Montreal Media Memories

Cool Birthday Cake at the end of CFCF (CTV Montreal) 50th anniversary special.

I just watched the special and it was very very good, the vintage footage and the singing tribute by Bowser and Blue at the end which was pretty well spot on.

I have a page on my Tighsolas website about Johnny Jellybean that gets a lot of hits. It’s a footnote to my play Looking For Mrs. Peel.

Johnny Jellybean was a TV character, one truly beloved to Montreal children of the era.

In 1981 or 2 Ted Zeigler, the comic actor who played Johnny Jellybean, visited the station and a producer noticed that everyone was coming around to the studio for a peek. “We employees ignore all the sports heroes and such who pass through this place,” he said,”but we go berzerk for Johnny Jellybean.”

I know because the producer said it to me. I was working in radio, as a copywriter in that era, and the CFCF radio offices where adjacent the TV Newsroom. I was one of those employees trying to sneak a peek of Zeigler.

What really freaks me out about this 50th Anniversary Special is that more years have passed between 1982 and today, than had passed between 1982 and 1961, the year CFCF (Canada’s First, Canada’s Finest) came on the air. In 1982, as a young adult in my 20′s, 1961 seemed a million years in the past, while 1982 seems like yesterday to me right now, although I have sons in their twenties to prove it isn’t.

So it goes.

I know I didn’t see CFCF come on the air because my family was living in Labrador and only moved back to Montreal in November.

As it happens, they aired a clip of Jimmy Tapp who anchored one of the station’s first shows. Jimmy worked in radio as an announcer in 1982. His son worked there too.

Magic Tom, well, I never went on his show as a child, but my Aunt was in Army Recruiting during the war and I guess she had worked with him. Sometimes in the late 70′s we met him downtown and she introduced us. He was a very handsome man and I could tell she had had a crush on him back in the old days.

Oh, and Jack Curran worked in radio too. He once told me a story about one of the Romper Room hostesses, which I won’t reveal here, but let’s say, she acted out of character. I don’t think they showed a clip of that popular pre-school program.

Anyway, it’s true what Mitsumi said about the special feelings Anglo Montreal has for CFCF. The station holds a unique place in our hearts because of our unique (and often annoying) situation, politically-speaking.

I’m sure there are many, many Torontonians who would like to have seen this show (and maybe they did on satellite). I know quite a few personally.

One night, in 1983, I awoke in a cold sweat because I suddenly realized I had forgotten to change a radio ad for the next day, and it would start playing at 3 am or something. So I took a taxi into work.

Well, the taxi driver was a young law student from McGill and he was just SOOO thrilled to be in the building at 405 Ogilvy, his head was spinning, almost literally as he took it all in. I recall him saying, despondently, as we left, “I guess this is the first and last time I’ll see this place.” Gee, maybe he was coming onto me. Too late now!

Anyway, Edith and Flora would have lived long enough to see CFCF come on the air, although they retired and moved back to Richmond around that time.

I wonder what TV stations Richmond could get in the 60′s. They loved to watch Bonanza. But I seem to recall that show was on the CBC.

One more thing: CFCF was a Canadian Marconi Station. In 1912, Marconi was experimenting with radio waves. I read an article about it in Technical World. He was hoping his new invention would have a democratizing effect on the world’s citizens, that it would even the playing field, so to speak, similar to what was hoped for the Internet. Hmm. How Interesting.

A Picture is worth 1000 words?

Flo and friends, circa 1910

I just saw the movie, Up in the Air, with George Clooney, directed by Jason Reitman, a Canadian. It is an extremely well crafted movie, and very enjoyable, with some very clever and funny lines. My only problem with it, was a sign of its flawless execution, for it was a cold movie, with a bit of a documentary feel – as befits its story-line and main character.

I suspect that it won’t be a movie (like Michael Clayton) that I will watch over and over… I think MC has one of the best screenplays ever. I love Tom Wilkinson’s ‘bread’ speech.

Yet, I also suspect that Reitman’s Up in the Air will go down in cinematic history as a classic because it captures the moment perfectly, and that it not easy to do in a time of rapid change.

Due to the new technologies we live very different lives from people 100, 50, even 20 years ago.

People in The Tighsolas Era (1908-1913)were also experiencing a paradigm shift, as they say.

Flo and Edie, who loved to watch the TV show Gunsmoke in their later years, saw more change in their lifetime than any who came before.

In 1908, when our Tighsolas story unfolds, airplanes, or aeroplanes were just getting off the ground and the auto was becoming a desired item among average middle class men.

Motion pictures were just becoming popular and the theatre industry was worrried about its survival. The ‘cheap’ seats were going unfilled.

Talking Machines (victrolas) were bringing music into the home (which worried some mothers).

Home movies, in the form of various machines that projected images, were being pushed big time. But they never really took off, did they? At least until VCR’s were invented.

Marconi was just experimenting with his wireless signals. He felt that his invention would change the world order by empowering ‘the little guy’, just like what people hope for with the Internet.

But technology changes us in ways we can’t predict.

For some interesting articles on entertainment in 1910 go to www.tighsolas.ca/page597.html.

As my Tighsolas story reveals, in 1910 people were still very social. Your connections in 1910 were your lifeline: family, friends, camarades at the Masons, at church, were everything to you. A person without family and connections was a lost soul, unable to marry or find any work (hence, the ‘social evil’ of prostitution). As the family became more and more privatized over the decades, a person became less reliant on family and friends. Jobs and networking became what’s important.

The social safety net and good union contracts took up the slack.

But what happens in a ‘super-privatized’ environment like today, when jobs become scarce and work-security non-existant?

After all, we’ve given up, over the century, what we all used as back-up in time of trouble. Connections. We are, indeed, all up in the air….We do, in fact, rely on ONE PERSON, our mate, for security, support and help. Wow, scary. And if you don’t have a mate, what do you have?

As I was discussing Up in the Air with my 23 year old son, who ‘wants to be free’ as they say, to do what he wants and go where he wants… I was reminded of something I heard on BBC Radio Four.

An interviewee was defending those obscenely overpaid Wall Street and Bond Street brokers (during ‘the downturn’) saying that ‘they give up everything to do their job. They never see their wives or their children.’ I found this line of thought rather lame: so being a lousy husband and father, a robot of a kind, is justification for making huge amounts of money -even when you’ve failed miserably at this job.

Up in the Air is about just this kind of person, I think, except Clooney’s character is One Up on the Wall Street types, for whom money is the be all and end all. He actually has some human contact, although only with human beings he is firing, people he never sees or hears about again. I guess that is the central irony of the cautionary tale.

I should think about this and write a better essay.