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Last week, Peter Mansbridge celebrated being in the main chair at CBC Television News for twenty years. To celebrate this anniversary, the producers snuck in a video of Mansbridge’s first broadcast twenty years ago in the following broadcast.
Video will pause for a bit at start. Surprise happens after Coyne’s comments.
On today’s date in 1902, the first transatlantic wireless message was exchanged between Canada and England, via Signal Hill in Newfoundland. Contrary to popular belief, the first words spoken were not: ” ‘Allo? Is this the 1XB line? Winnipeg? Are you there? “
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Forecasting the looming death of the MotherCorp seems to be something of a pastime among Canadian pundits.
Check out this issue of TV Guide about 20 years ago.
Little could they know, we’re still alive. 
In case you want to buy this classic issue, it’s available on eBay for $5.
Maybe make a poster out of it?…
From the great folks at the CBC Digital Archives comes this photo from the Glenbow Museum site. It’s a photo of the staff lounge at CBC Calgary in 1961. Nice.
Do you have any pics of the CBC from the 60s or 70s? Email them to insidecbcblog@gmail.com
Look up, look wa-a-ay up… and wave bye-bye. Rusty and Jerome have left the building.
On Tuesday, the CBC Museum held a going away party for Rusty the Rooster, Jerome the Giraffe, and 51 pieces of paraphernalia from Friendly Giant. The items, which were on loan from the family of the late Bob Homme, are being returned to his family.
(According to a story in the Globe, the items were returned after the puppets appeared in a skit on this year’s Gemini Awards. They were portrayed as living in a retirement home, “where a narrator described them as sitting around, drinking, smoking and having sex.”)
None of Homme’s family were present at the farewell party, but there were milk and cookies, reruns of the show, and a duo of recorder players performing Early One Morning.
(Feeling nostaligic? Watch the Friendly Giant opening sequence on this YouTube clip, which includes CBC-TV ads from 1984. Or see the puppets work on the theme music in this YouTube clip.)
Not all the 51 pieces were on display at the museum - they include small objects like guitars for Rusty, hats, and snow covered turrets to use on the castle in winter time. (More photos on my Flickr set. H/T to Elizabeth Bridge for the pictures and headline.)
Also in the crowd were people who worked on the show during its 26-year run. One of them was John McCarthy. He’s now operations manager for the Network Production Centre, but back in 1979 he was a special effect technician working on Friendly Giant. The highlight of his career: lowering the drawbridge on Friendly’s castle each day. (Runner up: making the cow jump over the moon.)
“We did the models for the show, and made the instruments,” McCarthy said. “And we frequently had to repair Jerome’s ‘castle neck’.” The giraffe’s long neck would frequently wear out from rubbing against the wood of his window frame.
McCarthy said everything was “live to tape” back in those days, and believe it or not the musicians played the music live each time, seated behind the set. “Bob was a great recorder player,” John remembers.
What are your memories of the Friendly Giant? Share them here!
On this day five years ago, Queen Elizabeth toured the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto and paused for a moment to ask about the CBC Archives web site — one of the displays set up in the hopes of catching the royal eye.
Walking with Minister of Canadian Heritage Sheila Copps, the then-CBC Chair Carol Taylor introduced the Queen to the new media presenters. The Queen approached the display to inquire, “And what is this, exactly?”
Turns out it was a television clip of the 1959 Calgary Stampede showing the young Queen sitting in the crowd with Prince Philip. The Queen also viewed archival footage of her opening the Canadian Parliament in 1957.
(Factoid: While watching the archival footage, the Queen was told the website documents CBC radio and television clips from the past 70 years in both French and English. Sounding surprised, she responded, “In both languages?”)
For those of us old enough to remember when cutting tape meant, literally, cutting tape (you can still see grease pencils lying around the corridors occasionally), this beautiful photo of a reel-to-reel tape recorder was snapped by Daniel Harris in North Sydney, NS. The recorder was found in an abandoned house.
Photo: “symbolism? i’m not sure” by Daniel W Harris
Now that it’s a new year, I thought I’d try to collect a list of important dates in the CBC’s history. I’ve culled what I can from the CBC archives site but, as you can see in the sidebar to the right, I’m hoping to have one item of historical significance each day.
Here’s what I’ve got so far. Please let me know if there are any important dates you’d like to add.
I’m certainly willing to do the legwork on it, but I wonder if such a list already exists and, if so, can someone point me to it?
Some historical sites exist, like the CBC’s official milestones site, and CBC.ca’s excellent 10th anniversary site, but none of these offer actual dates.
The CBC’s logo has remained remarkably consistent in our history, but there have been changes.
Incidentally, CBC Archives has an outstanding site called Days to Remember with schedules from CBC eras gone by. I especially am in awe of the 1942 radio schedule, with such shows dedicated to updating school children on the war, then, later, a discussion group about what to do after the war.
The CBC logo (its official name is “the gem” though many of us still call it the “exploding pizza”) is protected by all sorts of rules set down by the corporate logo police. They include:
(Fine, I made that last one up.) But it’s all for good reason. Here are just a few of the various logos that existed prior to Fall 2001 when the new logo rules came into effect:
If you had to design a new CBC logo, what would it look like? Feel free to make one and email it to me: tod {at} insidethecbc.com.
There’s an interesting and extremely odd piece in today’s Globe & Mail about my day job, the CBC Digital Archives site.
In A grab bag of CBC history, Ivor Tossell is mostly positive about the site:
While the CBC Archives website isn’t mind-blowing just yet, it’s growing into a fantastic grab bag of Canadian history — or something like it. The site features carefully chosen archival TV and radio clips by the hundreds, grouping them around topics that range from the Rolling Stones’ visits to Canada to the Halifax explosion of 1917. For each topic, there are a handful of broadcast clips spanning the years — for the Halifax explosion, say, eight television clips and four radio clips. And for each individual clip, a little box off to the side displays contextual information, which is usually thorough and interesting. It all piles up: There’s enough material to lose a history fetishist in there for days. (And the collection of clips on the evolution of computers and the Internet is just terrific.)
But Tossell also injects a thesis: that the CBC Archives site is about CBC, not history.
In fact, the more you watch, the more you realize that for all the Cancon, the CBC Archives site isn’t about Canada; it’s about the CBC itself. It might be a distinction that the Corporation encourages people to blur, but it does exist. This isn’t a definitive historical collection, but an intriguing documentary of a broadcaster’s evolution.
That’s certainly one thing that is documented in the archives – along with just about everything else that has shaped Canada in the past 70 years. And it’s a valid point in the context of the bigger argument that no media outlet is the entirely neutral observer that most pretend to be. Nor is any historian, for that matter – there’s always a point of view.
That viewpoint, logically, extends back into the archives. A document isn’t neutral just because it’s old (quite the opposite, in my experience – the air of detached neutrality is a reasonably recent invention.)
But that’s not what Tossell is getting at. He compares the CBC site to the BBC’s (a parallel he admits is “odious”) and argues that the BBC site is more about history than about the broadcaster itself. He demonstrates CBC’s self-reference by pointing to the single clip on the site that’s about the site – a presentation to the Queen (Self reference: that’s me with Her Majesty in the photo!)
OK, fair enough, we’re blowing our horn here. But it’s the only one of more than 10,000 clips that talks about our own site. The vaunted BBC doesn’t ignore itself either – check out its Themes/Radio & Television section, where half of the 23 clips are about the BBC.
I imagine if I combed through the Globe’s archives, I’d find a few stories about the newspaper too. (For the record, the CBC Archives site has clips about the BBC and the Globe too.)
A couple of reactions from CBC Digital Archives staffers:
Whose coverage were we supposed to use (besides our own)? Does any one else have more live coverage of the history of Canada? Even if someone did, would we then use their footage?
and
Broadcasting, like history, evolves. Our understanding of history is equally affected by the means we got the story in the first place. To suggest that the BBC “pushes history into the foreground” by re-purposing copy from the date in question is incorrect. The Beeb has evolved technically as well as editorially and like the CBC, it has a point of view, just like the Globe & Mail.
For me, that’s always been the most captivating part of the Archives – watching broadcasting evolve alongside technology and societal values.
Some of my favourite examples:
It’s all there, warts and all. And it’s fascinating. Why wouldn’t we cover the evolution of broadcasting, or ourselves?
Lord knows everybody else does.
Now that a number of new programs are airing on Mother Corp Television like 49th and Main and North / South, maybe we can look to the past for some new ideas.
John Candy had some, albeit tongue-in-cheek.
In these classic clips from SCTV, Candy mocks CBC programming and even does an imitation of Air Farce comedian Luba Goy.
Tip o’ the hat to John Paolozzi from CBC Radio 3!
