customer service, fair wages and public access stations.

In Philadelphia, the fight is particularly intense. The Philadelphia City Council passed an ordinance in 1983 that established a public access station and created a nonprofit organization to run the channel. Though the nonprofit was created, no one bothered to sign its articles of incorporation, and so the station never made it off the ground. However, the city continues to collect franchise fees from Comcast, with the money going into the city’s operating budget instead of to public access. And though Philadelphians have been clamoring for public access, neither the city nor Comcast have budged.

Enter the Philadelphia Community Access Coalition, a grassroots group founded nine years ago to force the city’s hand. Wendy Hyatt, campaign manager for PCAC, says that in the last decade, the group has gone through a lot of different strategies for promoting public access. A lawsuit PCAC brought against the city over public access was recently thrown out of federal court; however, a court-mandated mediation process resulted and Hyatt says PCAC’s relationship with the city has gotten less standoffish and slightly more cooperative.

Hyatt says there’s no definitive answer on why it’s taken so long to get a public access station on the air in Comcast’s hometown, but she thinks it has a lot to do with the relationship between the city and the cable provider.

“Philadelphia is the home of Comcast, so our city tends to have this tactic of dealing with Comcast that really doesn’t want to ruffle their feathers,” she says.

In the past, Hyatt says, Comcast representatives have made a tape of “the worst of public access” and given it to the mayor.

“It sort of led him to believe public access was … just gratuitous sex and white supremacy,” she says. Comcast executives have also gone on record saying that public access is little more than a digital soapbox with little value, according to Hyatt. Add to that the fact that the city has been collecting franchise fees for more than two decades without having to dole it out to public access stations, and it’s not difficult to see why the city is so hesitant to provide public access. There’s no minimum franchise fee requirement, though Federal Communications Commission regulations cap the fee at 5 percent of the revenue the cable company gets from a community’s subscribers.

“The city has been collecting franchise fees for 21 years, and they don’t want to give it up,” Hyatt says. “That’s the problem. There’s a bunch of ways you can make the case that Philadelphia is cash poor … but we’re not talking about that much money here.”

PCAC eventually filed a lawsuit against the city on the grounds that it was stifling free speech. Though the suit was thrown out of court, it resulted in a court-mandated mediation process between PCAC and the city, which in turn led to a better working relationship with city officials, Hyatt says. They actually return her phone calls now and are open to discussing ideas about setting up a station. Thanks to the mediation process, the fight is a little easier, and now PCAC is trying to use the city’s plan to provide free wireless Internet across the city as leverage for a public access station, according to Hyatt.

“What we’ve been saying to them is, that’s great, we support you, but that really rings with a hollow tone, because we the people of Philadelphia don’t have access to the tools to create their own content.
“We’re talking about creating a city full of consumers … we’re not really showing the world anything about Philadelphia, except maybe what Comcast wants to see,” she says.

Hyatt says PCAC’s inclusion in the Grassroots Cable Campaign allows them to take a “two-pronged approach to this problem.” Most of the work that PCAC does is “city politicking,” according to Hyatt. The GRCC, meanwhile, is a more holistic endeavor against Comcast and other big cable companies that includes labor unions and consumer interest groups.

Hyatt doesn’t know for certain when public access will make it to Philadelphia, but she’d like to see the nonprofit’s articles of incorporation signed by September.

“I don’t have a specific timeline for when the first kid can make the first video in the building, but I have a shorter timeline of victories laid out,” she says.

After incorporating, it’s a matter of gathering money for a public access center dealing with nuts-and-bolts issues like establishing the station’s board of directors and regulations.
When a station does go on the air, though, Hyatt is sure there will be plenty of people eager to start broadcasting.

“I think Philadelphia is just full to the brim with content, and we have drawers and drawers full of content here at our offices,” she says. “There’s just a whole generation of art and information that has never really had a venue, and I think that will be really exciting when Philadelphia does get a public access station.”

in manchester: Wrestlers, politics and god
While public access has languished on the Seacoast, the state’s “Queen City” is the king of community television. Manchester’s public access station. MCAM. airs 70 regular repeating programs each week along with special one-time programs. Programming runs the gamut, and residents are using the station to address issues, provide information and spread the word about what’s going on in their community. One of the station’s bigger demographics is the growing Haitian population in Manchester.

“There’s a couple of shows that target that audience very well and may get as many as 25 percent of the Haitian viewing audience at one time,” says station manager Joe Lahr. “It’s a market no one is tapping into.”

Manchester has had a public access station since the early 1990s. Recently, the organization that oversaw PEG access in the city split up and a nonprofit corporation, MCAM, handles the public access station while the city school district oversees educational and government programming. The city receives 3 percent of Comcast’s Manchester revenue as part of the franchise agreement. Two percent of that amount goes to the city’s educational and government access station, while 1 percent, or $230,000 goes to MCAM, according to Lahr.

During the station’s time on the air, Lahr says it’s become “very easy to attract people” to MCAM and produce shows. He receives 20 to 30 inquiries a month from people asking how they can produce a show.

“It’s gotten easier; in fact, we really don’t have to promote as much. People understand, if I want to say my piece, I can go do it on that channel. It’s just a matter of if they have the courage to do it,” he says.

The biggest draws to the station are political and religious programming. For every big issue, “you get people that come out for it, and that brings out people against it, and that brings out a faction of the people for it … and the next thing you know, everyone needs to be heard,” Lahr says. As for religious programming, which Lahr says accounts for about 30 percent of the station’s programming, “it seems like one denomination or one church wants to out-do the other, so there’s a competitiveness there.”

MCAM’s programming schedule backs up Lahr’s assessment. There are almost 20 religious-themed shows on the channel, and on any given weekend, you can check out shows by the First Baptist Church of Manchester, the Calvary Outreach Ministry and more. And if all that talk about Jesus isn’t your thing, there’s “Norm’s Psychic World,” hosted by local psychic Norm Moody. Other programs target the city’s various ethnic groups, from Latinos to Ethiopians, while some of Manchester’s political fixtures, like Joe Kelly Levasseur and Greg Salts, have their own talk shows. Topping it all off is an hour’s worth of backyard headbashing and amateur body slamming with “WAW” and “WAW Aftermath,” a pair of WWE-style wrestling shows on Friday nights at 11 p.m.

When a public access station first goes on the air, it’s difficult to explain to people what the channel is and what it does. Viewers may not be prepared for the amateurish quality of the shows or the diversity of content, Lahr says.

“Eventually, that all just goes away, and it becomes part of your culture,” he says. “People expect to tune in and see certain gadflies on different nights; those people become mini-celebrities in their own right. They’re on TV and that seems still magical, even after all these years.”

Though a number of New Hampshire towns have their own access stations, Lahr thinks there could be better coverage.

“They’re just barely kicking along in Keene … they’re getting pennies of what they could be getting (from the franchise fee), and they’re getting nothing in Nashua,” he says. “I’ve lived in Keene and I’ve been to Portsmouth a lot. These are very eclectic, artsy-type communities with affluent people … (and) that’s the place where access should thrive.”

Any town like Portsmouth that can have a low-power FM station can easily have an access station. Starting a low-power FM is incredibly difficult compared to starting an access station.

Lahr calls public access the “last neighborhood in America.”

“People are isolating themselves now … it seems like we hardly go anywhere like we used to, seems like we never meet anymore. Access allows you to enter into those homes of your neighbors you might never meet, or at least talk to them on some level,” he says.

More importantly, access gives people a voice in an increasingly corporate-owned environment. Though there are plenty of opportunities for blogging, podcasting and other independent digital media, Lahr says those venues were made possible by public access, which is still vitally important.

“When four or five companies control everything you see, access is more important than ever, low-power FM is more important than ever. We’re going to lose our understanding of media if we don’t continually try to be a part of it,” he says. “Public access allowed this little guy to go on there and talk about his ideas on gun control or talk about his way he found Jesus or talk about his favorite restaurant. It may be relevant or irrelevant, but it’s important that the person never be forgotten in the realm of corporate giants.”

“Granite Planet” is a prime example of the possibilities, and limitations, of public access television.

Lou Bortone and Dave Rogers started “Granite Planet” a little more than a year ago. Bortone previously lived in Los Angeles and worked in marketing at stations like E! Entertainment Television and Fox.
Rogers is a community theater veteran who “doesn’t have a lot of fear of things technical,” he says.
“I had always wanted to do writing, (Dave) had wanted to do performing, and we were looking for an outlet for creative uses. It started out almost like a joke,” Bortone says. “We said, ‘Let’s do a ‘Wayne’s World’ kind of thing,’ but when we saw what we were able to do … we realized we could make a pretty decent-looking show for no money.”

Bortone, Rogers and the rest of the cast have produced four episodes so far, with the fifth episode currently in production. The finished product is shipped off to 20 public access stations in the state. The first show took almost a year to complete; since then, Bortone says it takes about a month per episode, which is still a lot of work.

“It turned out to be a lot more ambitious and time consuming than we anticipated,” he says. Because of that, Bortone and Rogers decided to maximize the fruits of their labor by distributing the show around the state. Sharing programs between stations, called “bicycling” in public access parlance, is a common practice. Statewide viewership recently earned Bortone and Rogers an interview on New Hampshire Public Radio to talk about the show and a mention from Portsmouth Herald columnist Emily Wiggin.

“I think what we’re doing is not like what other folks are doing, because not a lot of people are trying to do comedy on public access,” he says.

Bortone says the show gets some positive feedback from the public access stations where it’s shown.
“I think they’re happy with it because it shows what can be done,” he says.

Bortone and the rest of the show’s cast are still far away from being public access celebrities, though.

“I have yet to be recognized while shopping,” he says.