I used to record VHS tapes of Spice channel and sell them to friends, my uncle had a descrambler. Glad to have experienced those heady days of analog piracy.
The tv we had growing up, if you had the channel info box up, it would lock the scramble scroll in place, so you had a pretty decent picture. My adulthood insomnia is to blame for those late night sessions of creeping around the house in search of titillation.
I have a distinct memory of waking up with my hand in my pants, The static channel on TV, and my father angry disappointed at me on his way out the door to work.
I remember my TV getting "TV1000", some local paid channel I guess, with straight up porn coming on right at midnight. But it was encoded in a way that you could see everything with perfect picture, but the colors were inverted. So everyone looked very blue, and had blackish teeth and white shadows between their teeth.
Sometimes it would just be the audio and you sit real close to the TV with the sound real low and your hand on the off button. Staring at the lines hoping to see something