On Thursday, when the news broke, there was a temptation to blame the sudden shuttering of Canada AM to loosening Canadian content requirement requirements. These were implemented last year by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission. One of the results of that “Let’s Talk TV” pow-wow in Ottawa was a gradual reduction in the number of hours Canadian Over-The-Air
I write about television, but very seldom about television sets. This is a story about one I brought home from my parent’s house today. It is a Clairtone. It was the first colour set my family owned. With my mom’s move to a retirement home, the time had come to sell and empty out her
Like Art Linkletter, Alan Young was one of those Canadians embraced as all American in the early days of U.S. network television. He died earlier this week at 96. Born in England, his family moved to Scotland and then, when he was six-years-old, West Vancouver, He got hooked on radio as a lad due to
In a brave, new digital era of binge viewing, trust me to get hooked on a series which began back in the ’60s. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father ran for three seasons, from 1969 to ’72. I liked it as a pre-teen and enjoyed it even more the past several weeks as I caught up with
Still several time zones removed from reality, I managed to scramble downtown earlier this week to attend Wayne & Shuster in Black and White, a presentation of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Held at the University of Toronto’s Innis College (a wonderful mid-size screening room I hadn’t been in since attending U of T), the
Look up “’60s TV Dads” in the dictionary and there should be a photograph of the gentleman to the right: William Schallert. The actor passed away earlier this week at 93. Best known as patriarch Martin Lane on The Patty Duke Show (1963 -’66), Schallert’s face and voice were as familiar as test patterns throughout the
O lord how it rained. The story behind the greatest Super Bowl half time show ever is here. Production designer Bruce Rogers was in the truck in Miami for Super Bowl XLI and tells how, when Prince was warned it was pouring rain, he asked, “Can you make it rain harder?” Price was plugged into four,
One of the things that surprised Sean Patrick Shaul while making “Silent Legend: The Mack Sennett Story” was how few people, even in the film and TV business, had even heard of the man dubbed the original “King of Comedy.” The Vancouver-based filmmaker’s Sennett doc premieres Monday at 8 p.m. on CBC’s Documentary Channel. Having