121: A History of Canadian Pay TV (with Ed Conroy)

Ed Conroy, a Toronto-based cultural historian and the creator of Retrontario, joins the show for a look back at the 40th anniversary of Pay TV in Canada.

On February 1, 1983, Canada’s first Pay TV channels arrived on the airwaves to great fanfare: Competing movie services First Choice and Superchannel offered subscribers blockbuster movies "uncut and commercial free" while the more refined C Channel offered more highbrow fare: world cinema, opera, theatre and concerts. First Choice distinguished itself from the other services by offering adult entertainment (softcore nudity on the soap opera “Loving Friends and Perfect Couples” and late night Playboy Channel programming, co-productions that controversially qualified as Canadian Content).

But Pay TV was not a success out of the gate, leading to C Channel going off the air within weeks and First Choice eventually having to merge with Superchannel (Canadians know the service now as Crave).

Ed and I take the listener on a tour of this chapter in television history, when uncut movies in your home were a novelty in the days before VCRs were commonplace, and the thrill of being exposed to exciting illicit programming, bringing Canadian teenagers in the eighties an at-home crash course in high and low film culture.

RIP Noah Cowan, veteran programmer and artistic director for TIFF who brought us Midnight Madness at the Festival and whose father Edgar brought us C Channel, a service ahead of its time.

There are over three dozen premium episodes of the show available exclusively to patrons: some notable previous Patreon guests include Jared Yates Sexton, Jacob Bacharach, David Roth, Bryan Quinby and Sooz Kempner. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Ed Conroy on Twitter and visit his wonderful found local video repository Retrontario

First Choice commercial, February 1983

Superchannel commercial, March 1983

C Channel commercial featuring Gordon Pinsent, February 1993