It’s 3 a.m. The party’s over and you’re crashed out on your couch flipping channels. You come across Channel 6 and your thumb stops, hovering over the channel-changing switch. The TV’s showing a wide-angle shot of a street, and it looks familiar. Suddenly it dawns on you. It’s Massachusetts St. And, just like that, you’re faced with the same question that haunts so many Lawrence couch potatoes: what the hell’s the point of having a live feed of downtown, and why isn’t someone down there doing something stupid on camera to entertain you?

The camera feed comes courtesy of 6 Productions and runs when there’s no other scheduled programming. Although the ever-shifting view of downtown Lawrence from atop City Hall usually just shows cars driving and people walking, the camera periodically catches entertaining shots of people who enjoy standing out on TV. One story has it that a DJ working at Set‘Em Up Jack’s, 1800 E. 23rd St., a year or so ago got tired of seeing the same old scene. He challenged any girl in the bar to go flash the camera for two minutes, offering free drinks to any takers — at least one of which he got. Matt Sayers, chief meteorologist for 6News, says he’s seen everything from people climbing flagpoles in their underwear to people humping fire hydrants to people settling for just flipping off the camera.

Mitch Sandow, Salina junior, is one of the countless people who has gone out of his way to make a cameo on the TowerCam. One afternoon during first semester last year he and some friends decided to stage a fight for the camera while another friend watched back home. They drove around until the guy back home told them via cell phone that they were on TV. Then they parked their car, jumped out and started pretending to throw punches at kicks at each other. “There’s some people walking by and some cars slowing down and we’re wailing on each other, and then we see a cop,” Sandow says. To avoid tangling with the law, the group left, but not before their friend had videotaped their faked street fight.

Since the TowerCam went on air in February 2003, Channel 6 has aired an estimated 9,000 hours of footage of downtown Lawrence. A former 6News meteorologist came up with the idea for a Lawrence TowerCam as a replacement for the News Plus scrolling news banner that had been filling in the gaps in Channel 6’s programming. Channel 6 doesn’t run any

syndicated shows, so it typically has about 12 hours of dead airtime to fill each day. The idea of filling it with material with a local slant fit with the station’s theme and appealed to its managers.

“We at least have something that kind of says ‘Lawrence,’” says Cody Howard, Channel 6 news director.

Howard says that sometimes the camera catches newsworthy things in addition to the random naked flagpole-climber. It recorded footage of a hot air balloon that crashed into the river during August 2003 and has gotten good shots of various fires around town. It hasn’t recorded a tornado (such as the one that swept through Lawrence in May 2003) or any crimes being committed, though the police have asked from time to time.

Howard and Sayers say that the station has gotten good feedback from the community about the camera, and that it plans to keep the camera in use. What isn’t known is whether there will be more cameras anytime soon. A common misconception is that there are several stationed throughout Lawrence. The truth is that there’s the one on City Hall, pivoting and zooming at the command of whoever’s in the Channel 6 Weathercenter. There is another camera, EagleCam, owned by The World Company, but it’s only available on the Internet. Howard says that while he would like to see more cameras some day, it probably won’t be discussed seriously for a while.

The future of people messing with the TowerCam also remains uncertain — but only in the sense that one can never be sure what they’ll do next. Staged fighting is far from the limit of the imaginations of Sandow and his friends, who have already toyed with ideas such as taping porn to the camera. “We also thought it’d be really funny to get a giant nut costume and a giant squirrel costume and go chasing around,” he says, “but it’s hard enough just to find a giant squirrel costume.”