TORONTO TV SHOWS THAT WERE AHEAD OF THEIR TIME
These concept shows tested the boundaries before it was cool, and before we had the Internet
Long before the Internet allowed us to easily access vast tranches of content and the notion of cord-cutting was en vogue, television stood accused of fostering a junk culture bereft of originality or progressive concepts.
Thankfully, during this pre-web era we had some intelligent, prophetic local TV shows that not only foretold much of what would come to pass but also trained us in how best to prepare for this new media revolution.
Here are six great examples of trail-blazing Toronto TV shows that augured the Internet age.
MEDIA CIRCUS, TVO
In 1974, TVOntario unleashed this punky media analysis series, the likes of which had never been seen before or since. Created as cheap ephemeral filler in the groovy mid-1970s by Jim Hanley (who also created Magic
Shadows and Nightmusic for TVO during the same period), Media Circus was a live, 90-minute exposé and discussion of what other local broadcasters were airing at that exact moment in time. With intellectual heavyweights like Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan chiming in as chatty guests, this series eviscerated many myths about media and taught viewers to take a closer, more cynical look at their sources.
FREE FOR ALL, CITYTV
A Citytv original from 1972, hosted by eccentric William Ronald in a pink polyester cape holding court over a live studio audience who were encouraged to stand up and speak their mind about any subject they desired.
Free for All helped cement Citytv’s reputation as an egalitarian enterprise but proved unsustainable as the audience often erupted in fist fights, chair throwing and offensive verbal outbursts. It was the first of its kind on TV: wholly utopic in theory, but uncontrollable and easily susceptible to mob rule. Kind of like anonymous online comments sections below website articles, now doomed to fade away for much the same reasons.
BITS & BYTES, TVO
The original computer show, radiantly hosted by Luba Goy ( Royal
Canadian Air Farce) and starring Billy Van ( The Hilarious House of Frighten
stein) as a lowly noob getting started with his Commodore PET (other computers featured included TRS-80, Atari 800 and Apple II). Featuring a Kraftwerk sampling intro theme song and short animated and computer-generated sequences, Bits
& Bytes still gets name-checked by most old-school computer programmers as the moment the Rubicon was crossed regarding computers and the role they were about to play in our lives. TVO famously offered the series as a correspondence course in 1983 to overwhelming success.
SPEAKER’S CORNER, CITYTV
Appearing like a portent of the future in 1990, Speaker’s Corner can be viewed as both an heir to the earlier Free for All experiment and the forebear to viewer-created content providers like YouTube. What began as a cheap means for the public to record letter-to-the-editor type messages for CityPulse soon evolved into a mass content generator that, in addition to its own TV show, could be stripped across all of the CHUM channels: MuchMusic, Space, etc. as compelling and topical interstitials. Besides fulfilling City’s original mandate as an outlet for “regular” people to get a voice on broadcast, it allowed for new stars to be born (most famously, the Barenaked Ladies, Scott Speedman, Jesse Labelle and the Devil’s Advocates comedy duo) and raised a lot of money for charity (the $1 cost to record a message was always donated). If there was one single program that embodied Citytv co-creator Moses Znaimer’s complex media divination, this was it.
PRISONERS OF GRAVITY, TVO
During the dark ages before science fiction, horror and comic books transcended nichedom to become mainstream manna, lonely geeks in the wilderness at least had this sprightly TVOntario magazine-styled show framed by the conceit it was an outer space broadcast jamming and overriding the signal of another boring Canadian nature series. Hosted by the excitable Rick Green (and cocreated by Mark Askwith and Daniel Richler), Prisoners covered topics from cyberpunk, robots, censorship, technology to the advent of the Internet itself, and featured canny interviews with genre mavens such as Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, James Cameron and Spider Robinson.
STREETNOISE, YTV
Like Vice for the tween set, streetNOISE covered a mixed bag of hot topics (tattoos, drinking and driving, child slavery, racism, etc.) back in 1989 when YTV functioned more as a broad narrowcaster and was actively pursuing older eyeballs. Lightning edits, Dutch angles, auditory overkill and lots of distortion made the series often seem as if it were transmitting from another universe, never mind Liberty Village, and it wasn’t long before MTV in the States remade it (as Buzz) and MuchMusic in Canada adapted much of its look and breakneck pace. Such storytelling techniques may be commonplace now, but at the dawn of the 1990s it was truly intoxicating stuff with a predictive remit to “outzap the zappers.”