You never want to be caught without your laptop or even an iPad when somebody as special as Alex Trebek dies. I was crossing up Hwy 6, headed to close a cottage on the Bruce Peninsula, when my phone lit up with messages from Murtz Jaffer. The CTV News Channel producer was calling with the
Sean Connery — this was no time to die. I never met him, and I’m sure I would have remembered if I had. I do remember the first time I saw him on screen. It was at the long-gone Orangeville Drive-In north of Toronto. My parents knew the family who ran the outdoor theatre, including
Those blockheads at ABC have Boomers all a Twitter. They’ve decided not to air A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in prime time on network TV in 2020. Curse you, Disney executive chairman Robert Iger! It’s been 55 years since A Charlie Brown Christmas first charmed kids and parents in
I watched an interesting TV show Wednesday night, all about teachers using television to conduct remote learning classes to students at home. No, it wasn’t a live zoom demo. It was an episode of a 66-year-old TV series. The Peabody award winning series was Mister Peepers, starring Wally Cox. The still charming, classroom-based comedy was
Way back when the British spy drama The Avengers made its way to North American TV screens in the mid-’60s, I was more into Hot Wheels than hot babes. My TV thrills were found watching Batman, and perhaps Get Smart! and Lost in Space — not some imported, tongue-in-cheek James Bond hour for adults. Yet,
Frequent visitors to this site will know that I collect TV shows on 16mm film. Older readers will remember this format from high school, when pizza-sized reels of film were threaded on a projector, the lights would go out and everybody took a quick nap. I stayed awake, and never lost my fascination with the
When I was a young lad, the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup so often it was boring. One player who was never boring, however, was Eddie Shack. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He could score goals, he had the knack. He also had a nose for value. He was more animated than Peter
I tried, I really tried to pay tribute to Regis Philbin Saturday on CTV News Channel. Between me being at a remote, Internet-challenged cottage and some snafus back at the studio in Toronto, however, it just wouldn’t happen. What we finally had to settle for was me filing my comments over the phone. That’s how