This was a
weekly
15 minute produced by Ron Hill, a general staff
announcer - one of only 5 announcers on staff when I
joined CKCO in the spring of 1957. The other 4 were
Al Hodge, Tom
Rafferty, Reg Sellner and myself. Ron would
line up people to interview and he and I and a
cameraman,Jack Phillips or Ross Osler, would go out
and I did the interviews.
Our venues were community
events....agricultural shows, Fall Fairs were a
favourite, we talked to civic officials, service
club leaders etc. The purpose of the show, as I
recall, was to take the TV station out into our
coverage area, to introduce CKCO-TV CHANNEL 13 to a
variety of communities and public events, to
establish a TV station "presence" in those
communities and to put our guests on television..
"on the air".
The
station management figured that if someone was
interviewed for an on air appearance, that person,
plus his/her families and perhaps many of their
friends would be sure to watch the program, and the
TV station CKCO. If they tuned in once, the
odds were that they would tune in to other programs
and thus become more
frequent viewers of our station. And I
think this purpose was achieved in many instances.
The interviews, were shot on 16
mm black and white film, on an Auricon camera that
required 110 v. AC to operate. Ancillary
footage of the events etc, was shot either on the
Auricon, a Bell & Howell or Bolex. These
were 16 mm silent hand held spring wound cameras and
were the standard portable film cameras used by many
TV stations. The Auricon sound at that time
was known as optical sound and while quite good for
the era magnetic stripe soon over took optical for
tape recorder quality.
I can't remember how long the
Gadabout program continued...but I suspect it was
not much more than a year or so.
Gary McLaren, host
