…ends in 19 minutes from the time I start writing this. I’m watching KING-TV (the first analog telecaster in our corner of the world) as its original transmission ends after nearly 61 years. Right now, it’s transmitting a Today show segment about how to find the right-size bra.

KING’s sister station KONG just ran a segment on its local morning news about the big digital switchover. They said KCTS (the local PBS affiliate) has already shut off its analog signal.

KOMO’s been running a Good Morning America outdoor concert segment with the Jonas Brothers.

Back on KING, Today‘s got the Black Eyed Peas, with some backup dancers in black-and-white striped full body suits. How appropriate, for some of the last signals to be carried on the ol’ 525 horizontal lines.

The segment ended with the 57-year-old station-break cue: “This is Today on NBC.”

On KIRO, The Early Show offers Lionel Richie (now mostly known as a reality-show star’s dad) on the deck of a Navy ship, presumably at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The onscreen program guide says I missed a segment with Betty White, that living TV legend.

KOMO’s local news break has a predawn car crash and the arrest of a male suburban YMCA employee for allegedly abusing a 13 year old girl, plus traffic, weather, and one more warning about the death of analog.

KING’s last analog commercials: Eastside Vascular Vein Center and the Village Theater. KOMO’s last analog commercial: The Jewelry Exchange in Renton.

KING has now switched to an infomercial about the big switch, in Spanish with English subtitles. It was preceded by an announcement, in English, by KING 5 News dude Glenn Farley, saying the Anglophone version of the infomercial will follow.

KOMO’s analog signal, beamed since 1954, is now dead.

KIRO’s analog signal, beamed since 1958, is also now dead.

KSTW’s analog signal continues, for now, with Divorce Court. Not what I’d have chosen to close out an era in American communications technology.

Update, 10:54 a.m.: Just called the receptionist dude at KSTW. They’re keeping their analog signal on until noon today. This means the official last analog telecasts in Seattle will be reruns of judge shows.

Update, 12:27 p.m.: The final switch came at high noon. At the end of “Family Court,” a pretaped announcement said, “KSTW 11 is now ending its analog signal. Please stand by.” Then static.

…ends this Friday. Does anyone care? This guy does.

…what the odd temporary readerboard sign for a Hal Ashby film festival was doing up outside the Showbox one day last week, we now know. It was part of a Target TV commercial with Pearl Jam. Really.

…to Greg Palmer, the witty and endearing KING-TV arts and culture commentator and film critic, later a creator of always intriguing PBS documentaries. He proved what television could become.

As promised last week, here are my thoughts about the potential end of daytime TV mainstay Guiding Light.

When I’ve told people I’d become a GL viewer, they’ve scoffed. Some of them could imagine me watching Days, One Life, GH sure enough, but Guiding Light? Really?

Yes, really.

I’ve known about the show all my life, but only tuned in to it sporadically until last February. That’s when GL abruptly switched to what its PR called a “new production model.” It was an effort to cut costs and gain youth appeal in one fell swoop. Hand-held minicams replaced the big studio cameras. Twangy alt-country guitars replaced the syrupy synth-string background music. Four-walled studio rooms and real outdoor locations replaced the flimsy old sets. The show’s characters were the same, but its whole audio-visual vocabulary completely changed.

Daytime’s oldest, squarest show became an immediate mess.

Which made it a lot more fun.

At first, the crew’s unfamiliarity with the new format made for some of the clumsiest scripted drama this side of the Canadian network CTV (or the dialogue scenes on “Skinemax” late-night cable shows). Because they were making five one-hour episodes a week, they had to leave in a lot of imperfect takes.

It didn’t help that the new GL’s launch coincided with the first “scab scripts,” written anonymously during the 14-week writers’ strike.

After the strike, the show’s writing staff was reshuffled. The “handheld” cameras got attached to mini-tripods and Steadicam-type devices. The lighting and the sound gradually improved. GL again became a competently made show.

None of this affected the ratings, which continued to drift downward along with the rest of the oldline networks’ fare.

The new format had made the show profitable again, chiefly because it needed far fewer crew people. But if the ratings wouldn’t turn around, that profitability wouldn’t last.

At the end of last year, the producers speeded up the show’s plot pace and brought back several fan-favorite actors. The ratings stabilized. The gossip on GL message boards implied the show might make it to another year’s renewal by the network.

It didn’t.

Procter & Gamble, which has owned and sponsored the show all this time, says it’s shopping GL around to any other broadcast/cable channel that might be persuaded take it. P&G is U.S. television’s biggest single adversiser, so it’s got more than a little clout in that department.

At TV Guide (the magazine, not the online listings service no longer affiliated with the magazine), an exec with Telenext (the ad-agency-owned production company that produces GL and As the World Turns under contract to P&G) says they really are working to find GL a new broadcast or cable home. Fans on online message boards are trying to make their own voices heard in this regard.

The thing is, daytime soaps have a business model that’s just as last-century as that of daily newspapers. Talk shows, judge shows, game shows, and “reality” shows can be made for as much or as little money as a channel’s got. Daily soaps are different.

GL’s on-screen credits list 127 names, including those of several veteran (and presumably well-paid) actors. Anything resembling “fat” in its budget was excised with the new format. GL can’t be made much cheaper and still maintain both its stars and its staggering productivity.

GL produced 253 episodes last year, with only one rerun episode (at Christmas). Until the Internet, there was no domestic aftermarket for these episodes. New episodes now stream on CBS’s site. Past installments from before the full switch to the new production model are on Hulu.

If you look at these older GL episodes (and the many more posted by fans on YouTube), you can see how much slower and duller they were before the new format.

The new GL looks and moves a lot more like my all-time favorite soap, the British workhorse Coronation Street. The look is more naturalistic (when characters are outside in the snow, it’s the real outsides and real snow!). The dialogue is more intimate, less histrionic.

It’s still an American soap with your basic American soap plot themes–treachery, betrayal, crime, adultery, emotional turmoil, and the lot. But it’s been evolving a new approach to these formulae, an approach more suited to modern TV/film tropes.

That’s a feat for the world’s longest continuously running dramatic production. Then again, it’s continually reinvented itself since it began on radio 72 years ago. There were several total cast turnovers even before the switch to TV in 1952. (GL was on KIRO-TV’s first-day schedule in 1958.)

With a new home, and perhaps a more rerun-friendly production schedule, GL could shine the way toward a new future for drama on TV.

My big Guiding Light essay will show up here Friday. But for now, some other televisual content. It’s my Vanishing Seattle plug segment on KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.

First, my daily paper goes away. Now, my favorite (US) soap is going away too. I’ll have more about this later in the week.

What, it’s still on?

…for the know-nothing videophobes in our audience (ignorance of your culture is NOT considered cool):

• Bill Maher asked Newark mayor Cory Booker why America’s economy needed to keep growing all the time; doesn’t everybody already have more than enough? Booker quietly reminded him that not everybody does. Another guest, bio-ethicist Peter Singer, chided Paul Allen for devoting too much of his charity money to projects in the affluent Northwest; Booker chimed in with the observation that plenty of folks and organizations in the NW could really use that money.
• Angie Mentink on Fox Sports Net Northwest, during a postgame discussion of the UW men’s hoops team and its historic Pac-10 regular-season title, on why the team and its fans should save some celebration energy ’til after the Pac-10 tournament: “There’s a difference between feeling ‘happy’ and feeling ‘satisfied.’ It’s something I’ve tried to teach my husband about.”
• A Today segment discussed frugal living with a tabletop tableau of “simple life” stuff—a Netflix envelope, a Scrabble board, a package of store-brand toilet paper, a drip coffee maker, etc. Excuse me, but you think we haven’t already familiarized ourselves with these?Unless the show’s producers are on the vanguard of a new media meme. Let’s call it “the upscale downsizing.” This schtick is to talk about economizing precisely for people who haven’t had to economize. It demographically separates the newly downscaled from those of us who’ve already been here a while.

…and his call for a huge uprising against Obama’s stimulus plan? And the small but well publicized “tea party” protests held in several major cities soon thereafter? Turns out they were all carefully planned by a network of right-wing PR groups, funded by a brother team of far-right billionaires.

…(a population subset that again includes me) should view the CNBC documentary House of Cards, next airing at 5 and 9 p.m. PT tonight (Monday). In two hours, you learn just how the mortgage bubble grew and burst, taking countless common citizens with it. In short, greedy bankers + unregulated markets + creative math nerds = global fiscal disaster.

…today to Blossom Dearie, the legendary jazz artist of the lilting vocals and the assertive piano playing, as heard in dozens of albums and several Schoolhouse Rock shorts.

…(known among many customers by a two-letter initial): My week of cablelessness ended this evening, as I gave in and paid up what I owed ’em. The basic channels and local HDs came on promptly when I called; at least the visual portion. After some jiggling, I got the sound back on by turning up the VOL on my cable remote. There were still no cable HD channels or digital tier channels, and no menus. I had to call back to get them to “ping” a reset signal to my cable box (which seems to be the all-purpose answer to such issues).

How does it feel to be no longer tubeless? Great. I feel again connected to the great global media tether. Yes, I survived without it for a week. No, I didn’t instantly become a better person due to any magical power of tubelessness. Yes, I should keep it (and the DVD player and the Web browser) turned off while I’m writing.

One happy discovery: During the extended wait to reach a live person during my first call, the on-hold music consisted of recent and current TV themes. The signature sounds of The Office, House, Desperate Housewives, Survivor, and more serenaded me with the promise that all these pleasures would again be mine.

Whilst we were all looking forward to the big inauguration late last month, I failed to notice that Broadstripe Cable’s filed for bankruptcy. Rumors that Broadstripe would sell out to Comcast Belltown viewers would finally get On Demand) have been denied.

…of a major life experiment.

I’m without cable TV.

For the first extended period of time (except while traveling) since mid-1984.

Sorry, videophobic hippies: Tubelessness hasn’t instantly transformed me from some brainless, tasteless, corporate-drone “sheeple” into an all-wise Renaissance Man. I’m still the same imperfect meat-n’-potatoes dude I’ve always been.

Of course, I’ve quickly learned that most everything I’ve been regularly viewing is available either on regular broadcast TV or online. The two major exceptions:

• Certain live sports events, but in this post-Sonics winter there haven’t been many of those I cared about; and
• Coronation Street. Recent UK-aired episodes of this workhorse prime-time soap (Britain’s most popular show) can be found via BitTorrent, but not the nine-month-behind episodes on CBC’s schedule. CBC’s own Web site only streams episodes to users with Canadian IP addresses.

What’s it like so far? I can’t browse away through the 121 or so channels to discover something novel and bizarre. Also, I’m missing a lot of the cheap snarky fun I get from sneering at particularly dumb commercials (Shamrow, Snuggies, Obama collector plates, funnel cake machines, etc.).

And as for the background noise, which I’ve come to need for certain types of creative brainwork, I’m learning to get it from substitute sources, including online audio/video sites.

This experiment will last at least until I can pay two months’ back bills to the cable company. Beyond that, we will see (or won’t see, as the case may be).