The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

“All right, let’s get up a bit more speed and gradually ease it into second,” Bob Newhart, as a soft-spoken driving instructor, explains to a student taking just her second lesson. “Well, I didn’t want to cover reverse this early, but as long as you shifted into it….Of course, you’re nervous. I’m nervous. I’m not just saying that, I’m really very nervous. Just don’t pay any attention to their honking. You’re doing fine….You’re not blocking anyone’s lane…..No, as long as you are here on the safety island, you are not blocking anyone’s lane.”

It was January 1961, and the show was An Evening with Bob Newhart on Trans-Canada Telemeter, an early experiment in coin-operated pay-television that took place in Etobicoke between 1960 and 1965. Filmed in a spartan Bloor Street West TV studio, because of Telemeter’s small catchment area the special was seen by fewer than 2,000 viewers. But, as the world’s first live (non-sports) pay-per-view production, the Newhart special captured the attention of heavy-hitters from the film and television industries—all eager to witness pay-TV’s revolutionary promise “of a splendorous new show business in the future,” as Variety (December 14, 1960) put it.

Telemeter advertisement from the Toronto Star (February 26, 1960).

Trans-Canada Telemeter debuted its pay-TV services on February 26, 1960, capturing international attention from newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. After introductions and speeches by a variety of talking heads, the first program they aired was a brief tourist film, The Wonders of Ontario. Then, Telemeter’s opening-night audience of 1,000 subscribers could choose to watch The Journey to the Centre of the Earth or The Nun’s Story—uninterrupted and commercial-free.

Given that Trans-Canada Telemeter’s parent company, Famous Players Canadian Corp., was itself a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures, the venture was initiated as a transparent attempt to recover box office revenue being lost to television. After proposals to test pay-TV elsewhere fell through, Paramount selected Etobicoke because it offered the desired population density and per capita income level, as well as market competition from the handful of television stations available via rooftop antenna. Most importantly, the suburb was beyond the purview of the FCC and other American governmental agencies that had previously interfered with small-scale pay-TV field tests in the United States in the 1950s. As one Telemeter official put it, “if Pay-TV could be sold there, it could be sold anywhere.”

Within a year of launch, 13,000-14,000 homes, centered on the company’s facility at Bloor and Royal York Road, were wired with coaxial cable, buried or strung along telephone poles by the Bell telephone company. Of these potential subscribers, 5,000-6,000 paid the $5 installation fee for a device to access Telemeter’s service.

After tuning the television to Channel 5, subscribers could select 5A, 5B, or 5C by turning a knob on the coin box: a device about the size of a mantle radio and connected to the television by two wires. Depositing the required coins—ranging from 75 cents to $2 depending on the program—at the appropriate time descrambled the television signal to give a crisper picture than that available by antenna alone. (Right: Telemeter advertisement from the Toronto Star [January 8, 1960].)

Broadcasting for about five hours each evening, and longer on weekends, Telemeter offered subscribers their choice of first-run and older movies (some of them available in colour), live sports, and public service programming.

From 1960 to 1961, film options ranged from The Ten Commandments, Psycho, Old Yeller, and Village of the Damned to the Presley-vehicle Flaming Star, as well as risqué fare targeted to an adult audience like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Baby Doll.

This being post-war Toronto, of course, it took less than a month for Telemeter to run afoul of the Lord’s Day Alliance, the moralistic do-gooders who slavishly ensured the Sunday closure of shops, children’s playgrounds, and just about everything else in Toronto. “This is, in a sense, paying for one’s entertainment,” an alliance spokesman argued of Telemeter, “and to pay for Sunday amusement is, with some notable exceptions, considered unlawful, if not sinful, in this province.” After some initial hand-wringing, the opposition quietly petered out.

From the Toronto Star (January 29, 1961).

From its launch, Telemeter carried Maple Leafs’ road games for $1 a game, prompting some sceptical critics to question whether the public would pay for something available for free on Saturday nights. But avid sports fans also proved willing to pay for boxing and football games. Nearly a quarter of Telemeter’s subscribers paid a hefty $2 for live coverage of the CFL Argonauts’ exhibition games against the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers and St. Louis Cardinals in the summer of 1960, and the regular season CFL games broadcast on Telemeter through the 1962 season.

Prior to Newhart’s appearance, Telemeter’s only experience in original television production came from each evening’s 15-minute Toronto Star News and the other public service programming that occasionally aired free-of-charge. Debates by local educationalists, clergymen, and charities were sometimes recorded for re-broadcast, municipal and Metro election results were carried live in December 1960, and eventually a series of documentaries explaining how local government worked aired beginning in April 1961.

Advertisement from the Toronto Star (December 31, 1960).

Through its manager, William O. Crampton, Telemeter sought to create original programming that would differentiate pay-TV from regular broadcast television. A graduate of Toronto’s Central Tech and the Royal Conservatory of Music, Crampton had worked as a big band drummer and photographer before moving to New York City in 1948 to work in television. Described as “tough, shrewd, personable, and definitely experienced” by one Toronto television critic, Crampton had worked behind the scenes on a couple of variety shows before becoming a specialist in launching new television stations, which he helped do in Syracuse, Alabama, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. Returning to Toronto in 1955, he was a pioneer producer of television commercials at MacLaren Advertising before being hired by Telemeter.

Crampton called upon his industry contacts to secure rising comedy star Bob Newhart to star in Telemeter’s first live-to-air production. Newhart agreed to do the special for an estimated $2,500-$4,000—only a fraction of the $10,000 fee he regularly commanded for a week-long nightclub engagement. The potential of pay-television intrigues Bob,” his handlers explained to the press. “Being a studious and naturally curious young man he’s anxious to see for himself what pay-television is all about.” In reality, it was likely the potential royalties he’d earn each time the videotaped show was re-run that enticed him—as it was for numerous other stars who later accepted lower-than-usual fees to appear on Telemeter.

“It ought to have considerable guidepost value for both wary broadcasters and exuberant show-men,” Variety explained about the importance of the Newhart program, “whether or not it resolves the pro and con of paysee’s efficacy versus commercial tele.”

From the Toronto Star (January 7, 1961).

Along with Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, and Lenny Bruce, Newhart was part of a new wave of comedy in the Eisenhower years. Traditional comics continued to do dull “mother-in-law jokes and one-liners about their wives being bad cooks,” Newhart recalled in his autobiography. “Generally speaking, ours was a different kind of comedy than telling jokes,” he continued. “We did situational comedy. We told stories and did comedic vignettes.”

Just one year earlier, Newhart was an unknown in Chicago, doing stints as an accountant, a hardware salesman, a law student, and a bureaucrat in an unemployment benefits office—quitting the last when he realized he could make nearly as much money collecting instead of dispensing unemployment cheques. While working as an advertising copywriter in the late 1950s, Newhart and a co-worker entertained themselves composing absurdly comic situations over the telephone. Some taped samples wound up in the hands of Warner Brothers Records, and the unknown comic was signed to a record deal in 1959.

When Newhart recorded his first album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, over two weeks at a club in February 1960, it was the first time he’d ever performed before a live audience. The record was an immediate sensation, remaining the top seller for 14 weeks. Newhart became particularly popular among college students, who preferred having pizza and beer while listening to comedy records over an expensive evening watching a nightclub comedy act. Next for Newhart came a series of television appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, ever-more-lucrative nightclub engagements, and the release of two follow-up LPs.

An Evening with Bob Newhart was hyped in the local newspapers, on radio stations, and in the Telemeter Guide distributed to all subscribers. Although he declined an offer to autograph records at a local department store, the 31-year-old comic did advance press with journalists and radio personalities who visited the studio the afternoon before the show; a wise-cracking Newhart tried to not appear bored working with technical staff to test the audio-video equipment.

At 8:30 p.m. on January 5, he stepped in front of the cameras, performing his 70-minute show before a studio audience of 100 invited guests and the viewers at home who’d deposited their $1.25. “To the usual invited studio audience, primed by intimacy and warm-up rituals,” Variety (January 11, 1961) raved on its front-page, “Newhart’s debut on pay-see seemed impactful as the shy little guy whose satires on the political foibles of the age verge on hilarity.”

The studio set was sparse—just a simple backdrop—but it suited Newhart’s ability to conjure vivid scenes with only a few words. “This was one whale of an advantage for an outfit attempting its first production of this sort,” Bob Blackburn argued in the Toronto Star (January 6, 1961). “All they had to do was shove him in front of a curtain, point a camera at him, and let him go.”

In his characteristic fashion, Newhart weaved mild exaggerations of everyday life situations into more and more ridiculous scenarios, fumbling along as he revealed more details, and patiently turning his pregnant pauses into punchlines.

In addition to “The Driving Instructor,” Newhart performed several of his classic routines. There was the one where a plain-clothes policeman nonchalantly uses psychology to talk a jumper down from a ledge. “He could conjure up an image of an essentially tragic situation,” a Globe and Mail (January 6, 1961) reviewer noted, “and make you shake with laughter without slipping into bad taste about the man, who eventually jumps.”

“I wish I knew where the material comes from,” Newhart had told Marvin Schiff of the Globe and Mail (January 5, 1961), “and I’d go back there. I draw a lot from personal experience.”

Blackburn raved about An Evening with Bob Newhart, but remained disappointed that the comedian’s then-modest repertoire meant most of the routines were familiar to anyone who owned Newhart’s records. As a condition of his Telemeter contract, however, Newhart also composed at least one new routine especially for the program which he was not allowed to perform again in any other format unless he purchased back the rights from Telemeter.

One original piece involved a plane passenger who suspects his seat-mate is Hitler (it “still needs to be worked on” one critic assessed) which later re-appeared on Bob Newhart Faces Bob Newhart (1964). Another new routine imagined Wernher von Braun’s responses to a Mike Wallace-style hard-hitting interview—included on the album Behind the Button-Down Mind (1961) released shortly after Newhart’s pay-TV appearance.

The day after his Telemeter premiere Newhart flew to New York to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show (his third time) and the The Dinah Shore Show later that month before launching a 40-stop North American tour on January 30. By the time he was back in Toronto on May 4 to perform at Massey Hall, Newhart had cleaned up at the 1961 Grammy Awards—winning best new artist, album of the year for The Button-Down Mind and best comedy performance for its follow-up, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back. Although a variety show he started hosting on NBC in 1961 lasted only until 1962, Newhart was well on his way to establishing himself as a staple of television comedy for decades to come.

The Telemeter special was rebroadcast the following two nights. According to figures published in Broadcasting (February 6, 1961), 30 per cent of Telemeter subscribers, or an estimated 1,740 homes, paid $1.25 to watch Newhart between January 5 and 7. The actual number of viewers was somewhat higher because Telemeter subscribers frequently invited friends over to watch pay-TV programming—so much so that rush hour-levels of traffic in and out of Etobicoke were often reported on hockey nights.

Newhart’s program was hailed by Telemeter officials as “a fabulous success.” The company was consistently tight-lipped about its viewership actuals, preferring instead to refer to the percentage of subscribers who tuned in. The assumption was that if a given percentage of Telemeter subscribers were willing to pay for a program, then so would the same percentage of all viewers, if pay-TV were more widely available. Officials at the parent company were ecstatic at Newhart’s 30 per cent penetration, which compared quite favourably with recent free-TV specials by Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Victor Borge, and Fred Astaire. “It was a shot heard round the show business world,” one Paramount executive told Variety (January 18, 1961).

Telemeter quickly sought to follow up with more experiments in original content. Seeking programming unavailable on free-TV, the company invested an estimated quarter of a million dollars in acquiring rights and production costs for a series of special presentations that winter and spring.

(Left: Advertisement for Telemeter’s Hedda Gabler from the Toronto Star; April 20, 1961.)

Performances of several theatrical shows in New York—Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera, The Consul, a hit off-Broadway production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Chekhov’s The Country Scandal—were filmed for airing on pay-TV. Promoted with the tag line “From Broadway to Bloor Street,” each was aired unabridged and uninterrupted.

Failing to see how The Consul differed from something the CBC might have done, at the Star Blackburn critiqued that the opera was “all very well, but it isn’t the sort of thing, quite, that’s going to make people sit up and say, ‘Here’s something that’s never been tried on television before.’”

Ninety minutes of improvisational comedy from Chicago’s Second City Revue, which made its television debut with a special on the pay-TV service in early July 1961, proved to be an outstanding critical success. “Their humor is pungent, their attack probing,” said the Star‘s critic Nathan Cohen of the Second City performers. “They can invest the most threadbare subject with a fresh and invigorating quality.” But, as with aforementioned theatrical screenings, few subscribers handed over $1.25 to watch the comedy troupe.

The only real success of the post-Newhart original programming was Show Girl, Carol Channing’s two-hour one-woman show. Five cameras focused on the stage at New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre, and another filmed audience members milling around the lobby before the show and during intermission, in order to simulate the live theatre experience for Etobicoke viewers. (Right: Promo for Telemeter’s Second City special from the Toronto Star; June 24, 1961.)

The first Broadway show televised live-to-air in its entirety, Show Girl was so popular with Torontonians in April—capturing 38 per cent of the potential audience at $1.50 per household for the live broadcast, and supplemented by numerous reruns over the ensuing weeks—that the O’Keefe Centre was added to Channing’s summer tour.

After Crampton left Telemeter to become general manager of Toronto’s just-launched CFTO-TV in late May 1961, the pay-TV enterprise all but abandoned producing original content outside of sports and local politics in subsequent years.

From the Toronto Star (July 27, 1963).

Critics of pay-TV couldn’t figure out Telemeter’s math. One independent survey in October 1960 found that subscribers were only spending an average of $1 per week on pay-TV programming, well below the estimated $100 per year each customer had to spend for Telemeter to break even.

Around the time of Newhart’s special in early 1961, Telemeter reached its peak of nearly 6,000 subscribers. Faced with a waiting list of 450, with demand outstripping the supply of coin boxes, Telemeter began removing coin-boxes from homes if the subscriber failed to deposit at least 75 cents each week. The company found, however, that because the set-top boxes had become something of a status symbol—a perk hyped in rental classifieds and real estate ads—consumers were unwilling to give them up. As a result, Telemeter eventually implemented a $15 annual fee on top of the program pricing to boost its sagging revenues.

“We are not making money…but we are satisfied with results so far,” one prominent Telemeter official professed in 1961. Telemeter was only an experiment, went the company line, for testing the pay-TV equipment and learning what types of programming viewers are willing to pay for.

Despite frequent proclamations that pay-TV would soon be available across Metro Toronto, Telemeter made no serious efforts to expand its service apart from adding some portions of nearby Mimico and New Toronto in late 1961. The total number of subscribers, however, remained constant, an indication that new subscribers were off-set by cancellations as the novelty wore off.

Telemeter was, in reality, losing money hand over fist, even on its most popular programming. This didn’t become apparent until boardroom turmoil became front page news. In the fall of 1961, Toronto lawyer and businessman Norman Robertson resigned as a director at Famous Players, alleging that Telemeter had lost Famous Players over $400,000 in 1960. Not only were shareholders being denied a full financial picture, he argued, but the company was being milked by Paramount Pictures, absorbing financial losses while the American firm accrued the benefits of the pay-TV field trial.

(Left: Telemeter ad from the Toronto Star; January 15, 1960.)

Although Paramount officials responded swiftly, announcing that they would assume all Telemeter operating costs retroactive to January 1, 1961, there were growing murmurs from the United States that film industry shareholders were losing interest in coin-operated pay-TV.

Telemeter straggled on, without any real effort to attract or retain customers, or to expand its geographic reach. Even as the company’s dwindling subscription base was rumoured to be as low as 2,000 by August 1964, Paramount just kept absorbing losses that cumulatively reached into the millions.

The service was, at long last, wound up at the end of April 1965. Cable systems, supplanting roof-top antennas as the future of the television industry by the end of the decade, would eventually usher in Canada’s next foray into pay-TV.

Nathan Cohen was scathing in his post-mortem of the Trans-Canada Telemeter scheme. “But what it has all come down to is that all those visions of millions upon millions of people at home gladly paying money for specific shows, instead of taking whatever free TV has to offer them, were just pipe dreams,” he wrote in the Toronto Star (March 24, 1965). “For hockey games, yes, for boxing matches, maybe, and for anything else—most likely, no.” Calling pay-TV a mirage, Cohen concluded: “For that is what Pay-TV is: the biggest, most expensive act of collective self-deception in the experience of show business.”

Additional sources consulted: Ian Anthony in Broadcaster (October 2002); Ken Easton in Cablecaster (April and June 2001); Mike Filey, Toronto Sketches 4 (Dundurn, 1995); Bob Newhart, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! (Hyperion, 2006); and articles from Billboard (January 9, 1961); Broadcasting (January 2, 1961); Globe and Mail (October 17, 1959; January 22, February 27, March 9, and August 2, 1960; March 3, 17 & 18, April 19 & 29, May 5, 9 & 15, June 26, July 1, October 17, November 8 & 23, and December 6, 1961; April 25, 1962; February 25, May 29, August 6, August 22, and December 11 & 16, 1963; January 27 and August 8, 1964; March 25 and November 12, 1965); Montreal Gazette (December 27, 1960); Sports Illustrated (December 26, 1960); Toronto Star (November 1, 1958; June 18 and July 23, 1959; January 29, February 26 & 27, March 7, 8 & 26, April 4 & 30, May 14, June 24, October 11, November 8, 9, 10 & 29; and December 2, 24 & 29, 1960; January 20 & 21, February 11, 14 & 18, March 2, 4, 5, 16 & 17, April 3 & 6, May 5, 19 & 29, June 12 & 24, July 8 & 21, August 2, 11 & 19, September 9, October 6, 7 & 20, and November 22, 1961; July 26, 1962; July 27 and December 5, 1963; November 10, 1964; June 3, 1965; September 2, 1966; June 4, 1976; November 8, 1999; and May 7, 2000); and Variety (March 29, 1961).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

All of Top Chef Canada’s season-three chefs, with Lisa Ray, Mark McEwan, and Shereen Arazm in front.

About to enter its third season, Top Chef Canada has grown from a U.S. import to a reality show with authentic Canadian flavour. Last year’s winner was Toronto-based Carl Heinrich, then a chef at Marben (he has since opened his own restaurant, Richmond Station). Will this year’s winner once again represent our city?

As Top Chef Canada viewers know, there are a few people who can send competitors—and their knives—packing. At North 44 on Thursday, we, along with a handful of Toronto media, sat down with three of them: Chef Mark McEwan, who serves as the show’s head judge, show host Lisa Ray, and resident judge Shereen Arazm. We were there to sample a five-course meal prepared by this year’s five Toronto competitors.

The season has already been taped, but its results are still secret. We don’t have any inside information, but based on that lunch, plus what we know about past seasons, here’s what we predict for this year’s Toronto competitors.

Goodyear could go far. He was most recently executive chef at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. Confident, experienced, and clearly passionate about good food, he has a real shot at the top. He’s experienced at working under pressure for clients with high expectations, which could only have served him well during taping. He told us that it’s all about knowing when to keep things simple, and knowing when to push the envelope. His plan during the competition, he said, was to play to the judges’ palates—something competitors in other seasons have neglected, to their regret. But skills and instincts are never a sure thing, so let’s not count out his competitors just yet.

Becky Ross, 24

Ross doesn’t immediately seem like a potential winner. The former sous chef at Malena (now closed) is quieter than many of her colleagues. One might write her off as too timid, but her food tells a different story. Adept at desserts, she knows how to round out a meal in a way that leaves everyone asking for more (no small feat at a multi-course tasting event). Her sweet-savoury smoked butter and raw-honey griddled cornbread, served with preserved peaches, whiskey cream, and spiced pecans impressed McEwan, who called it layered, sophisticated, and true to its ingredients. Why does this bode well for her? As history shows, the judges react favourably to those whose dishes actually taste like the main ingredients. If those flavours get lost, so too might the chef’s chances.

Rory White, 23

White may not have much experience, but he does have a pedigree. His most recent gig was as a sous chef at George, and he trained at the Niagara College Culinary Program. He’s known for his skills in butchery, which can be helpful on the show. (As we learned last season, the ability to create well-executed proteins can take competitors far.) He has a calm, cool demeanor, which can also be helpful. He tells us that his plan was to “go hard every day,” and he seems to have the endurance to do just that. However, his relatively short career may have been a detriment.

Ruth Eddolls, 30

If it’s drama you’re after, keep an eye on Eddolls, formerly of Pusateri’s. While we can’t say for sure, we suspect that she’ll bring a little extra personality to the show. If there was any friction with any other competitors, she didn’t let on, but we think this season may have a trick or two up its sleeve, and won’t be surprised if she has a role in it. Even so, this award-winning chef’s focus on simple and tasty foods probably helped her showcase what she was really there for: cooking. We’re guessing her skills served her well, just as long as she remembered that McEwan isn’t a huge fan of too much spice or unnecessary smoke.

Dennis Tay, 34

If there’s a wildcard contestant from this bunch, it might be Tay, the soon-to-be sous chef at Nick Liu’s GwaiLo. It’s no surprise, considering his new gig, that he gravitates to Asian-style plates, but with a twist. He told us that he’s not afraid to push the envelope, which, if done right, would have made him a strong competitor. But McEwan favours food that retains its original character, which might have been Tay’s downfall. Whatever happens on the show, we can expect to see a competitive streak in Tay, who tells us that he was “pushing hard all the time.”

Season three of Top Chef Canada premieres Monday, March 18 at 9 p.m. on Food Network Canada.

All photos courtesy of Top Chef Canada/Food Network Canada.

Source: the Globe and Mail, November 5, 1975.

Last week, we reported that TVOntario is cancelling Saturday Night at the Movies after almost 40 years on the air. Today’s ad from the show’s early days sums up the things that made it a hit: an enthusiastic host, smart programming choices, and the use of the medium as “a springboard for discussion, ideas, feelings and—education.”

Saturday Night at the Movies was prominently featured in the network’s “TVOntario opens eyes” print advertising campaign during the mid-1970s. Today’s ad gives a feel for the range of films the series was showing at that time: Hitchcock thrillers, swashbuckling adventures, and Cold War–paranoia sci-fi.

Sharing space in this ad is host Elwy Yost’s weeknight gig, Magic Shadows. To fit the half-hour slot, movies were split up, serial style, and curated by Yost in a less formal manner than the Saturday-night feature bills. The show featured an imaginative—if slightly frightening to children—animated opening sequence.

The American presidential candidates, 1968. Left to right: George Wallace (American Independent), Richard Nixon (Republican), Hubert Humphrey (Democratic). The Toronto Star, November 5, 1968.

It’s election day south of the border, which means many Torontonians will spend tonight glued to televisions or to social media, awaiting the results of an endless campaign. Among tonight’s options for analysis is CBC, which provided plenty of coverage during a three-way presidential race 44 years ago—even if most of it came from another broadcaster.

Viewers settling in for the evening on November 5, 1968 witnessed the final chapter of a tense race. Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s campaign hadn’t made anyone forget the battles between police and antiwar protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Republican Richard Nixon had vowed to the media that they didn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore” after his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial contest. Former Alabama Governor George Wallace, whose pro-segregation platform emphasized law and order, had mounted a strong third-party challenge. When the ballots were counted, Nixon carried 32 states, Humphrey 13, Wallace 5.

In Toronto, CBC television carried NBC’s election feed. To fill the peacock’s commercial breaks, the public broadcaster offered analysis from Washington correspondents Knowlton Nash and Gordon Donaldson. While the Globe and Mail praised Nash’s solid commentary, the paper felt that NBC anchors David Brinkley and Chet Huntley lacked the “person to person strength” of CBS’s Walter Cronkite.

Star TV critic Patrick Scott preferred ABC’s coverage, citing the concise analysis of anchor Howard K. Smith and the reunion of the “incomparable comedy team” of guest commentators William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal following their combative performance during the Republican National Convention. “If you are going to go with NBC anyway,” Scott observed, “you might as well go with it all the way and spare yourself the tortures of the CBC’s guest commentator, a sort of pauper’s combination of Buckley and Vidal called Tony Howard, whom I can only assume Knowlton Nash found on his doorstep on Hallowe’en.”

Additional material from the November 6, 1968 editions of the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

CORRECTION: November 15, 2012, 8:20 AM This post originally stated that Humphrey carried 15 states, when in fact he carried 13. We regret the error.

Flat metal shapes, painted in bright colours and fastened together, dancing along frame by frame to a 1792 French folk song. Not the most typical career-launching film, but a significant one: Toronto-born animator George Dunning’s Cadet Rousselle (1947). Pushing the boundaries of conventional animation techniques, with it Dunning announced himself as an important new talent, among the first generation at the National Film Board that established Canada’s reputation as a venue for acclaimed animation work. By career’s end, he’d produced Yellow Submarine and was regarded, in the words of one observer, as “the undisputed father of British commercial animation.”

Born in Toronto on November 17, 1920, Dunning studied at the Ontario College of Art. After a period as a freelance illustrator, he joined the National Film Board in 1943, only the second artist Norman McLaren had recruited to the animation department. From the minimalist line drawings of his first film, Grim Pastures (1944), Dunning strove to pursue an individual path as an artist.

“From his very first film he showed a ready and natural bent for animation, and, what was even more important, he had the ability to make the sensitive and mystic marriage between his talents as a graphic artist and as an animator,” McLaren recalled of Dunning in an interview with Animafilm (January 1980). “His peculiarly personal vision and whimsy soon shone out in such early films as Cadet Rousselle [1947] and Upright and Wrong [1947]. I found George a graceful, articulate and gentle person: a philosopher much given to strangely fanciful invention and drollery, and all in great taste.”

Beginning in the 1940s, the NFB’s animation department was an incubator of artistic experimentation, attracting gifted animators from around the world who tired of working in the commercial sphere and sought an outlet for more personal creativity. Dunning’s output was prodigious. In addition to wartime propaganda films, he created Three Blind Mice (1945), several entries in the Chants Populaires series of adaptations of French folk songs, sponsored public service announcements, and the award-winning Family Tree (1950).

Experimenting with styles and techniques during his time at the NFB, Dunning shifted between traditional animation, paper and metal cutouts, and painting directly onto glass. “He was a true poet,” said McLaren.

Dunning and his colleague Colin Low took a three-month leave of absence from the NFB in 1949, Karen Mazurkewich writes in Cartoon Capers: The Adventures of Canadian Animators (McArthur & Company, 1999), to work on an adaptation of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. But the production, utilizing metal cutouts and imaginative imagery, proved too ambitious and the film had to be abandoned.

Dunning left the NFB for good later that year. He joined Jim McKay, a Beaverton-born artist who’d graduated from printing signs and gag cartoons to being groomed to succeed McLaren at the NFB, to form Graphic Associates, Toronto’s first private animation studio.

Graphic Associates produced commercials—including the first colour commercial produced in Canada, which aired on a Buffalo TV station in 1950—as well as educational film-strips, graphic design work, storyboards, and the like. Expanding the company, Dunning and McKay hired budding artists Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, and a teenager aspiring to a career in animation, Richard Williams, to their first jobs in the industry.

Graphic Associates, Ron Csillag writes in an obituary of McKay for the Globe and Mail (November 16, 2002), “became a drop-in centre and learning-ground-cum-shrine for every young animator in the area.” But the commercial firm proved not to be a profitable venture for Dunning and McKay. When the former left Toronto in the mid-1950s, the latter remained behind, remaking the firm into Film Design Ltd. to produce a variety of children-focused work for Sesame Street and TVO over the ensuing decades.

Dunning relocated to New York City in 1955, recruited by Stephen Bosustow, a fellow Canadian and president of United Productions of America (UPA), to work on the Gerald McBoing-Boing Show.

The next year, Dunning was asked to relocate to London, England, to oversee the opening of a UPA satellite office. Seven months later, the office was closed and the parent company was on the verge of collapse.

As Mazurkewich tells it, Dunning invited some industry contacts, John Coates and Richard Williams among them, to a Mayfair pub and pitched them his idea to open an independent production company.

Coates quit his television industry job to become Dunning’s business partner in June 1957, forming TV Cartoons (later known better as TVC London), one of many small animation studios that sprouted in London’s Soho district during the 1950s seeking to profit off the increasing demands of the advertising industry. Dunning hired many of his former UPA staff.

His partnership with Coates proved to be long and prosperous. But, in an interview with Animafilm published in January 1980, Dunning also credited Williams as being vital to TVC’s foundation. By then an established and in-demand animator producing commercials and his own Little Island (1958) project, Williams agreed to work with them until the venture company got off the ground.

“I remember Dick came to me exactly a year later,” Dunning recalled, “and he said, ‘The year is up.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, the year is up?’ He said, ‘I said I’ll help you, and give you a push. Now I really want to do stuff through my own company’s name and things like that.’ We went on collaborating on some things but he was much more active with the Richard Williams Studio and developed it and so on. I have always had the greatest respect for all his abilities.”

TVC produced commercials and public health and safety films for the National Coal Board, Ford Motors, Mother’s Pride Bread, and Mentholatum Deep-Heat Rub. By the 1960s, with Dunning’s oversight, the successful firm was also responsible for several cartoon series for television including The Beatles (1965–1967), Cool McCool (1966–1969), the “Digger” segments for Vision On, as well as the opening credits sequence for the Pink Panther film A Shot In The Dark (1964). Dunning produced the three-screen animation for Expo ’67 entitled Canada Is My Piano.

“Like all animation studios,” Coates recalled in another issue of Animafilm, “we had many ups-and-downs, during which time our partnership thrived. A large part of this was due to George’s steadfastness. He had an amazing way of keeping his cool under all circumstances, whether he was forcing through his creative ideas or arguing with the ‘money-men.’”

Even at the height of TVC’s success with advertisers, producing 100 commercials per year during the 1960s, Dunning found personal expression in his spare time by experimenting with techniques and creating his own shorts. The Wardrobe (1958), The Apple (1962), and The Flying Man (1962) were “atmospheric [and] Kafkaesque,” in the words of the Liz Czach in the Canadian Film Encyclopedia. His business partner Coates asserted that Dunning was regarded by his contemporaries in the animation industry as a “quiet innovator of marvellous new techniques and experiences.”

Asked by an interviewer whether his success at TVC had helped him remain an independent artist, Dunning replied: “I would guess that is the answer, yes. One has to live. I had a long stint at the [National] Film Board. I learned a lot and enjoyed that kind of existence—government backing, budgets for films and all kinds of special facilities that you could get that way, that you don’t get out in the cold world of commerce.”

A man’s ever-escalating efforts to reach an apple in a tree are recounted in The Apple, a humorous short that won a BAFTA award in 1963. Collaborating with Williams, Dunning drew the characters in plain outline against a sparse background—like a newspaper strip—with the only object in colour being the apple itself.

In the Flying Man, Dunning returned to painting directly onto glass, a method he’d learned during a stint in Paris in the 1940s working with Berthold Bartosch under the auspices of UNESCO. This surrealistic film, in which a man composed of pastel brush strokes takes to the air, won the grand prize at the International Animation Film Festival in Annecy, France.

Dunning’s experimentation culminated in his role as producer and director of the colourful, popular, and highly influential Yellow Submarine (1968), which harnessed a wide assortment of different animation styles and techniques to bring the Beatles’ music to the big screen.

When Al Brodax of King Features in New York hatched the idea of a feature-length animated film, John, Paul, George, and Ringo refused anything but token involvement. They despised TVC’s production of The Beatles television series—which Dunning oversaw on behalf of King Features. But the band was contractually obligated to provide a fourth feature the Fab Four didn’t have the energy to fulfill, so they finally agreed to Yellow Submarine. For good measure, manager Brian Epstein took $200,000 off the film’s miniscule $1 million budget for the band.

Dunning was skeptical anyone would want to pay to see a simple screen adaptation of the TV show. Like the band, Dunning was no fan of the Saturday cartoon which he characterized as “a very poor kind of design” and a “very ordinary, very cheap cut-rate kind of thing.” Peter Sander, a young cartoonist who worked on both the TV series and the film, speculated in the Toronto Star (November 13, 1987) that Dunning only took on the project because “it was the closest thing to the Baron Munchausen tall tales…which he’d always wanted to do and had never been able to finance.”

Seeking to create something more sophisticated and significant, Dunning recruited Czech-German illustrator and designer Heinz Edelmann to act as art director and to design the film’s iconic characters. After Edelmann had disappeared for two weeks, Dunning recalled: “I remember this brown envelope arrived with four drawings in it, one of each Beatle. It was really marvellous cause it had that solved, attended-to quality. You could see it wasn’t Mickey Mouse, it wasn’t this, it wasn’t that—it was just there! The film is very much a phenomenon.”

London’s Dog and Duck Pub became an unofficial office for the crew working on Yellow Submarine as they worked through countless drafts of the script and animation concepts. Although the finished film seemed the quintessential document of the psychadelic era, Sander noted, the film’s creation was more fuelled by booze than drugs. Dunning supervised more than 200 artists, including many local art students, in order to meet the impossible 11-month deadline.

The Beatles liked Dunning’s work, in particular the art-school-trained Lennon, who appreciated the efforts of Dunning, 20 years his senior, to interpret their songs for the screen. Sander concurred. “What Dunning did was give the music a visual vocabulary,” Sander reminisced. “An artist’s creativity is more important than his personality and Dunning complemented that feeling in visual terms perfectly. I mean that sincerely. He caught that.”

Dunning feuded with Brodax, however. When the film was more than half finished, Brodax realized that Dunning and his artists were charting their own independent path with the material—and running over budget—rather than concentrating on commercial appeal. The New York businessman sent a cease and desist order, Michael Posner wrote in the Globe and Mail (March 6, 2003), and boarded a plane. The artists, realizing that they might lose the results of their efforts, snuck into the studio and absconded their completed work.

King Features stopped payments to TVC, which now stood near the brink of bankruptcy, until Dunning threatened to liquidate his company. King Features relented, and TVC retained creative control and the film was finished. Yellow Submarine was a massive success with the public and critics alike, but Dunning—who suffered ill-health as a result of the episode—never actually made any money on the production.

Nor did Dunning think Yellow Submarine was the apex of his career.
“Its fluorescent, bold designs were the antithesis of Dunning’s personal style,” Mazurkewich wrote, suggesting that pared-down, simple charm of The Apple and Flying Man “more closely reflect his own taste.”

Still from George Dunning's unfinished animation The Tempest; (1979) from {a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George_Dunning,_The_Tempest,_1979_%28unfinished%29_%283648660053%29.jpg"}WikiMedia Commons{/a}.

Dunning’s later years were dedicated to an animated adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which envisioned Caliban as a tree-like creature. “People ask me why do it in animation,” he noted in an interview. “It’s all very well with the fantasy side of it, that seems appropriate. But beyond that, it’s something that I think should be demonstrated. And that’s what I’m doing, and then that helps open a technical line on it as well so that others can carry on.”

“I can not think of a more unlikely subject for animation than that,” animator Bob Godfrey recalled in an interview, “but that, of course, was why George was making it.”

Dunning’s pet project was never completed, remaining an assortment of test animation sequences, pencilled sketches, and character and landscape studies. He died of a heart attack at the age of 57 on February 15, 1979.

Other sources consulted: The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 4 (Gale, 2000); Valliere T. Richard, Norman McLaren, Manipulator of Movement: The National Film Board Years, 1947-1967 (Associated University Presses, 1982); and articles from Billboard (April 20, 2002); the Globe and Mail (January 29, 2001); the National Post (August 21, 2009); Take 1 (Summer 1999 and Spring 2000); The Report Magazine (December 16, 2002); and the Toronto Star (March 5, 1994).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

On the cusp of the 1980s, Toronto viewers were occupying a 16-channel television universe when the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) introduced pay-TV to Canadian airwaves with two national pay-TV services and numerous regional pay channels.

To bureaucrats, industry observers, and cultural nationalists, pay-TV offered astounding promise for a renaissance of Canadian content by diversifying the programming available to Canadians, elevating its quality, and fostering the development of an industry of independent Canadian television and film producers enthusiastically supplying the content.

C Channel, which took to the airwaves on February 1, 1983, best exemplified these lofty ideals, broadcasting ballet, theatre, opera, and orchestra performances. But after a few short months of corporate mismanagement, bureaucratic bungling, uncooperative cable companies, and an indifferent public, the Toronto-based arts channel was bankrupt and was off the air by June 30.

“It wasn’t one single thing,” C Channel president Edgar Cowan reflected on the accumulation of factors leading to its demise to Cinema Canada (November 1983). “It’s only when you put them all together that you say, ‘Oh my God! What’s going on here?’”

Origins

Almost a decade after pay-TV had been introduced south of the border, the CRTC’s Therrien Commission had finally recommended the initiation of a competitive, Canadian pay-TV industry in Canada in 1980. Among the broadcast and film industry associations and entrepreneurs who presented to the Therrien Commission was a fledgling company, Lively Arts Market Builders Inc. (LAMB), seeking to establish a pay-TV network dedicated to the arts in Canada. Excited by the potential of emerging technologies—like video cassettes and particularly pay-TV—for providing arts groups additional revenue and increased marketing reach at home and abroad, arts administrator Louis Applebaum assembled a group of arts industry veterans to form LAMB. The company was incorporated in July 1979. (Left: article from the Toronto Star; January 20, 1983.)

The founders included former National Capital Commission chairman Douglas Fullerton, philanthropist Arthur Gelber, former NFB administrator and filmmaker Bob Anderson, and lawyer Howard Beck. G. Hamilton Southam, former diplomat and founder of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, used his considerable personal resources as a member of the wealthy newspaper family to become a primary investor in the new venture. By autumn 1979, the group attracted Edgar Cowan, former publisher of Saturday Night magazine, to head the company’s operations. Having been one of the founders of Citytv, Cowan was the only one with significant experience in the television industry.

In October 1981, Cowan and Southam presented to the CRTC’s pay-TV licensing hearings, outlining their vision for a pay-TV service showcasing contemporary and classical arts—dance, opera, music, theatre, and film—as well as children’s progamming. Although they stressed that their venture, C Channel, would not consist solely of “‘pure culture’ nor ‘high culture,’” right from the start they would have difficulty shaking the perception of elitism.

“They are a group that is perhaps a little better educated and with a somewhat higher disposable income than the average viewer,” Cowan and Southam haughtily described C Channel’s anticipated audience of arts aficionados. “They are also a group that tends to be more bored with conventional television and more dissatisfied with the programs to which their children are exposed.”

Cowan and Southam readily acknowledged that their niche venture would be “undoubtedly more fragile than a more mass-appeal oriented service.” But, with either naiveté or arrogance, they predicted C Channel would turn infrequent television viewers into regular watchers, emphasizing that their proposal was “most innovative” and “would add the greatest measure of diversity to the Canadian broadcasting system.”

The CRTC agreed, granting C Channel one of two national pay-TV licences on March 18, 1982. The second national service was First Choice; four regional licenses were also issued, resulting in a maximum of three pay-TV channels available in any given market.

Programming

C Channel launched on February 1, 1983, with a performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Ballet, followed by the acclaimed French film from 1980 The Last Metro. First Choice and Superchannel, the two other pioneering pay-TV services available in Ontario both launched the same day by screening Star Wars.

For the first few months, C Channel’s broadcast day was just eight hours—a fact which, it later emerged, made subscribers feel short-changed. While programming was repeated throughout the day on the other premium channels, C Channel had coloured bars on the screen until the broadcast hours were expanded in mid-May.

The C Channel day started around supper time with its block of critically acclaimed children’s programming, including the Kid Bits shorts that demonstrated the secrets behind magic tricks or featured a jester doing stand-up with a puppet. Prime-time programming included concerts or musical documentaries by guitarist Liona Boyd, Bob Marley, and from Canadian jazz festivals. Fine arts content included stage opera performances of Samson and Delilah, La Boheme, and Rigoletto, as well as a ballet starring Veronica Tennant called The Newcomers. And among the films C screened: classics like David Lean’s David Copperfield, Out of the Past, Canadian movies like 1982′s Ticket to Heaven, international favourites like La Cages Aux Folles or King of Hearts—although some critics complained of sloppy dubbing instead of subtitles on such films—and even a marathon of Charlie Chaplin films. The highlight of the schedule in March would be an 8.5 hour marathon showing of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s staging of Nicholas Nickleby.

“For those with more discriminating tastes and those who appreciate the finer things in life,” Helmer Biermann, writing in the St. John’s Times Globe, echoed the critical praise heard across the country, “a blend of classic movies, recent quality movies and the arts, it seems that the best, and perhaps the only choice is C Channel.” Others critics, however, questioned whether videotape recordings of on-stage performances made for ideal viewing on the small screen. “For all of Cowan’s insistence,” the Star‘s Jack Miller argued, “it’s hard to brush off a suspicion that the kind of entertainment that thrives on the audience feeling almost close enough to touch living and breathing performers just doesn’t work as well in the clinical envelope of a TV tube. Not night after night, at least.”

(Advertisement from the Toronto Star; March 7, 1983.)

Like the other pay licenses, the C Channel license carried strict Cancon conditions. The specific requirements included that 30 per cent of total air time (and prime time) be dedicated to Canadian content for the first three years of operation and 40 per cent thereafter. Furthermore, the station had to dedicate 20 per cent of gross revenues to the acquisition or production of Canadian content. C Channel hoped to exceed these mandated minimums in their first year.

“You see,” C Channel programming executive Audrey Cole explained to Cinema Canada (May 1983), “we didn’t consider the restrictions that were put on us by the CRTC about Canadian content in production as cumbrous. The fact is that is why C Channel exists in the first place.” C Channel intended to spend almost every penny of its production budget—projected to be $37 million in the first five years—on independent productions of Canadian performing arts.

“We are a commercial network,” Cole added to highlight their emphasis on quality work, “and what goes on that screen is going to the most discriminating audience there is in this country and it has to be the best.” She underscored that the channel would not fund something just because it fit the channel’s mandate: “We aren’t the Canada Council. We aren’t a grant-giving body.”

This approach didn’t go over well with arts groups. Fuelled by impossible expectations of what could reasonably be achieved in C Channel’s first year, the Canadian Opera Company and others in the artistic community were irate that they’d endorsed LAMB’s CRTC submission but had not yet received television production funds.

Money Troubles

For all the protestations of pickiness by C Channel spokespeople, the reality was the channel was severely under-capitalized for its business model. Independent producer Jack McAndrew, who recorded Bach’s The Passion According to St. John at Montreal’s Notre Dame Cathedral for C Channel, admitted that he had to defer his fees because C Channel couldn’t absorb cost overruns. Other producers eventually didn’t even bother pitching because they knew C Channel couldn’t match their asking price.

Buoyed by overly optimistic projections, C Channel had drastically overspent on productions in their start-up phase. “Instead of spending 20 per cent of revenues,” Cowan later admitted, “we spent about 200 per cent.” While First Choice and Superchannel could maintain a healthier cash flow by relying on “off the shelf” Canadian films rather than new programs, in the absence of a similar back catalogue of performing arts video recordings, C Channel had to start from scratch. (Left: article from the Globe and Mail; June 11, 1983.)

Despite their early optimism, C Channel brass soon realized that they’d underestimated the seriousness of their license restrictions. And, in unison with the other pay services, by the mid-spring they complained of overly strict Canadian content regulations.

Cowan vented in the months after C Channel’s collapse:

The present situation has got to be a terrible frustration to producers who want to create quality programs that Canadians will watch. It’s simple. Producers want to create them. The government wants to encourage them. So why can’t we? Because nobody’s prepared to talk about the untalkable. We never talk about the sacrosanct system of Canadian content that was set up years ago, and we never talk about how we’ve got to scrap it and start all over.

Cowan argued that the CRTC should have instead nurtured the nascent networks lower but then ever-increasing Cancon requirements as viewership stabilized.

First Choice’s practices illustrate how other pay-TV stations exploited loopholes in regulations. At the same time as First Choice was turning down countless proposals from independent Canadian producers in the winter of 1983, the station signed a co-production deal with Playboy whereby the resulting adult films were certified as Canadian content.

First Choice and Superchannel also relied on an accounting trick called “scaffolding.” If an American network was willing to provide $80,000, the payment to producers would flow through the Canadian channel (which might add $20,000 of its own money) so that the project appeared on the books as a $100,000 investment in Canadian content. (Right: C Channel President Edgar Cowan from Cinema Canada; November 1983.)

But for Canadian independent producers, often signed on by well-funded American companies to help fulfill bare minimum compliance for certification as Canadian content, co-productions could be less than ideal. McAndrew recounted with regret his own experience in co-production of Romance, a soap opera serial, to Cinema Canada‘s Lucie Hall in May 1983:

I have since decided that I would no longer work as a producer on these types of productions because it is too demeaning to be used that way. It’s demeaning for the same reason that whoring is considered a necessary service in some quarters but is ultimately demeaning to the participants….It’s all very self-defeating and demeaning and I don’t like being treated as a serf on my own turf.

From all accounts, C Channel avoided such financial sleight of hand and dealt with producers fairly and honestly. As a result, McAndrew argued, most producers preferred working with C Channel. The only problem, it seemed, was the promising venture had been woefully under-capitalized.

Article from the Globe and Mail (May 10, 1983)

By mid-May, the company could no longer hide the troubles. They had burned through almost $6 million of initial investor money as well as a $3.5 million loan from the Toronto-Dominion Bank. The Globe and Mail reported: “the company desperately needs new equity to get it over the financing gap created because initial programming and marketing costs of a pay service are very high, but revenues grow slowly as subscribers join.”

C Channel had monthly revenues of about $225,000 from an estimated 28,000 subscribers. It was a far cry from the company’s expectation of at least 70,000 by that point and the 200,000 necessary by year’s end to break even. The miniscule revenues weren’t even enough to cover basic operating expenses, and the channel had to back out of commitments to a Leonard Cohen special and the Montreal International Jazz Festival.

Last-Ditch Efforts

Part of the problem, Cowan later diagnosed, was that from the start the company had been wholly unable to attract the right equity investors. The founding investors with personal wealth to match their passion for the arts—and thus willing to suffer short-term pain for C Channel’s long-term vision—clashed at the boardroom table with investors expecting profitability in the short-term.

And C Channel found little success attracting new investors due to a variety of factors. Industry insiders and journalists blamed the CRTC’s bungling of the pay-TV file by approving too many stations at the same time—without ensuring enough differentiation between the likes of First Choice and Superchannel—and basing Cancon expectations on the overly rosy predictions of applicants. Moreover, the federal government then established a Broadcast Fund in the spring of 1983 to subsidize the Canadian independent producer industry but specifically excluded pay-TV productions from accessing the fund. Finally, pay-TV was subject to cost volatility because rates with Telesat—which transmitted pay-TV signals through the Anik C3 satellite—and with individual cable companies were left unregulated by the CRTC.

Just when the troubled C Channel did begin making headway with potential investors, federal Minister of Communication Francis Fox undid it all. “I wish he’d stop being such a blowhard on this issue,” Cowan raged to the Globe and Mail‘s Stephen Godfrey in late June. “How many times have we listened to him say he’s not giving money? Who asked him?”

He elaborated further in an interview with Cinema Canada (November 1983): “[Fox] made statements about how the government was not prepared to help the pay licensees. Now, I hadn’t asked for anything, but when the government tells me that they are not prepared to set up structures or agencies to insure that a license they have granted is going to be successful, it had the effect of scaring the hell out of our investors.” (Left: article from the Toronto Star; June 23, 1983.)

To make matters worse, the pay-TV services couldn’t sell directly to their customers but had to rely on cable company salespeople, who made easy sales to existing customers to upgrade to pay packages—at $16 per channel—but didn’t reach out to new customers. C Channel discovered that the arts and culture station had not, in fact, lured occasional viewers to heavier viewing as expected. “We’re still seeing the heavy TV watcher being the only one to take pay-television,” the Globe and Mail quoted Cowan in June. “So far, the rest of the country hasn’t moved.” He blamed the cable companies.

C Channel’s own abysmal marketing efforts were also a culprit. The few advertisements that did appear put such an emphasis on arts and culture that many viewers didn’t even realize C broadcast movies. At the same moment, the pay-TV competition was spending an astronomical $500,000 per week for television ads.

“The name says it all,” Star critic Rick Groen bemoaned in June. “C Channel, with the heavy emphasis on C, was out to woo the culturally elite back to the plebian tube….They were after the ‘up-scale’ crowd, the folks with a large propensity for the arts and a fat wallet to match.” Groen questioned whether the niche viewers ever existed in sufficient quantity to sustain a pay network, no matter how high the quality of its programming.

Article from the Globe and Mail (May 13, 1983)

The C brass launched a “Survivathon” of continuous 24-hour programming—interspersed with on-air pleas from the likes of Karen Kain, Sylvia Tyson, and Andrea Martin—on Thursday May 12 at 5 p.m., ending on Sunday at midnight. The pitch was to encourage existing subscribers to each convince one friend to sign up, thus doubling subscriptions to 50,000 by weekend’s end.

By special permission of the CRTC, C’s signal was allowed to be unscrambled so customers without converter boxes could sample the service. At one point in Toronto, Rogers Cable was showing C Channel simultaneously on four separate television channels. Some cable systems, on the other hand, refused to even staff their telephone lines over the weekend to accept new subscription requests.

But the estimates of new subscribers were discouraging, ranging from 2,000 to 5,000. A stock offering to coincide with the “Survivathon” proved similarly disastrous. Instead of an anticipated $5.5 million, it raised only $810,000.

The End

By early June, Cowan had met with 75 groups and individuals (by his own estimation) about investing in C Channel. Most, like The Disney Channel (not yet available in Canada), wanted to rebrand and reformat the network. The CRTC, however, was unwilling to accept that possibility. CRTC chairman John Meisel was asked at a public forum: “Are you prepared to see a pay-TV channel go under, if it can’t meet its original program promises?” His quick and decisive reply: “Yes.”

Talks with potential investors came to nothing. On June 17, 1983, C Channel went into receivership. “We’ll take care of all staff salaries that are owed and all taxes owed the government,” Cowan announced. “After that, the bank is next in line. There are a number of creditors but the bank is the only one that’s secured.”

With the option of keeping C Channel afloat, maintaining subscriber revenue while continuing to broadcast programming it had paid for but hadn’t yet used, or ceasing operations to sell off assets, receiver PriceWaterhouse chose the latter. On June 30, it went off the air. The last program broadcast the Tracy-Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike.

“I thought that C Channel was a good service, an interesting service and I, personally, would have hoped that more Canadians would have subscribed to it,” Minister Fox said upon hearing the news. “But the ultimate test is the market test for C Channel and the other pay-TV services.”

C Channel’s studio, offices, and other production assets were sold to Crossroads Christian Communications, producers of 100 Huntley Street and aspirants to a national religious television network. Rogers purchased the pay-TV licence for $12,500 a few months later in December 1983, but the deal was thwarted by the CRTC and fell through.

Article from the Toronto Star (June 25, 1983)

Other pay-TV services that went on the air in 1983 fared little better than C Channel in the first year of business. Star Channel, in the Maritimes, eventually shut down; and Quebec’s TVEC merged with First Choice, which itself lost a staggering $21 million that first year. They all suffered the same cost volatility and half-hearted salesmanship from the cable companies, as well as the rising popularity of VCRs.

In 1984, First Choice and Superchannel reorganized themselves into two monopolies, dividing the country on the Manitoba-Ontario border, and survive today as The Movie Network and Movie Central, respectively.

The two found success by being bundled by cable companies with newly licensed specialty channels—The Sports Network and MuchMusic—which seemed to provide a greater value for the consumer than individual fees for service. The industry and the CRTC seemed to have learned the lessons of C Channel’s demise. The way new channels were introduced to the market was adapted, particularly by forcing consumers to opt out of the costs of new services rather than opting in. As a result, when Bravo!, a more populist take on arts and culture, took to the air in 1995, it succeeded where C Channel failed.

Sources consulted include: Ian Anthony in Broadcaster (October 2002); Tom Perlmutter, “A Woobly Picture for Pay-TV,” Report On Business Magazine (April 26, 1985); Walter Pitman, Louis Applebaum: A Passion for Culture (Dundurn, 2002); Ben Viccari in Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada (Summer 1997); Cinema Canada issues from February, April, and May 1982, January, May, and November 1983, March and May 1985; as well as articles from the Globe and Mail of January 7 & 30, May 10, 13, 14, 18 & 27, June 10, 11, 18 & 30, July 29 and December 8, 1983; Postmedia News of December 27, 1994, and January 8, 1995; and the Toronto Star of January 6, 19, 20 & 26, February 2 & 25, March 7, April 19 & 20, May 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18 & 24, June 18, 23 & 25, and July 29, 1983, December 2, 1986, and December 18, 1993.

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

WHERE: Queen Street East and Degrassi Street

WHEN: Wednesday, February 22, 3:30 p.m.

WHAT: Last week came the sad news that Neil Hope, the actor who played Wheels on Degrassi, had died five years ago, his death unknown to his family and castmates until just recently. Today, at the intersection of Queen and Degrassi, a small memorial in his honour.

Hat tip to @rachelconduit.

Click on the map to view the full-size version.

Teen pregnancy, teased-out hair, and Joey Jeremiah’s fedoras: Degrassi Junior High had it all. Long before the likes of Drake and other airbrushed teens reclaimed the famous fictional school for the noughties, the first season of DJH changed not only after-school programming but Canadian television. Critically acclaimed for its frank take on social issues (now somewhat diluted by the dated, outrageous fashion) DJH resonated beyond the 49th parallel, running on PBS and the BBC—anyone who has hosted a visiting DJH fan to the city has had to break the news that there is no “real” Degrassi Junior High. But there’s no shortage of memorable moments that were filmed around the city. Some of the locations have changed over time, but as the kids on Degrassi learned, that’s just part of growing up.

Photo of George Feyer on CBC's Razzle Dazzle, 1961, by Albert Crookshank, CBC Still Photo Collection.

George Feyer was stuffing feathers into quilts for $18 a week in 1949 when he sold his cartoon in Canada. It was, by all accounts, a rather subdued gag about a man being fitted for glasses.

It was only after its publication that the editors were informed by other immigrants that Feyer’s cartoon contained a second, hidden joke: a series of Hungarian swear words spelled out on the optometrist’s chart in the background. The unamused editors admonished Feyer, but luckily the incident didn’t stall the cartoonist’s career then and there.

More than just the best-known and most prosperous cartoonist in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, Feyer was a foremost pop culture figure of his day. Armed with a whimsical imagination and a dark sense of humour, Feyer’s print media work ignored taboos of the day, often engaging lewd or lascivious subject matter.

But, he was lighthearted enough for frequent appearances on television, particularly on children’s shows. And he was a lively personality among Toronto’s literary set until his untimely death at the peak of his career. Yet today, Feyer is largely unknown to the broader public; his few books are long out of print.

Feyer was a fascinating, enigmatic character who was close to few people. Like his first Maclean’s cartoon, first impressions of the man as an affable joker obscure a darker bearing.

Image from Maclean's (June 15, 1954).

Feyer quickly established an international reputation. From providing cartoons to Maclean’s, Feyer regularly sold work to Collier’s, Punch, The New Yorker, and publications all over the world. The recent immigrant from Hungary could soon afford to move from his dive apartment along Spadina to an upscale flat.

About one-third of Feyer’s work for the print media—a great deal of which some consider the cartoonist’s best work—was rejected by editors and remains unpublished. The vast majority of rejected drawings were bawdy, even licentious, depictions of an overtly sexual nature. Others were judged to be overly caustic commentaries on politics or religion.

Image from Maclean's (December 17, 1966).

Over lunch in March 1959, Feyer remarked to Pierre Berton “that all the cartoons he, personally, liked were invariably rejected in favor of cartoons which he drew under duress but hated for their banality.” The cartoonist shared an example he said had been repeatedly rejected as too grisly for publication. Berton, then on staff at the Toronto Star dutifully reproduced it in those pages. The illustration of a man’s arm clutching an umbrella protruding from a dog’s mouth depicted, Berton explains, “man’s determination to survive in the face of fearful odds.”

Feyer’s work was popular and noteworthy enough that magazine editors were willing to dig through a pile of his sketches for something publishable. Or they’d have Feyer draw and re-draw an idea to eliminate its racier elements.

Like the rabble-rousing Berton himself, Feyer was one of the few figures who could poke fun at the sanctimonious mores of mid-century Canadian society while enjoying broad popular appeal with this very audience. He became, Terry Mosher writes in Maclean’s (October 14, 2002), “the charming enfant terrible of Toronto’s media set.”

A light drinker, at cocktail parties Feyer, a very diminutive man, might drift from group to group as more loquacious guests conversed, hardly noticed. But then, Feyer told McKenzie Porter in the most extensive profile of Feyer during his lifetime, which appeared in Maclean’s (May 7, 1960), he would sidle up to an attractive woman in a quiet corner.

He might pretend to be hard of hearing in order to lean in close, or feign broken English even though he spoke five languages fluently—albeit with a Hungarian accent. “I’m afraid,” he might say, “that I speak an accent without a trace of English.” And he might sprinkle small talk with puckish turns of phrase: calling himself an “off-beatnik”; renaming the popular Junior League women’s service club as the “Junior Plague”; and labelling a well-known but temperamental female singer as a “schizo-soprano.”

Image from Pierre Berton, Fast Fast Fast Relief (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1962).

Having disarmed his womanly prey with such convivial charm, he’d brandish his ever-present felt pen and seek permission to draw on her. As Porter details, Feyer might draw a little man across her shoulder-blades, climbing out from the back of her dress; doodle a trapeze artist dangling from a necklace; or turn fingers into the legs of a pair of ballet dancers. “He particularly liked to draw on women’s bosoms,” Feyer’s wife would later recall with fondness.

He’d draw on just about anything at parties, turning mundane everyday items like bathroom fixtures and elevator buttons into quirky (and most frequently, racy) cartoons. At parties at the Royal York Hotel, Feyer was known to remove framed pictures from the wall, quickly sketch a naughty scene on the wall itself, and replace the picture to hide his mischief.

With this schtick repeated at countless parties in the 1950s and 1960s, it was perhaps too easy, then, for other guests to dismiss Feyer as a jovial little fellow, a clown. But there was an underlying darkness in Feyer.

Image from Pierre Berton, Fast Fast Fast Relief (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1962).

“I am not a funny little man,” Feyer complained to Porter. “I am sad and serious. I am so serious that when I am on TV they have to get a stage hand to poke me in the back with a broom to remind me when to smile. Humor is my business, not my recreation. For recreation I read philosophy. I get so tired of humor.”

“He was in no sense a clown,” Berton added in a eulogy for his friend in the Star (April 1, 1967). “He was a serious, thoughtful sad man with a serious, thoughtful and sad view of the world. He had every reason to be.” Feyer had seen more of the world than most.

Additional image is from the Toronto Star (March 23, 1959).

Yep. Them’s zombies. It's the season for 'em.

Hey, do you want to watch a TV show about a haunted house? “But wait,” you say, “most haunted house movies run out of steam halfway through; how is an ongoing show going to keep up my interest?” So I say that it has Dylan McDermott in it. Then you look at me funny. And then you end up watching American Horror Story anyway, for reasons you cannot adequately explain. Sometimes, these things just happen. (City, 9 p.m.)

Wilfred is an American remake of an Australian TV show where a man in the middle of a nervous breakdown sees his neighbour’s dog as a man in a dog suit rather than just a dog. It is, if you could not guess, a comedy. Elijah Wood plays the breakdowning lead; Jason Gann plays the man in the dog suit, reprising his role from the Australian version. It is a solidly okay show, with occasional flashes of brilliance and occasional flashes of mediocrity. But it’s already been renewed for a second season, so at least you won’t be left hanging. (City, 10 p.m.)

Monster In-Laws has nothing to do with the terrible Jane Fonda/Jennifer Lopez film of the almost-same name, but is instead a reality show about family therapy sessions among battling in-laws. Hey, do you derive sick pleasure from seeing normal, average people fighting bitterly with one another? Then this show is for you! Otherwise just go watch the show with the guy in the dog suit. (A&E, 10 p.m.)

Third new show of the night on City: The League returns for season three, and this show about a fantasy football league has grown to become one of the most consistently funny sitcoms on TV thanks to a brilliant cast and a dedication to raunchy humour that at present is only bested by It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. (10:30 p.m.)

Tuesday

If you’re interested in what happens in other provinces, tonight you can catch the Saskatchewan provincial election debate, where Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party—which at this point has essentially completely taken over the entirety of the provincial Liberal and Conservative parties—is set to again be victorious over the New Democrats, led by Dwain Lingenfelter, who has the greatest name in Canadian politics at the present time by at least two syllables’ worth of awesomeness. Unless, of course, Wall somehow makes a crucial gaffe during this debate. Perhaps he will suggest that Saskatchewan should install its own mountain range, and then Lingenfelter could be all, “no, we Saskatchewanians stand for flatness above all!” and then the election’s fortunes would dramatically reverse. It could happen! (SunTV, 8 p.m.)

Hey, do you like how on Auction Hunters, they managed to make a show out of the entertaining aftereffects of people going bankrupt and losing all their stuff? Well, now Spike has chosen to complement that show with Flip Men, which is a show about the entertaining aftereffects of people going bankrupt and losing their homes: the spunky protagonists buy foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar, refurbish them as quickly as possible, and sell them. This being Spike, the show mostly focuses on the “funny” houses—the meth lab, the house where squatters have been living (squatters! COMEDY GOLD!), the rundown shacks. But, just to keep it all in perspective, the show also has some episodes devoted to “goldmines,” where the house is in perfect condition and they barely have to do a damn thing other than remind people to forget about the family that lived there previously before Dad lost his job and Mom got cancer. (10:30 p.m.)

Wednesday

Dragon’s Den this week is an “all-student special,” which means the kids will either be brilliant or exceptionally stupid by Dragon standards. There’s not going to be an in-between here, we don’t think. (CBC, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

Televisualist always recommends watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and we sure aren’t going to stop doing so now. “I got a rock.” (ABC, 8 p.m.)

We’re not entirely sure why, in the lead-up to Halloween, Turner Classic has decided to show Fiddler on the Roof, or why Turner Classic has now decided that a movie from the ’70s now falls within its “classic” mandate (until recently, TCM shied away from the ’60s as being too modern), but it has, and we are thankful for it because, come on, it’s Fiddler. (8 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Treehouse of Horror XIX,” which is the one with the It’s The Great Pumpkin homage where the Simpsons characters are redrawn, Peanuts-style. Also features the brilliant opening with Homer trying to vote for Barack Obama. “Hello, I’d like to vote for president, governor, and anything else that will take money away from our parks and libraries.” (Fox, 11 p.m.)

Friday

Chuck returns for its fifth and final season, and after the fourth season—which started out weak and then got progressively better towards the end—we’re not sure what to expect, as Chuck is one of those shows that pivots sharply along the quality line and often relies on the significant charm of its cast in order to skate past gaping plot holes. But on the other hand, the dialogue is usually funny and the cast, as mentioned, is excellent, and this season will be the only time where Chuck‘s writers won’t have to be writing both a possible ending and a possible ongoing series for practically every episode, so on the whole we’re optimistic. (8 p.m, CHCH).

When new series were announced for the fall season a while back, Grimm was generally lumped with Once Upon A Time as the two “fairytale” series coming at the same time. However, the two shows are not kith and kin by any stretch: Once Upon A Time is a mythology-driven show with extensive plot arcs (or at least appears to be), while Grimm is very much more coming from a Buffy/Supernatural zone—a horror-action show where the fairy tales are monsters and the Chosen Hero has to kill them real good. It’s not bad, but it’s just treading the same ground those shows previously did and needs to do a lot of work to distinguish itself. Especially when Supernatural is, you know, still on. (CTV, 8 p.m.; also NBC at 9 p.m.)

The Weekend

Allen Gregory is Jonah Hill’s new animated comedy about a ridiculously brilliant seven-year-old going to elementary school for the first time, and from the first episode it appears to have one joke as its premise. But it’s a good joke. We have no idea if they can stretch it out into a series though. (Global, 8:30 p.m. Sunday)