When I was young, before the cable came to our area, we could pick up one TV channel clearly: WJAC channel 6 from Johnstown, PA. It was an NBC affiliate.
We also had a party line telephone. It rang all the time, but only some of those calls were for us. If you picked up the phone you could hear others’ conversations. If you needed to make a call, you could ask the others to relinquish the line. Sometimes they did. A lot of times they didn’t.