There’s an old joke about television newscasts: because you’re shot from the waist up only, it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing pants. One day I was doing the news and one of my colleagues, an older announcer, decided he was going to poke fun at me. He finished reading the local community news, then said to the viewers at home, “Take a look over here…” The cameraman, who was in on it, panned around so the audience could see behind the news desk. And there I was: jacket, shirt, tie, shorts, and flip-flops.
My colleagues and I always used to play jokes like that on one another. When I got transferred to Toronto, one of the top announcers there was a big drinker. The CBC had two radio networks—the Dominion Network and the TransCanada Network. He’d do the national news on one; I’d do the national news on the other. We’d do it every hour from 6:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. It was a fifteen-minute report, so we’d have nothing to do from fifteen minutes after the hour until the top of the next hour. The Four Seasons Motor Hotel was right across the street from the station. They had a bar, so we’d go over there. I wasn’t a drinker, but this colleague of mine was. Five times a night we’d make the journey from the station to the hotel bar and back. By the time we got to the ten and eleven o’clock newscasts, I’d often have to steady him to keep him from getting run over by the traffic coming down Jarvis Street.
And yet it was the most amazing thing: he’d get on the air and you would not know anything was amiss. He could be wobbly on his way to the studio, but on the air he was the perfect announcer, rock solid. So we delighted in trying to break him up. Once, when he was on the air, we opened the studio door and rolled in an empty seven-inch tape spool. We rolled it with a flick of the wrist so that it would spin. As the spool began to slow, it started making more and more noise, until it flattened on the ground. And when it flattened, he finally cracked. He switched off his mic for a moment and came out and cursed us. That was the only time I ever saw him break on the air.
Other guys would do the same thing to me. Once, I was doing a television newscast and a guy mooned me on the other side of the glass. I just barely kept it together. I can’t believe that we did all those things in those days. Nowadays you wouldn’t dare behave that way. But, hey, this was Canada. We’re out to have a good time, eh?