“It was, ‘We would like to be your friend, but we don’t want you to laugh at us.’ ”

(They were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, the actress Eleanor Bron, to whom the Beatles sang “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” on “Help!”) By 1971, the Sarsons, living in the Boston area, were the parents of an eight-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy, and Christopher, who was then working for WGBH, was increasingly concerned about his children’s social awkwardness around other kids as they approached their preteen years. and something of a glamour couple: he had been a rising star at Granada Television, and she had been a reporter for the Guardian and Reuters. He and his wife, Evelyn, were English immigrants to the U.S. The program was created by a young producer at WGBH, Boston’s public-television station, named Christopher Sarson. But, unlike Zoom the online platform, “Zoom” was mostly the province of kids, primarily those in the tween cohort.

Like the teleconferencing service, the original “Zoom” was screen-based and interactive, and it quickly evolved into a national obsession. Among older members of Generation X, it’s hard to hear the word “zoom” without associating it with “Zoom,” one of the most memorable and radically experimental television programs of its era.

The transition from in-office meetings to at-home video conferencing has occasioned lots of memes and social-media posts about “ my idea of a Zoom meeting,” usually accompanied by a grainy video or photo of haphazardly barbered nineteen-seventies children romping around in striped rugby shirts. Some original cast members of “Zoom,” including Bernadette Yao, emerged as national celebrities during their abbreviated tenure on TV.

Zoom tv show 90s