Intermissions were common, the TV studio often experienced telecine jams or blown tubes, cutting to a “sorry, it’s not your TV” card or similar.

They did have adverts, too. Most were for normal products and services, but longer, milder than Western ones (e.g. products slowly rotating on a tray) annd almost never mentioned prices. There was little risk of litigation so overpromising with phrases like “ensure”, “indestructible” and “only at” was common even though many things required frequent repairs (especially TVs) or were easily beat by gray market imports or underhanded services. I saw a Czechoslovak 80s ad collection and two stood out:

• one presented TNS, Eastern Bloc’s objectively best computer terminal system by JZD Agrokombinát Slušovice (the Asianometry video is good except it’s pronounced Slew-sho-vi-tzeh), of course nobody could just buy a terminal, they were installed at farms and factories. The ad featured basic 3D graphics and synthesized speech.
  • 288p:
  • “Introducing new technology, new possibilities, programs and connectivity, with the new TNS microcomputer from JZD Agrokombinát Slušovice, distributed by ZZN Brno, Gottwaldov branch. TNS JZD Agrokombinát Slušovice. ZZN Gottwaldov.” (JZD means Collective Farm. Slušovice was by far the most “capitalist”. ZZN means Agricultural Distribution Center. Gottwaldov is a town named after our worst Stalinist president, now bearing its original name Zlín (Eviltown). Slušovice (Politeville) is a random village near Zlín.)
• one had surreal music and showed Brutalist architecture. After a while, a well-paced documentary presenter voice talked about how concrete is the stone of the 20ᵗʰ century and mentioned its advantages over one whole minute. Then it showed the dirty process of concrete being poured into the rebar cage and the voiceover thanked concrete workers, none of which are seen in the video, for their contributions to society. (What do you mean it’s not selling anything specific? It’s the most concrete ad you’ll ever see!)
  • 288p:
  • “Mankind seems to have an insatiable yearning to build and rise. Across ever broader areas, over ever deeper valleys, to ever taller heights. These daring engineering challenges are possible thanks to a material contemporary in every way: malleable, hard and flexible. Artificial stone, stone of today: concrete. This material is shaped by concrete construction professionals. Our society needs and is grateful for the hard work of concrete construction experts.”

I wonder if there was also more blatant propaganda they cut from the collection, or if adverts were just like that.

And ads they were never expected to make money, they had bottom-of-the-barrel budget. Which is not bad, considering they don’t create value. An example of a low-budget technique was in the ad for Rekord chewing gum, where rapid zoom in/out on 12 people chanting in an empty stadium was presumably employed to make them seem like a crowd…

Like dude, I get you didn’t have compositing tools, but you could have used a shot from an old newsreel (TV alternative from back then), not like anybody cared about copyright…

In the 90s, the first major commercial channel, TV Nova, was the first to introduce midroll ads, and to this day the public-funded channels can’t use them (although there are shenanigans). This allowed them to licence more popular films and become most people’s tuner preset #1 (we don’t use number channels except for setting up the TV, see below) for a while in the 2000s. Still, we have way fewer ads by law, for instance something as short as an episode of The Simpsons cannot use midroll ads.

By the way, the comic appears to show a cartoon, many of which (Slovak Pat a Mat, Polish Bolki i Lolki, Hungarian Mézga család) beat current production because acclaimed film creators who didn’t quite ideologically align with the party were delegated to children’s programming, and many of the resulting productions were enjoyed by all ages. Also, dubs of Western films/shows were uncommon but very good.

Of course, nobody but party cadres had a VCR so people like Jucika and her partner were very careful not to miss episodes. (By the way, top Czech singer Karel Gott was shown using a VCR in his luxury home in a 1984 TV film but I think it was staged, there are mechanical keys but he is also seen operating it with a remote control in another shot (which is pointed at the TV, not the VCR on the cupboard), he also pronounces “video” the German way despite the West German version of the TV film not featuring the VCR scene. At that time, only about 20 % of households had a color TV, about the same ratio as US households with VCRs…)

As for TV technology in Czechoslovakia, I’ll be brief. The first TV system was a single-transmitter (Eiffel-inspired Petřín lookout tower in Prague), single-channel “network” in 1953 with fixed-frequency receivers in Band I (OIRT channel R1) at 625 lines (576i50). This then extended into Band III to cover Czechoslovakia on 10 region-specific frequencies (up to OIRT R12) but with the start of Channel II in 1970, it was clear VHF would not be enough and a UHF transition slowly started. In all, infrastructure for only 3 channels was created, the third being Moscow TV for “friendly soldiers” stationed here after the 1968 invasion. Color broadcast started in 1973 in the SECAM norm, one of the two color extension of B/W 576i50 TV. In the 1980s, the benefits of the other norm, PAL, were clear to TV manufacturer TESLA (mostly that it’s easier to generate, so they correctly guessed that Western market video game consoles, cameras and VCRs that started seeping in will not bother with SECAM), and their color sets started featuring PAL decoder slots, later coming pre-populated as standard, despite it being the standard of decadent Western bourgeoisie and enabling full viewing of West German or Austrian channels. Soviet sets were usually cheaper but fire hazards and behind on technology since Russia was slower to adopt UHF and saw no point in PAL. They were especially unpopular in East Germany because watching the same-language capitalist programs of ARD and ZDF on UHF, later in PAL color, was extremely common - so much that it even caused economic problems in Dresden, which experienced depopulation only because there was no reception from West Berlin. Thanks to a large number of sets supporting PAL (natively or with an easy upgrade) in Czechoslovakia, the switchover after the Velvet Revolution was quite smooth. To keep viewers willing to switch without disadvantaging most, the first channel to broadcast PAL was OK3 in 1990 (using the now freed Moscow TV infrastructure and featured hastily dubbed/hardsubbed foreign programs) and only then did the two main programs switch in 1992, and then the commercial broadcasters, starting with Premiéra (later Prima) in 1993 and first full-coverage one, Nova in 1994, were PAL only. VHF/UHF combo sets from the 70s and 80s almost never used channel selectors (those made sense in the US where dozens of TVs could populate UHF channels in each metro area with little coverage in between), they used 8 presets with tiny analog trimmers, switched mechanically or with bulky IR remotes (rare later models had 16/55/99 presets with digitally controlled oscillators). Eight turned out to be enough, Czech analog TV only ever had the 4 full-coverage channels (ČT24 (news) and ČT4 (sport) came post-2005, IDK how big their analog coverage ever got) plus maybe you’d get a fifth short-lived regional one in your area, or a few from abroad in Slovak, Polish or German. Now we have digital TV and dozens of terrestrial channels, not to mention IPTV and satellite. Still, some are SD-only on the air to save bitrate.