Jim Bradshaw: Before streaming, best TV shows were flush with good ratings

It probably wouldn’t work today, with all the ways we get our entertainment, but not so long ago, when television shows lived or died by Nielsen viewer ratings, the guys at the Lafayette water plant claimed they had a better way to find the favorites.
In the early 1970s, Jim Love, the superintendent, claimed they could put those sophisticated polling outfits right out of business. He was only half-joking.
He said they didn’t even need to turn on a television set, and wouldn’t think of bothering anyone with a telephone call. It was all on a round, revealing chart that tracked the flow of water through the city.
Changes in water pressure told when folks got up in the morning, when they did their washing, what kind of weather was outside — and, he said, what TV shows kept their interest most.
When I went to see for myself, Love and Charles Bajat, water production supervisor, explained that most people sat all the way through a good show, and when they’re doing that, they’re not using water.
But what happened when the show was over?
Ker-plooey!
The water pressure plummeted.
Looking at the chart, Bajat said, “you can almost see them walking to the bathroom,”
Poorer television fare didn’t hold the viewers, so they answered nature’s call at any time during the show. That spread the use of water. But during a really good show, everyone waited until the same time — the commercials and the end of the movie — and that’s when the pressure plunged.
A prime example was the night the dramatic movie “Airport” played on television. That day’s chart was smooth as a superhighway until the movie came on, because there was no great drain on the system. But just after the movie started the chart began to show squiggles — about the time less hardy viewers began to squirm.
“By 7:30 viewer interest had increased to a point where the television commercials show up as regularly spaced but radical drops in water pressure,” Love said. “At approximately 8:30 … a bomb exploded on the airplane … and from that time until 9 p.m., when the pilot landed the plane safely … almost nobody left their television set to do anything.”
He pointed to a chart that showed a squiggle at the first commercial, then a series of more pronounced squiggles, and then … a 26-psi drop!
That was a new, all-time record.
The 26 psi (pounds per square inch) drop topped — bottomed? — the 22-psi plunge registered at the end of “Patton” and bested “The Out of Towners,” and “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” — each of which registered a 19-psi drop — as the top television viewing of the year.
The men said drops at the end of good movies were actually bigger than those caused by firemen fighting big fires, which averaged about 10 psi. Hydrants tapped to fight a blaze drain from only one point in the system and the drain is over a longer period of time, but a “television drop,” they said, came abruptly from “thousands and thousands of homes.”
“You’ve got to remember,” Love explained, “that if 20,000 people flush 4 gallons of water at one time, that’s 80,000 gallons of water used in about a minute.”
The first color shows made the water plant gang aware of their rating abilities.
“Certain unexplainable drops in water pressure … began appearing on the charts at regular intervals in the early 1950s,” Bajat said. “We couldn’t figure out what they were, until someone noticed that they coincided with the ending of ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Walt Disney’ — the first two color shows on television. They were drawing, and holding, larger audiences.”
After that, it was easy.
“Back in the days of boxing matches on television,” Bajat said, “we could tell when each round ended.”
The water plant gang never compared their ratings to the regular television ratings, but claimed to have a better system. “We know we’ve got a larger sample,” they said.
The experts, of course, disagreed. I sent my story to TV Guide magazine, and the editors wrote back that the PSI Poll amounted to “nothing more than an old wives’ tale.”
But I don’t think many old wives ever saw an abrupt, 26-psi plunge on a water chart, or even had color television back then.
I did, and I was convinced.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.