Classic Television - Weekdays

Inside/Out 

Original channel

PBS

TV Ontario

Original airing

1972-1973

Inside/Out is a 1970s educational television series.

The show was produced in 1972 and 1973 by the National Instructional Television Center (NIT), in association with various contributing stations, such as KETC in St. Louis, Missouri, WVIZ in Cleveland Ohio, WNVT-TV in Northern Virginia, and The Ontario Educational Communications Authority. It was one of the last programs to be produced by NIT; the organization would be reformulated as the "Agency for Instructional Television" (AIT) in April 1973.

Funding for Inside/Out was provided by grants from 32 different educational agencies within the USA and Canada, with additional support from Exxon Corporation.

Inside/Out was an anthology series of 15-minute shorts that were designed to teach children about social issues. Instead of resorting to happy endings, as many shows of this kind had done, Inside/Out typically had cliffhanger endings, leaving the viewers to draw their own conclusions as to what they would do in similar situations.

Due to the critical acclaim for this series, some PBS stations would double-run two Inside/Out episodes in a half-hour time slot in the evening so that parents could watch this series with their children.

This series was commonly watched on classroom TV broadcasts during school hours as well as on 16mm film reels. It was a staple of daytime instructional television blocks (generally programmed by local agencies or school boards rather than by PBS) on public TV stations for many years, until at least the late 1980s.

Inside/Out was the first in a series of similarly produced instructional programs made by AIT. Others that followed included Self Incorporated (1975), Trade-Offs (a program on economics, 1978), Thinkabout (a series on creativity, 1979), On The Level (1980) and Give & Take (1982). All of the series, including Inside/Out, were produced for only one season, but were frequently rerun on television and shown in schools for several years afterward, as the topics presented kept its currency.

In 1996, AIT produced an updated version of the series, Looking from the Inside/Out.