Did what you watched on TV as a child influence what you read as a teenager?

When you think about it, there’s a good chance that our early reading habits were influenced by what we liked to watch on the telly. 

When I was a kid, the first live action TV shows I watched, that weren’t specifically aimed at children, were definitely in the science fiction genre. 

Not that I knew anything about genres back then.  As far as I was concerned, TV shows were divided into two clear categories: Ones I wanted to watch, and ones I didn’t.

My earliest memories of live action, non-kiddy, TV include:
                                                                                         Doctor Who (with Patrick Troughton)  

 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea .  
                                 I learned about red-shirts from here, long before I ever saw Star Trek.

                 Bewitched , with the first Darren.  
                                                          By the time the second one came along I'd gone off the show.

The Time Tunnel .  I had my first 'why don't they send someone else back to before those guys went into the tunnel and stop them doing it?'  tangle with temporal mechanics here.


And my favorite at the time, Lost in Space . To this day, the thought of Jonathan Harris and his portrayal of the selfish and cowardly Doctor Zachary Smith , brings a smile to my face.  .

Decades later, I recognized his voice when he portrayed Manny, the preying mantis, in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life,

Looking back at my early TV diet, I guess it’s not surprising that I went on to read so much science fiction and fantasy in my teenage years.

How about you?

What were the first live action, non-kiddy TV shows you can remember watching on a regular basis?

Did the genres of those shows influence your teenage reading habits?