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Lucy Goes Canadian


tjw
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A few years ago I wrote an article for my Lucy web site entitled “When is a Premiere Not a Premiere,” which dealt with the fact that back in 1951 there was at least one TV station (and possibly more) that showed I Love Lucy prior to its “official network premiere” on CBS on October 15, 1951.  The experts all told me that such things occurred many times back in the early days of television, before all the network links were in place, etc.

 

This morning, I stumbled on something similar that was happening as late as 1964 – when episodes of The Lucy Show were being shown on an independent station in Canada days before they aired on CBS here in the United States.  Who knew?

 

I found this information while thumbing through an old TV Guide for the week of April 25, 1964 – the “Lake Ontario Edition,” which reported the programming schedules for stations in the western New York area: Buffalo, Rochester, Erie (PA), etc. It also reports the lineups for independent CKCO-TV (Channel 13) in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada – just to the north of Lake Erie…

 

CKCO-TV carried (presumably via 16mm film) the episode “Lucy Enters a Baking Contest” on Saturday evening, April 25, at 7:30PM, two days before the same show was telecast over the CBS Television Network on Monday evening at 8:30PM.  The CBS version was shown over WBEN-TV (Channel 4) in Buffalo and WHEC-TV (Channel 10) in Rochester.  I assume that the signal from neither of these two stations was strong enough to be received in the Kitchener community – hence, Desilu (or CBS) arranged for Channel 13 to carry the show on its own.  I must also assume that there were other stations in Canada that made similar arrangements.

 

I realize that this is not “earth shattering news,” but it is another eye-opener because we have always been trained to believe that a network program had its first-ever showing on the network in question – but that (obviously) was not necessarily true…

 

Gosh, if we had all known each other back then -- Brock might have been the first of "our crowd" to see the weekly Lucys... (And here I thought people were moving north to avoid the draft!)

 

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A few years ago I wrote an article for my Lucy web site entitled “When is a Premiere Not a Premiere,” which dealt with the fact that back in 1951 there was at least one TV station (and possibly more) that showed I Love Lucy prior to its “official network premiere” on CBS on October 15, 1951.  The experts all told me that such things occurred many times back in the early days of television, before all the network links were in place, etc.
 
This morning, I stumbled on something similar that was happening as late as 1964 – when episodes of The Lucy Show were being shown on an independent station in Canada days before they aired on CBS here in the United States.  Who knew?
 
I found this information while thumbing through an old TV Guide for the week of April 25, 1964 – the “Lake Ontario Edition,” which reported the programming schedules for stations in the western New York area: Buffalo, Rochester, Erie (PA), etc. It also reports the lineups for independent CKCO-TV (Channel 13) in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada – just to the north of Lake Erie…
 
CKCO-TV carried (presumably via 16mm film) the episode “Lucy Enters a Baking Contest” on Saturday evening, April 25, at 7:30PM, two days before the same show was telecast over the CBS Television Network on Monday evening at 8:30PM.  The CBS version was shown over WBEN-TV (Channel 4) in Buffalo and WHEC-TV (Channel 10) in Rochester.  I assume that the signal from neither of these two stations was strong enough to be received in the Kitchener community – hence, Desilu (or CBS) arranged for Channel 13 to carry the show on its own.  I must also assume that there were other stations in Canada that made similar arrangements.
 
I realize that this is not “earth shattering news,” but it is another eye-opener because we have always been trained to believe that a network program had its first-ever showing on the network in question – but that (obviously) was not necessarily true…
 
Gosh, if we had all known each other back then -- Brock might have been the first of "our crowd" to see the weekly Lucys... (And here I thought people were moving north to avoid the draft!)

 

 

Very interesting piece of trivia! Always fun to learn something new like this. The television business is truly fascinating.

 

Did your research indicate whether or not the Canadian broadcasts were in black and white, like the CBS transmissions, or were they allowed to broadcast in "colour"?

 

I imagine, if we did all know each other back then, Brock would post a detailed (spoiler alert labeled) summary of each episode, followed by our questioning the minutiae.

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Very interesting piece of trivia! Always fun to learn something new like this. The television business is truly fascinating.

 

Did your research indicate whether or not the Canadian broadcasts were in black and white, like the CBS transmissions, or were they allowed to broadcast in "colour"?

 

I imagine, if we did all know each other back then, Brock would post a detailed (spoiler alert labeled) summary of each episode, followed by our questioning the minutiae.

 

Good question!  The Lucy broadcast on CKCO was in black-and-white.  Most of the local stations (at least in the smaller communities) were among the last to convert to color... After seeing your question, I flipped through the rest of the magazine to see if any of CKCO's other programs were in color that week, and no they were not...

 

BUT I also discovered that three other Canadian stations in that area -- CKVR-TV (Channel 3) in Barrie; CBLT (Channel 6) in Toronto, and CHEX-TV (Channel 12) in Peterborough, all simulcast a showing of The Lucy Show on Thursday evening April 30, 1964, at 8:30PM.  This simulcast was again in advance of the CBS airing: it was a repeat of "Lucy Gets Locked in the Vault," the program seen on CBS in the United States the following Monday, May 4.  Again... did not know about these advance showings!

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Makes me wonder how many people saw THE baby episode before the rest of the world did.

I Love Lucy was not syndicated to Canada until 1955... However, harkening back to my original discovery about stations in this country showing I Love Lucy prior to its Monday night broadcast -- YES, at least one station (WTTV-TV, then in Bloomington, Indiana) presented the baby show two nights early: Little Ricky was born in that community on Saturday, January 17, 1953 -- two days before Little Desi arrived in Hollywood!

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Gosh, if we had all known each other back then -- Brock might have been the first of "our crowd" to see the weekly Lucys... (And here I thought people were moving north to avoid the draft!)

 

 

 

Gee, I don't know if I could handle the burden! :o That is an honour that would have come with great responsibility.

 

 

 

I imagine, if we did all know each other back then, Brock would post a detailed (spoiler alert labeled) summary of each episode, followed by our questioning the minutiae.

 

:lucyhaha:

 

 

This is an amazingly intriguing find, Tom! Thanks so much for sharing. I'm going to try and find out if there are any other tidbits in the files. Through my job, I occasionally work with CKVR (currently CTV Barrie). I wonder if they have anything in their archives.

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The reason I've always read that CBS did not want to broadcast color programs was because of the color TV patent held by RCA who owned NBC (or the other way around).  But as late as 1963, wasn't Bill Paley being stubborn and myopically short-sighted?  Couldn't they see demand for color was right around the corner?  It was. Two seasons later, starting with the 65-66 season, most CBS shows had changed to color.  Since CBS showed Wizard of Oz every year, pre-1965, they were capable of color broadcast so that wasn't the issue.

 

Desilu's Greatest Show on Earth was filmed in color for ABC.  Did ABC follow CBS's lead and broadcast in black-and-white?

 

Also short-sighted was Desi who proclaimed the first season would be b/w.  "She's just as funny in black-and-white".  True and not that I mind b/w comedies*, but the Desilu advisors that started filming Lucy Show in color the next year (regardless of CBS's interest or encouragement) were right.  Years later many stations (including CBS for the Lucy Show's morning run) started their TLS syndication run with season 2 in color.  Some aired the first season after the 6th season.  It was quite jarring to go from "Boss of the Year" to "Waits Up for Christ" the next day.  It wasn't the same show. Some stations didn't air the 1st season at all, depriving The Lucy Show audiences of some of the best episodes, and "The Lucy Show" itself of greater respect.   CBS ran the b/w episodes twice, then dropped them from the TLS rotation altogether for the next three years TLS aired at 9am (10 eastern?). 

 

*Practically all of the series that ran before and after 1965-66 had a mixture of b/w and color episodes.  Without exception, my preference is the b/w episodes but that could be more that the quality was so much better in episodes from earlier years.   "Andy Griffith" "Bewitched" "Beverly Hillbillies" to name 3.   Another contributing factor: the color episodes did not have Don Knotts, Alice Pearce or Bea Benedaret....

 

Trivia question: what was the FIRST color TLS episode, originally aired in b/w, that CBS reran in all its red-headed colored glory?

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Trivia question: what was the FIRST color TLS episode, originally aired in b/w, that CBS reran in all its red-headed colored glory?

 

I believe the first episode to be repeated in color after having originally aired in black-and-white was the weirdly popular "Lucy and the Ceramic Cat" -- which was part of the FIRST batch of summer reruns, which filled in between the end of THE LUCY SHOW (SEASON 6) and the premiere of HERE'S LUCY.  That summer was a grab bag of shows -- most of them from the California based episodes... But this one opened the series...  (Repeats of THE LUCY SHOW often filled in for the summer during the early years of HERE'S LUCY.)

 

The show that opened the daytime series was "Lucy Plays Cleopatra," again being seen for the first time in color. I remember feeling cheated when that show first aired in 1963. TV GUIDE ran a full color photo from the show that looked wonderful, making the broadcast itself look kinda dowdy by comparison... Of course, I did not have a color set at the time, so I guess it really didn't matter!

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Looks like this continued with "Here's Lucy" in the 1970's.  I have a set of TV Guides from the Spring of '71 - the "Puget Sound Edition".   "Here's Lucy" aired at 8:30PM on Mondays on channel 7, KIRO-TV Seattle.  However, lucky viewers could view it the night before, on Sunday (also at 8:30 PM) if they happened to get channel 8, CHAN-TV Vancouver, British Columbia!

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