Global TV today started off as MITV back in 1988 as owned by the Irvings.

My first exposure to MITV or little Mitv as Frank magazine calls it came in 1983 when I took in a CRTC hearing in Halifax.  The Irvings wanted a TV station for Metro and CHUM wanted a second station for the Maritimes.  CHUM already had ATV but wanted ASN.  Both competed at that 1983 hearing that I took in as a bit of homework as I was applying for a radio station in Newfoundland at the time and wanted to see the CRTC in action for myself.

As a result of that hearing ASN got the license while the Irvings had to wait.  A few years later the Irvings got the go ahead for their venture in Nova Scotia province and the station was called MITV.  That stood for Maritime Independent Television, not More Irving TV.

I had just moved back from western Canada and started ABI (Atlantic Broadcasting Institute) when a good friend of mine, the late Chuck Garrison who had just been named sales manager of MITV, suggested I apply for the sports director’s job.

Thanks to Eastlink’s Brett Smith who found 10 minutes of production time I did an ad lib tape and gave it to the newsboss of MITV, Bruce Graham.

I met Bruce on a Friday and on Monday August 23rd got hired.   The station was launched at 6pm on Labour Day, September 5th, 1988.  We were all given a token plastic star souvenir from the brass stating the date of the magnificent open. I still have mine and maybe I can get a buck or two for it on Ebay.

My tenure at this TV station lasted five full years.  I gave them six months notice and finished on August 23rd, 1993.  I left to attend to my own business ABI (which was changed to AMI ---Atlantic Media Institute).

But I have no problem in saying those were five very good years at this TV operation.

The manager of this new operation was Ken Clark who at one time was a high sales executive at ATV.  He raided ATV for lots of talent the biggest; news wise (as Donnie Verge on the technical end was a great gain) was Bruce Graham then the big TV suppertime news anchor at ATV.

Bruce Graham brought instant credibility to MITV.  He was the face of the operation.  It was a great move by the Irvings and Clark.  Graham also went and got lots of ATV talent.  One of his best hires was a then 23-year old dynamo director by the name of Sue Holly.  She was great.  I doubt that I have ever seen someone so composed at that age in directing a full TV cast.

These days I believe she’s doing her magic behind the scenes at CBC and has for over a decade.  The last time I saw her was around five years ago, getting a coffee at the Quinpool Perks coffee shop early in the morning.  I think she was directing a National show from Halifax.

Graham may be the best news director that I worked for and that’s because he was a news first type of person. Sure he had a big budget (over 25 in the newsroom staff when you add the editors and shooters) but he wasn’t afraid to go for a story and spend the money to get it.

And did he ever go after stories.

So many come to mind.  

One night some guy shows up at the TV station saying ‘they are using steroids or a banned substance at the World Junior canoe championships.”

Graham told me to go after it and it became a national story the next day when four Romanians defected.

Another time he sent two people (Wade Keller and Andrea whose name escapes me) to London, Ontario in a search for the missing Kimberly MacAndrew.
 
The former Halifax City Hall Paul Calda story also was a winner, etc, etc.

Graham also believed in opinion.  His “Final Word” was the last news comment in metro.
 
When he hired me he did so knowing that I was an opinionated son-of-a gun.  I remember when he offered me the job he said:  “I’m not hiring you to read sports scores”.

He allowed and encouraged from me a daily sports comment called “According to Alex” and set in motion two sports shows that gave my department a local identity.  

Mind you those were the days that each TV station had a full time sports department with Paul Mennier at ATV and Doug Saunders, Colleen Jones and later Bruce Rainnie for the mother corp.

Graham set up the “Locker Room” for me which was taped on Friday afternoon and ran on Saturday at 6:30pm.  It was a great way to showcase local sports and for four years we had local, local and more local items.

I have tons of highlights from the Locker   Room and a few include karate king Charles Carabin breaking a bunch of boards of the show.  Man, did he ever hit them and they went all over the place.  He could have filled in for Chuck Norris anytime after that performance.

Colleen Jones gave me a sweeping lesson on the Locker Room after winning one of her umpteen provincial curling crowns.  And I shook hands with Dave Semenko who at some point was the body guard to Wayne Gretkzy.  I have shaken a lot of hands but he has the biggest set of paws I have ever seen.

One of my best Locker Room story involves the 1988 Atlantic Bowl featuring Saint Mary’s and Bishops.

The show was taped on Friday but done to give the viewer the impression it was being done live on Saturday supper time when it aired at 6:30 pm. So how can one go on air, on Saturday night, and not mentioned the biggest single day sport event in the city that took place that Saturday?

Or how can you have the biggest event taking place on Saturday and mention or show pictures of it if the show was taped the day before?

Here’s how the illusion of TV works.

It’s called creating a ‘black hole’.  In other words we start taping the show on Friday (usually around 3:30 pm) and after the opening comments say something to the effect, “Well a few minutes ago (realizing this will be shown on Saturday) this year’s Atlantic Bowl concluded …with the story of the game here is…so and so.”

Then the director keeps the tape rolling for a specific amount of time, let’s say five minutes.  After the five minutes we continue the program.  So the tape literally has ‘five minutes of black’ of which we will have to put something in before it airs.

So the next day, Atlantic Bowl day, the reporter gets the story and packages it up to exactly five minutes gives to an operator who will hit the Atlantic Bowl tape at the correct moment and presto you have the highlights of the game.  And the impression that the Locker Room is done live.

I mean it has to be right, after all, we just showed you the highlights of the Atlantic Bowl that was finished an hour before air time.

Yes, the magic of TV.
 
The reporter that Atlantic Bowl day was Shane Wilson now at Z103.5.

Shane got back to MITV from the game around 5:30.  He had to get the interviews and fight the traffic.

That left him one hour to put a pack (package) together.

Let me tell you folks, one hour is not a lot of time for a rookie camera person to put the sights and sounds and interviews together.  It would be close.  Guys like Ray Bradshaw can knock them off much faster but not a rookie.

And if he couldn’t get it done we would have a major problem as there was NO ONE in the newsroom.  There was nothing we could do.  For you see, in those early years, MITV didn’t have a weekend cast so only two people were in the whole building, a person in master control and the other in VTR (Video tape replay).

Bottom line, after tons of cursing and swearing Shane got it on with 30 seconds to spare.

Way to go, Shane Wilson.

We learned our lesson and in the years that followed with Paul Palmeter as the photo and camera guy (and he was very good at his job) we did the same thing year after year but waited until the last segment not the first one to ‘deliver the highlights and package”.  That gave us an extra 20-25 minutes in case of traffic or problems.  That is an eternity of time in the TV business.

But that first one was a dandy experience.

Graham then went along, (after my years of bugging him) with Sportsline a 30-minute sports package that started in the fall of 1992.

Again, and I admit it was a different time.  There was only TSN for sports as the Score and Sportsnet were not as yet created.

The story behind Sportsline can now be told.  MITV at 11:30 had no audience and ran either SCTV or Alf!  There were literally blanks or straight lines in the BBM book.
 
The MITV 11pm news package had for years competed against the CBC’s with Frank (Cameron) and Doug (Saunders) who were a news/comedy team onto themselves. I still don’t know how much Frank Cameron knows about news but the end of the show routine with Saunders was a classic one.

However, Saunders who was a friend of mine used to say ‘I’ll trade you Frank for the great looking (and sounding Kelly Eaton) who was the night anchor.

I proposed the late night sports show to have the national highlights and to have them on at 11:30 instead of waiting for TSN and their big cast at midnight.

Also we were local and it’s one of the reasons Global never got numbers on their six pm cast.  We’ll get to that in a minute.

Larry Uteck, Blake Nill, Jimbo (Jim Bottomley), fighting in sports ( more Bottomley), high school sports, college sports, local and regional interviews, point-counter-point with Gail Rice and Harv Stewart and good local stories as provided by then photo journalists Paul Palmeter/Ray Bradshaw made up the package.

In the early days of MITV, the Vees and the Windjammers provided the local/area pro sports fodder.

And whatever colourful or controversial items were in sports, we  featured.  And it worked.  This show went from zero ratings to a high 2 or 3 which is terrific for that time of the night when most have hit slummerland.

The president of the company at the time, Larry Nichols, told Bruce that he would spend a ‘week or two’ to sell the show.  Within a few days he had Ford who took the show, at a grand a week ($1000.) for a year so he had a $52,000 sale.

That immediately did the following for MITV.

They saved $30-35,000 bucks for Alf for SCTV. So when you add the 35 grand savings to the $52,000 you are looking at an $87,000 deal.

They had a regional ad vehicle and used it in the years to come.

And they could do no worst than the past shows.  They had NO audience before Sportsline and a specialty audience after that launch. It was a good move by all concerned.  

I lasted one full year with the show before I left and when Doug Vassen took it over, in the fall of 1994 and it was the perfect vehicle to feature a new team in town, the Halifax Mooseheads.

In my last year of the show, we hired a new photo journalist, Ray Bradshaw whose contributions to the station I want to acknowledge. Hard Rock Ray has really done a job for them giving up so much of his free time to make the station sound and look better.

In fact, Ray was my recommendation to replace me as the sports director/ sports anchor but he was, at the time, not interested.

It was not only in sports that MITV did a good job I liked our newscasts back then.

First it was a great move by Graham to deliver the suppertime cast at 7pm.  “The 7’oclock news with Bruce Graham’ was a winner.  What a great idea.  And it turned out to have the highest rating numbers ever in the history of news at the station.

Let’s never forget that ATV dominated.  They do today and did then and they had over 80% of the market at 6pm and CBC had the rest.

CBC with Jim Nunn had a good cast when MITV came on board but at 7pm MITV had 23-27% which is a very respectable to incredible figure depending on whom you ask. Since they moved to 6pm they haven’t had single digits.

In hindsight going to 6pm from the 7 o’clock news was the worst mistake they made. The other was trying to compete with ATV.

The fact that Global is basically saying no to local news is not a surprise. Over the past ten years or ever since they took it over from MITV the ship has been sinking.  

Graham did what he could when it went to 6pm and still was able to find a niche with “Metro at 6pm” and “Metro at 11pm”.

Bruce also did ‘documentaries’ on the fishery, one called “John’s Story’ where the bulk of the work was done by Wade Keller now with ATV news and one on the last railroad trip from Halifax to Cape Breton.  And there were more and if you are in the news game it’s some thing you want to be part of.

Why MITV even did a 30-minute local sports documentary on the Dartmouth Mooseheads with Ed Malloy and Bob Boucher winning the national title.  Paul Palmeter followed the team to Alberta and put it together. It was called “Road to Glory”.

MITV had one niche and that was HRM and for most of the time they used it.

It made sense.  ATV was the source for the Maritimes, CBC is the ‘news for Nova Scotia”, so MITV doing Halifax was a smart move.

I remember John O’Brien’s first day.  O’Brien now the HRM communications manager was hired by Graham to be the assignment editor.

He was great because he knew everyone in the business.  His news background from the Herald and being the PR guy to John Buchanan certainly worked in his favour.

I remember his first day on the job where he gave a contact to all reporters working on their stories.  Talk about knowing people. One of the stories was on Nova Scotia Power.  O’Brien knew all the players before and after they privatized.

Another person I enjoyed in my half decade at Mitv was Laura Lee Langley. She was good on air, a terrific professional worker and nice.  It’s rare that you get the total package. The same goes for my late night co-host and news anchor, Kelly Eaton.

But there are others who were pure jerks and that will come out when I do a book on my years in the media business.  One anchor (not Laura Lee or Kelly) was so vain that she, in doing a newscast at noon (the minor package) removed the video of stories so she could show her face on camera.  She was also involved in a late night mess that is simply hilarious but made her look stupid and silly on air.  But she was pretty and cute and loved her looks on camera.

I’m a great believer of niche casting and that is where Global should have been for the past 7-10 years. The niche being local HRM news.  There’s enough news here to do that but, as the network grew, that made it hard to have one cast focusing on only Metro.

When Global decided to compete with ATV for viewers at six, in my opinion that was it, the start of the end.

I know the move had to do with ‘Canadian content’ and putting the news at 6pm would add another five hours a week to that Canadian content total but it also killed what ever chance they had of increasing numbers their news numbers and News is the image maker at any station.

I was also told by some higher ups that ‘being third at 6pm will still give us more numbers than being the only newscast at 7pm’. That never happened.

The rebel in me never bought it and I was right from the first ratings book.  Global bombed in that attempt at 6pm and they shouldn’t have been surprised.

Yes, there were good people in front and behind the camera but my analogy has always been   ATV is the Coca Cola of the news business, CBC with its long history is Pepsi.  Global is Big 8, PC or Brand X.   When the price is the same (as in the same time to watch the news) why would anyone buy Brand X?

Over the past 12-14 years I have regrettably watched the Global news product drip, and drop and sadly sink.  There must be a reason to have people tune into your product and there wasn’t, not when the same product, for the most part, had the stable of the news business in the area, ATV.

Come on, tell me. Given a choice would you take Heinz (ATV) or Brand X (Global) if both were available for the same price?   At 7pm MITV had a niche and a focus, not to mention a much needed extra hour to get stories.

Then Global started with its cuts and people were leaving, bought out or other.

First to go were some people behind the scenes which leads to my credence that a union does nothing for you other than take your ‘union dues’.  What will the 30-laid off people have for years of ‘dues paying’?  What did the union do for those who have been cut/let go over the past few years?

The answer is very little to nothing?

Then Graham, the man who put the newsroom together left, and the Sportsline show was axed a few years ago. I can actually understand that one, to an extent, as now there is also The Score and Sportsnet in the sports mix. And one can get a highlight at almost any time of the day.

However, had the show stuck to local, regional and provincial programs there could still be a market.

Yes, TSN and co. will show the NHL and NFL etc. But how often do they show the Moose, Citadel High, The Cape Breton Eagles, Moncton Wildcats, soccer, SMU, Dal and other universities and deal with local/regional sports controversy?  And there is tons of controversy in sports.

Then came the news changes where we in the Maritimes were getting more of Kevin Newman then the local anchors.

Over the past few years there was simply no reason to watch the news.  Graham had given them credibility and offered a comment; Bruce also had everything from political to other panels in the news.  He wasn’t afraid to try things.

Many talk about Marilla Stephenson and her appearances on CBC, well Marilla started on MITV.

The on-air staff on that opening day included in addition to Bruce Graham, Laura Lee Langley.

The late news it was the talented Kelly Eaton and me on the set.  Our weatherman, who worked both the suppertime and late casts, was the slowest talking dude that I ever meet in Dave Michaels who was a legitimate meteorologist who came from Texas.

Other names from that first day one may recall include Kelly Ryan (from the consumer reporter at ATV), Robyn Smythe (now at ‘As it happens), Michael Chisholm (he came one week after we opened as he was working for CKO radio, remember them?) Janice Mathews and police reporter Cliff Evanitski rounded out the on air staff.  Evanitski may be the best police reporter I have worked with.  

He looked like a cop. In fact on his first day he walked into the police station with a box of donuts and coffee.  They liked him immediately and he made great contacts.

How do you think a TV station just happens to ‘record a take down’ at one in the morning?

It’s not luck but contacts and Cliff had them.

I was his back up at the station in the sense that if he wasn’t in the newsroom I would get the call and pass it on.

I got a few calls.

Evanitski did a piece on ‘violence in Spryfield’ (sorry about that councilor Steve Adams) and got a kid to show him a loaded gun! Now, that’s a story. And while not a big deal today a gun and a kid was something 15 years ago.

I’ve been in this media racket since I was a 17-year newspaper reporter and screaming dee jay. That’s 42 years and the five at MITV before they made the moves which lead to what happened last week, were some of my best memories.

I got an email from a former MITV employee a few days ago and she hit is best with the line, “MITV on that opening day had so much promise.”

It did and it’s a pity that it wasn’t realized.

I hope those dismissed end up on their feet.  However the life and times of Little Mitv will make a great book.

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