Category

TV History

Category

Elwy Yost was such an unlikely TV star. With that big round head, bushy moustache and over-sized glasses, he looked more like a butcher or detective or some other character actor from one of his favourite films from the ’30s or ’40s. The former host of TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies passed away Thursday in

I was on an Air Canada flight bound for Los Angeles Sunday morning and unaware until I landed of “the saddest news” being sent via email from Don Ferguson. Roger Abbott was dead. Roger’s passing hit me a lot harder than any other obit I’ve ever reported. I had the great good fortune to get

LeLanne (left) meets 98lb weakling News of the passing yesterday of Jack LaLanne at 96 brought me back to my encounter with the famous fitness guru 13 years ago at the Hollywood Collectors Show. LaLanne was just 83 then but he was still  probably the oldest guy in the room. He was probably the fittest, too. The Hollywood

It will be hard to imagine Citytv without the boomimg baritone of Mark Dailey. More than any other broadcaster in Canada, he was the voice of his city and his network. The veteran news anchor died today after a courageous battle with cancer. He was 57. Dailey began his career at City in Toronto in 1979.

MNF`s big three: Don Meredith, Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford Frank Gifford was asked recently about the current state of the TV broadcast booth. Gifford, one-third of the most famous trio of Monday Night Football announcers (the others being Howard Cosell and Don Meredith), said he wasn’t too impressed. All that boosterism bugged him, he said.

When the Naked Gun movies came out in the late ’80s and early ’90s, friends would not sit next to me in the theatres–I laughed that much. So, when I was invited to have lunch with and interview Leslie Nielsen in the mid-’90s, when he was in Toronto promoting his mostly made up autobiography, The Naked

Last hand: Connelly, Patterson, Cannell and Fillion Stephen J. Cannell was one of the icons of American television. The prolific writer/executive producer lost a battle with Melanoma Thursday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 69. Castle star Nathan Fillion spoke admiringly about Cannell during a visit to the set of the ABC series in 2009.

Over the years I’ve spent covering television I’ve only met a few genuine movie stars. One was Tony Curtis, who died Wednesday in Hollywood at 85. First time I met the man was way back in 1986, on one of my first TCA press tours. Curtis was at the Century Plaza hotel in Beverly Hills,