Rod Coneybeare, the puppeteer and CBC radio host who brought Rusty the Rooster and Jerome the giraffe so vividly to life over 24 season of The Friendly Giant, has gone to the big castle in the sky. He passed away last Thursday in Lindsay, Ontario. He was 89. The CBC children’s classic, which ran weekday
We all knew Valerie Harper was dying. We knew it when she made her final Television Critics Association press tour appearance over five years ago on January 11, 2014. She was promoting a TV-movie she had shot in Langley, BC, called, “The Town That Came a Courtin’.” News that she was suffering from a form
It’s finally true: as he once told John Lennon, Peter Fonda knows what it’s like to be dead. The actor, best known for his counter-culture hero role in “Easy Rider” (1969), passed away last week at 79. His death was attributed to lung cancer, not a gunshot to the stomach. That was an accidental wound
Happy to be in The Globe and Mail this weekend thanks to an assignment from The Canadian Press. I’m in with a story on one of the biggest employers of Canadian TV talent across the country — Hallmark. The family friendly American cable brand, owned by Crown Media, spends millions annually north of the border
Every now and then I like to compare notes with my pal and Buffalo News TV columnist Alan Pergament about this crazy, exploding medium we both write about. The subject quickly swung over to the new Deadwood movie (launching Friday, May 31 on HBO and Crave). “Did you notice anything different about the movie from
Podcaster Mike Boon, a.k.a. “Toronto Mike,” invited me back on his show Monday to “kick out the jams.” Mike, a fellow Michael Power grad, who, as he liked to point out, graduated from that high school many years after I did, invites all manner of media types over to his basement studio and quizzes us
Thursday night at 8 p.m., the hour-long final episode of The Big Bang Theory will bring to an end one of the greatest success stories in TV history. The show CTV took a chance on in 2007 will have racked up ten, consecutive No. 1 finishes for an entire season. Not American Idol, not The
“What’s a Tim Conway?” a character once asked on The Simpsons. “Oh, about 128 pounds,” came the reply, voiced by Conway himself. Now it is 2019, and there is a generation out there who really are asking, “What’s a Tim Conway?” Those of us who grew up with The Carol Burnett Show as well as