FORT MEADE, MD - All three employees of the Pentagon Channel (TPC) attended a lunch yesterday to celebrate a major milestone in the network's history.
This week's Nielsen ratings reported that two separate viewers tuned in to TPC last week, pushing the total number of people who have ever watched the channel to 100.
The celebration lunch was held at a reserved table at CiCi's Pizza, located in the 6400 block of Baltimore National Pike in Baltimore.
"I try not to get caught up in things like 'ratings' or 'popularity,'" said Chester Perkins, TPC's General Manager. "This was a big deal, though, and I wanted to commemorate it. It's just nice to get together for a hot lunch."
Perkins has been an employee of the Defense Media Activity and its predecessor, the American Forces Information Services, since 1958. He has been in charge of TPC since it went on the air in 2004.
"Old Chet [Perkins] has been, to put it politely, resistant to change," said Mike Carey, TPC Director of Programming. "The History Channel pulls great numbers with its war documentaries, and there are plenty of popular military-themed movies and shows out there. I keep pitching ideas for programs that people might actually want to watch, but Chet says that's not what we're about here."
One of Carey's ideas that did make it was Close Combat, which broke down combatives techniques from all four services and showed fights from a 2010 military-wide combatives tournament. The martial arts-themed subject matter generated some initial interest, but failed to attract even a single viewer.
