Back in the late ’60s, in the nascent days of cable television, George Stoney viewed the innovation as a leap for democracy.

The activist, professor and documentary filmmaker — who would become known as the father of public access television — saw the potential to give everyday Joes a voice. It could be a high-minded forum for public debate.

In reality, public access TV became a showcase for bizarrely bawdy soft-core porn — from the country’s first nude talk show to a male host who wandered the streets asking young women to strip — peddled by a coterie of quirky Manhattan characters.

One of the platform’s biggest stars was Robin Byrd (née Cohen), a former porn actress clad in a crocheted bikini who interviewed other adult entertainers in town to dance at seedy Times Square porn palaces such as Show World.

“The Robin Byrd Show” premiered 40 years ago, in 1977, and although she stopped filming original content more than a decade ago, her late-night show still airs in edited reruns. The loopy blonde was such a pop-culture phenomenon, she was parodied on “Saturday Night Live” by Cheri Oteri.

“It was like Letterman, only with adult stars,” said Paper Magazine columnist Michael Musto, who was a frequent clothed guest on Byrd’s show and dubbed the programming “pubic access.”

In 1971, two channels — known as C and D — were set aside for local politics, community board meetings and cultural showcases. In a first for the nation, Manhattan’s two cable companies — Sterling Manhattan Cable and Teleprompter Cable TV — would provide free studio space for anyone on a first-come, first-served basis.

“[Stoney] wanted community board meetings and no entertainment,” said Ed Grant, who hosts “Media Funhouse,” a cable access show about pop culture, art and film.

“As a viewer, I don’t know anyone who was really interested in that.”

What emerged from Stoney’s lofty vision was a hodgepodge of programs that looked more like a wacky precursor to YouTube than C-SPAN.

There was Rapid T. Rabbit, a man dressed as, well, a rabbit, who claimed to live in the subways. John Wallowitch sat behind a piano, on which sat a framed picture of his mother, and took requests from viewers. Bion Fury was a call-in psychic.

The truly raunchy stuff was still a few years away. But Manhattan public access had its first scandal in 1973 when artist and Andy Warhol pal Anton Perich pushed the boundaries on his eponymous show — and Sterling pulled the plug mid-broadcast.

“A group of young men and women, some wearing the clothing of the opposite sex, whom a viewer might have presumed to be drug-crazed or demented, were putting on a skit in which they exposed themselves, shamelessly groped at one another and turned the air blue with their language,” read a report in the New York Times on March 21, 1973.

The FCC rules were already murky and the boob-tube brouhaha ignited a public debate on whether such programming constituted art — or obscenity.

No matter how it was interpreted, Perich was back on the air the following Sunday at 11 p.m.

Manhattan Cable Television (the old Sterling) added a third channel in 1976, where people could buy weekly time slots ($50 an hour) and advertise. The idea, according to Leah Churner, who curated a 2009 Museum of the Moving Image exhibit on the evolution of public access television, was to allow people “to subsidize their own efforts, talented performers would rise to the surface and go on to produce original programs for the content-starved stations.”

Instead, the “leased access,” known as Channel J, became the Wild West for adult entertainment. The commercials were for hookers, hustlers and swingers’ clubs — and the content was headlined by the likes of Byrd.

Al Goldstein, who published Screw magazine, hosted a Channel J show called “Midnight Blue” that featured porn reviews, dispatches from porn palaces and interviews with cultural fixtures, such as Tiny Tim and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. He once described it as an “erotic ’60 Minutes.’”

The honchos at Manhattan Cable were horrified and suspended “Midnight Blue.” But they were unable to clamp down on the lewd content because of loopholes in New York state law that said cable companies had no right to censor public access shows. Plus, they weren’t technically hard-core — penetration was never shown — so it was protected by the First Amendment.

“You’d zip around the dials and all of a sudden, you’d see a penis in your face,” said former talk show host Richard Bey, who did a segment about public access in Manhattan in the ’80s. “We didn’t have a gazillion channels back then, so there wasn’t a way to avoid it.”

Ugly George, whose real name was George Urban, would approach girls on the street and ask them to get naked before his large, cumbersome camera for a show that ran from 1976 to 1982.

“One out of every 20 would say they’d be delighted,” recalled Josh Friedman, who was an editor at Screw magazine and produced segments for “Midnight Blue.”

“They would walk into a stairwell and strip,” Friedman said. “That was his show. It was ‘Manhattan Gone Wild.’ You couldn’t show anything hard-core, but you could show nudity.”

On “Interludes After Midnight,” host Dan Landers would sit around naked with his guests and talk about swinging. Jon Lovitz parodied the show on “Saturday Night Live.”

Family-friendly programs and lewd shows alike were filmed out of TV Studio Inc. on 23rd Street, which made for the occasionally awkward collision. William Hohauser, who directed numerous shows, including “The Robin Byrd Show,” recalled the “Interludes After Midnight” folks arriving an hour early as a group of Episcopal ministers were wrapping up their show. “The ‘Interludes’ people showed up, threw their clothes off and started traipsing around the place naked,” recalled Hohauser. “The ministers were so upset.”

But while the content was racy, Grant said the shows weren’t exceptionally good or interesting.

“The parodies they were doing on ‘SNL’ were actually making them seem way more intriguing than they actually were,” said Grant.

“It was hard to be aroused by it,” said Musto. “It was just so over the top.

“It was a more permissive time — before our politically correct time where everyone is a victim,” Musto added. “At the same time, nightclubs were running rampant and you could get away with a lot. It wasn’t all good but it did result in some pop-cultural gems that will never be recaptured.”

As the cable television industry grew, it became evident no one was watching public access. A 1984 study by Warner Amex Cable Communications found that these channels accounted for less than 1 percent of all viewing time.

In the early ’90s, Time Warner attempted to scramble the content it deemed profane. The move would require customers to request access to the channels. Goldstein and Byrd sued Time Warner. In 1995, the courts sided with the king and queen of porn.

But Byrd stopped filming a few years later. “Midnight Blue,” however, hobbled into 2003 as Goldstein, who died in 2013, mentally unraveled on camera.

When the programs disappeared, said Musto, there “was a feeling that something very bizarre and quirky and specifically New York was gone.”

The characters and the seedy genre they championed eventually became the victims of changing appetites and the internet.

“Nowadays, no one really goes for erotica [on public access],” Grant said.

About five years ago, the raunchy “leased access” content was moved from Channel 35 to 79, the Siberia of cable. Even the Robin Byrd reruns, which air on 79, are heavily edited.

“They had this giant bicycle pump that could enhance an erection . . . Those were cut. She used to do this thing where she would pretend to go down on a dancer. That’s gone because Time Warner tightened up the rules,” Grant said.

At the same time, fewer people signed up for air time.

“It had its moment, sadly. And YouTube usurped it,” Grant said.

And with porn for every perversion readily available for free on the internet, no one is tuning in to cable to get a peek at breasts.

“Now, a 13-year-old could dig up anything imaginable on the internet,” said Friedman. “Forty years ago, seeing nudity on television was a tremendous novelty.”