In the mid to late -60s, ‘File
Thirteen’ had just come into the popular lexicon, on its
way up as a catch phrase. CKCO since the early 60s had
been promo’d as ‘The Big Bright Thirteen’. So when it
came to titling a new locally- produced prime-time
regional affairs newsmagazine, the two just sort of came
together. Like Scan for the 6 o’clock news hour, it
worked, and worked well.
The Wednesday night 9:30 time slot had come open up in a
shuffle of network programming. There was a Baton
Channel 9 production available out of Toronto, but CKCO
decided instead to pick up the time and run with it,
turning it over to the News Department to mount
something different by way of a local news half-hour,
and the mandate was given to me to develop it.
CKCO had all of but the extreme southwest corner of
Southern Ontario within Channel 13’s A, B and C
contours, - close to being but not quite yet a ‘must
buy’ television market for national advertisers, - and
we were in the build-up to expansion into the Georgian
Bay area and Channel 2, Wiarton. As a news operation,
moving into prime time meant we were pushing out into
waters where the BBC’s This Was the Week That Was’ had
been torpedoing all who came within its cross-hairs –
NBC’s Saturday Night Live is its legacy - CBC’s
high-flying This Hour Has Seven Days had gone down in
producer-vs-management flames; CTV’s W5 picked up where
This Hour left off, pioneering a first-person, watch-dog
journalism, aped by CBS’ fledgling 60 Minutes - and it
was our intention, marshalling such talent and resources
as were available to us to carve out an audience for
regional affairs, something we had only just begun to
define in reference to our audience and our local news.
More by default than design, we fell into W5 mould.
Stories were hashed out, reporters and photographers
assigned and air dates set at weekly editorial meetings,
along with the current week’s final line-up and who was
to be on-camera - Gary McLaren, Ed Doyle, Bruce
Johnston, Rennie Heard, Terry Thomas among others on the
roster - with myself as producer-host. Photographers,
giving credit where credit is due, included Paul ‘Pablo’
Cassel, John Arajs, John Donahue and, as the story
demanded, Guy Goodwin in the London area.* The show was
broadcast live or live-to-tape, repeated, with updates,
in the Sunday afternoon line-up.
As a newsmagazine, it gave us the opportunity to take on
and open up in greater depth stories that were not
necessarily hard news, but were of interest and
importance regionally in Southern Ontario. Ed Doyle, for
instance, scored with a piece on the need for an air
service in the Owen Sound area. The night of the
broadcast, there was a phone call waiting when we left
the studio: a St Thomas aviation company was interested
in relocating, eventually moving and re-establishing
themselves. Our Owen Sound source was the Geoff
Nightingale, then manager of the Owen Sound Chamber of
Commerce, who later came on board first as a stringer,
then full time CKCO reporter/cameraman in Owen Sound
area.
It also meant we were not necessarily bound by the
constraints of ‘objective’ reporting, but could be
‘one-sided’ as we were when the recommendations of the
‘progressive’ Hall-Dennis Report were brought in tossing
out traditional education in Ontario. Living and
Learning replaced prescribed courses of study with
curriculum guidelines for child-centred “individualized
programmes of instruction”, - self-directed learning
with minimal supervision, - and advocated, among other
reforms, the “removal of corporal punishment”. We went
to air with an affirmative point of view, fully aware-
hoping actually - we would provoke strongly expressed
alternative points of view. When the responses came in –
and they did - we used them as a springboard in
something of an on-going dialogue with the audience.
Just as television news then was still very much ‘radio
with pictures’, documentary reporting was still very
much narrative supported by visuals, or the vice versa,
visuals supported by narrative; but there was a nagging
awareness that there were stories that could better be
told by letting the camera tell the story, even letting
the story tell itself, and, if, as on This Hour, a
satirical song could tell a story, then a
tongue-in-cheek scenario could also be effective. More
than once we pulled Pat Miles out of the film lab for
his comedic talents. For a New Year sequence on
car-owners failing to meet the December 31 deadline for
purchase and installation of new vehicle license plates,
we ran a series of scenes of Pat, a package under his
arm, slogging purposefully along a snow-covered
sidewalk; dodging slush thrown up by passing cars;
waiting at a light, traffic criss-crossing in front of
him; disappearing in a crowd of pedestrians; and finally
of Pat squatting at his bumper in the snow, the package
wrappings open, finger-tightening the bolts to attach
his new markers. Point made, story told. We didn’t
realize it then, but we were already onto the now
universal technique of telling a story from point of
view of the ‘one-among-many’ impacted by facts of the
story, not ‘covering’ the story in the standard
journalistic five W’s.
Likewise in the studio we wanted to break away from the
static announcer-at-podium or behind-a-desk set for a
more dynamic presentation. The set department came up
with moveable columns and shapes which could be lit and
shot freeform as sets-within-sets, and for the first
season they worked, - though not necessarily for the
crew who had only a minimum of time to light and set
their shots. However, when the next season’s news sets
were introduced, we were back at a podium.
File Thirteen was on the air for three seasons, 1968 to
1971, I like to think successful on the whole for what
we had set out to do. In 1971, there was word the
network could be taking back the Wednesday 9:30 slot. At
the same time, I was considering an offer of a faculty
position in Conestoga College’ Broadcasting/Radio
Television program. In the end, I said yes to the
College, no to continue freelance with the show.
Whatever were the determining factors, File Thirteen was
gone from the 1971 Fall schedule.
*And to give credit where credit is due, my apologies to
those other contributors to File Thirteen whose names
regretfully defy recall at this stage of the game – I
hope they will come forward to be included in the
credits for the show.
submitted by Larry
McIntyre
Feb 3. 2011
