Can the CBC become a local broadcaster again?

When I was a boy growing up in Winnipeg in the 1960s, CBC was a local broadcaster. The most prominent CBC personality was not Earl Cameron, whose short national TV newscast at 11 p.m. consisted mostly of reading wire-copy, but a man named Bill Guest who hosted the morning Winnipeg radio show and the televised […]

Published Apr 12, 2018 at 2:06pm

When I was a boy growing up in Winnipeg in the 1960s, CBC was a local broadcaster.

The most prominent CBC personality was not Earl Cameron, whose short national TV newscast at 11 p.m. consisted mostly of reading wire-copy, but a man named Bill Guest who hosted the morning Winnipeg radio show and the televised high-school trivia competition, “Reach for the Top.”

My mother had acted in nationally broadcast radio plays, in both French and English, produced in Winnipeg in the 1950s. And in the 1960s, there was a weekly country music variety show called “Red River Jamboree” that was seen across the land. (Halifax, similarly, produced “Don Messer’s Jubilee,” while Edmonton later had “The Tommy Banks Show.”)