From 1959: When TV in Canada was only seven years old, Maclean's toured the CBC casting offices, looking for old-fashioned and honest ways to get on the 'magic box'
View Full Issue Click to View Article Pages 1213 December 19 1959 View Full Issue View Article Pages THE CBC-TV casting department was recently in receipt of an application for work from a blonde sixteen-year-old from Windsor, Ont. She had a plump, rouge-smeared mouth and plucked eyebrows and she had ignored the request on the form for details of any professional training or public performance or talent. Perhaps she had none to list.
How did this handful succeed where the others failed? Why w'ere they picked? How, for that matter, did the regulars, the established stars, the personalities, first break in? How, in fact, do you get on TV? Pierre Berton, who is spectacularly well established as an interviewer for Close-Up and a panelist on Front Page Challenge, has a more explicit proposition."Get your name known.” he says."For instance, get on the executive of ACRTA and get up in meetings and say something.” Berton, who is on the executive of ACRTA. the performers' union, adds,"I don't really know how I got on TV.
Applicants offered to yodel, to play on the skillle-bass , vocally to produce such sound effects as gunshots and galloping horses; to pantomime the lyrics to records, and to do exercises on camera. A farmer's wife said she would whistle to her own piano accompaniment. A Swede checked in with a vaudeville act that involved shooting eggs out over the audience. A seventeen-year-old Vancouverite volunteered her services on the ground that, as she wrote,"I can speak like Donald Duck.
All stations receive performers avidly. “We will audition any act and invite performers to come to our studios at any time,” says Don Jamieson, vice-president of CJONTV, in St. John’s, Ntld. The CBC is just as keen. Crossan has already auditioned two thousand people this year for Talent Caravan. The CBC-TV variety department auditions almost every applicant it gets. The drama department auditions as many as seventy-five a month.
It is a surprisingly straightforward job. “You can almost reconstruct the person from the way he applies,” says Miss Langbord. Those that list no training or experience at all—who announce with unsupported conviction. “If I had the chance I would be a great actor”—are cooled off quickly. Those who live too far afield are advised to apply to local little theatre groups or TV stations: sooner or later, if they're good enough, they'll move to Toronto or Montreal and be within range.
The applicants will begin a series of trips to the CBC drama department offices. in downtown Toronto. In the department's outer office they will find a bulletin board with a set of sheets stapled to it. one for each producer. They will register on the top sheets across the board to indicate that they want introductory interviews.
None is a guarantee of a part. Last year the eighteen thousand roles available in CBC network drama were filled by only two thousand actors, most of whom earned little more than three thousand dollars for their pains."The very first time I interview an actor I say TV acting is no way to make a living, honestly," says Miss Langbord.
CHBC-TV, in Kelowna. B.C.. televises a monthly live play using Okanagan Valley drama groups; early this year CJONTV. in St. John's, pioneered a TV drama festival with three Newfoundland little theatre groups; the CBC stations in Vancouver and Winnipeg occasionally originate TV drama. Otherwise there are few openings for a TV actor outside Toronto and Montreal.
Periodically the CBC spreads its net much wider—and even provides a showcase for its finds: from 1954 to 1957 it ran a talent show on the network called Pick the Stars; last January it launched Talent Caravan, ran it for nineteen weeks and re-introduced it this fall for a thirtynine-week season. For the first stint producer Drew Crossan traveled forty-eight thousand miles around the country, auditioned a thousand acts and presented seventy-five of them on the network.
Detecting the same quality in singer Allan Blye, casting officer Phyllis Elliott says happily,"He happens'."Whatever it is, the ability to convince a producer you have it is the major qualification for anyone hoping to crash the third—and only indigenous area of television talent. This is the area of panel shows, interviews, talks, and televised conversations, which require people to be themselves and themselves to be lawlessly beguiling.
His list of candidates had been compiled from among his personal friends and professional acquaintances, from the recommendations of his colleagues and from wild hunches. It included the secretary of a fellow producer, the wife of a writer and a TCA stewardess-instructor who’d caught his eye.
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