Ryan Couldrey, a part-time photographer working at the CBC, is posting a series of shots of “retro, lo-fi audio gear,” on his blog.

This is the first in the series. It’s an Ampex 351 reel to reel recorder. The intertubes tells me that this machine is from the 1960′s. There’s a video demonstration of one of these in action here.

Anyone have any stories/memories of using this gear?

The CBC Archives department picked up two awards last night at a ceremony in London, England.

The Digital Archives website won for Best Use of Footage on Non-television Platforms, and long-time CBC’er Roy Harris won a lifetime achievement award. Harris thanked the CBC “for understanding the importance of bringing our collective history to new audiences on new platforms.”

Paul Gorbould, senior producer for the digital archives project, said the award was “really gratifying to win,” because he says archival work is crucial, “an archive has no value if nobody sees the footage it contains.”

The CBC has an amazing legacy, “There’s a great opportunity, now more than ever, to bring all this great material back into the public eye, to see how our collective history unfolded,” Gorbould said.

The award is one of many that the CBC archives has won over the last couple of years. They’ve also won awards from the American Society of Archivists – a first for a Canadian institution – an EPpy, a Webby Award, A Prix Italia and several others.

Unfortunately, their work is under financial pressure. The digital archives site was launched in 2002 with money from the Department of Canadian Heritage. The federal government discontinued that fund in 2009. So now it’s up to the CBC to keep the project alive. “As you can imagine, it’s not a great time to look for new money. We’re working… to find ways to keep it going.” Gorbould said. “Fingers crossed.”

Ever wonder who transfers all those CBC archival tapes into a digital format? Erich Schmidt is your answer. The CBC has hundreds of thousands of beta tapes and film canisters; some of which are slowly getting transferred to digital format and published on the internet as part of the CBC’s digital archives project. It’s an amazing project, but encoding and transferring beta tapes is a time-consuming process.

Paul Gorbould took the image for the CBC’s photo competition.

Video will pause for a bit at start. Surprise happens after Coyne’s comments.

Photo by Melanie Watts, used under Creative Commons licence.

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?…

Do you have any pics of the CBC from the 60s or 70s? Email them to insidecbcblog@gmail.com

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!

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?”)

Photo: “symbolism? i’m not sure” by Daniel W Harris

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.

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:

• Do not stretch or distort the logo

• Use approved colours (red, white, black or grey) only; no purple, no green, no blue, no orange, etc.
• Do not reproduce an isolated part of the logo, or outline the symbol; logo must be used in its entirety
• Do not reproduce the logo at an angle
• Do not place the logo on a heavily patterned background or complex photograph
• Do not put anything (including type) over the logo
• Do not make the logo dimensional (i.e. do not make it appear 3D in a 2D application)
• Do not encase the logo in another shape that may be mistaken as part of the logo.
• Though tempting, the 1970s version of the logo should never be used as the hidden image in one of those Magic Eye graphics

(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.

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:

• - This clip about Africville, where the reporter actually uses the N-word when interviewing a black man (and gets called on it)
• - The clip where a child reacts to the moon landing by saying she’ll never get to go to space – because she’s a girl
• - The air quotes in Peter Mansbridge’s first mention of something called “internet”
• - The play-by-play coverage of the 1939 royal visit, where the reporters eschew actuality in favour of droning on and on
• - The horribly stilted, scripted “conversation” about what women should do after the war

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.

Tip o’ the hat to John Paolozzi from CBC Radio 3! 

One of the first fiddles used by a popular CBC music star will be auctioned off later this month. Don Messer bought the fiddle in 1930 for $105. It has been at the Nova Scotia provincial archives since Messer died in 1973.
     According to the archives:

Across the country, tens of thousands of Canadians sat by their radios three times a week from 1939 to 1958, listening to ‘Don Messer and His Islanders‘ broadcast from Charlottetown, PEI on CBC Radio. With the advent of television, Messer moved seamlessly across to the new medium, bringing his audience with him. Thousands more watched ‘Don Messer’s Jubilee’ weekly, 1956-69, produced by CBC Television in Halifax, NS. When the program was cancelled, there was a national uproar; thirty-five years later, some people miss it still.

The plain brown fiddle is a copy of a Stradivarius — the invaluable stringed instruments made by Italian Antonio Stradivari in the late 1600s. There are less than 700 such instruments left in the world, highly prized for producing exceptional sound.
     Messer had some 14 fiddles in his lifetime. A few have been sold and others given to friends. One fiddle was bought in 2004 for $8,000 at an auction.

Watch a clip from Don Messer’s Jubliee (March 4, 1968)

CBC Arts: Early Don Messer fiddle to be sold