CURTAINRISES

THE CURTAIN RISES by Mike Oldfield

Like many of my fellow classmates who were about to graduate in 1958, I had no idea what the future held for me or just where I was going to find a job.  Our small hometown in northern Ontario was not exactly brimming over with employment opportunities at the best of times and high school had not trained us for much more than shuffling papers in an office, clerking in the retail trade or some blue-collar apprenticeship.  For the vast majority of us, going on to university was a financial impossibility; of all the people I knew in high school, only a handful went on to college.  However, I did not look at this as a great disappointment because after enduring 12 years of teachers and classrooms, I wanted to get out into the real world and earn a living.  But still, I had no idea where to look for my future role in life.  Luckily, a ray of sunshine appeared just a few weeks before graduation when a neighbour told me that the local TV station was looking for an eager young lad just like myself to learn the television trade.  This was right up my alley because all my life I had a fanatical interest in all facets of showbiz…radio, movies, Broadway, and television, and the thought of working at a TV station as opposed to a dreary office was an exciting prospect.  My Dad drove me up to the station on the following Saturday for my job interview.  The whole process was a brief one.  The Chief Engineer was most impressed when I referred to the TV sets in the control room as monitors, a little something I had gleaned from the pages of Coronet magazine, and I got the job.

On my last day of high school, Thursday, May 15^th, we were released at 12 Noon; I went home; had a bite of lunch and then caught the bus out to Callander, a small town nestled on the shores of Lake Nipissing and about 12 miles south of North Bay.  On top of a steep hill which overlooked the town, stood the TV station and its towering antenna which broadcast television to the surrounding areas.  It was a warm day and I did not enjoy the long slog up the steep and winding road which led to the station but I guess we all have to suffer for our art.  Upon my arrival, I was required to fill out all the necessary employment forms and was then led to the control room where they began the long process of turning a starry-eyed kid into an audio operator.  I was climbing into the saddle for what would be a very long ride.  My brilliant broadcasting career had begun.

They  started  off   slowly  by   teaching  me  the  very  basics  of  the  audio  operating  business.

My first task was to learn how to cue up a record.  This involves dropping the needle onto the disc until the first musical notes are heard and then dragging the turntable back a few inches and stopping it so that the needle is only a split second away from the beginning of the music.  When the turntable is rolled, the music will come up instantly rather than waiting for the needle to work its way through the grooves. The same process was used on reel to reel audio tape and later, on video-tape.  The first record that I ever cued up was the march, New York Hippodrome by Paul Lavalle and the Cities Service Band of America and if you’re curious about that aggregation, Paul Lavalle was the conductor of the Band of America which had played on radio for years and was sponsored by Cities Service gas stations.  It’s funny how a particular  piece of music can stick in our memories and become instant nostalgia for some long-forgotten incident in our lives.  We only have to hear a few bars and we are swept back to a time and a place that made a lasting impression on us so many years ago.  For me, one such  piece is Lisbon Antigua by Nelson Riddle and his Orchestra, cued in past the opening piano intro to where the sweep of the violins comes in.  This was the music that our TV station used for its Programme Highlights segment at the sign-on and sign-off every day.  Each time I hear this tune, I am immediately transported back to that control room as I sat there recording the highlights package of the day.  How many times did I cue up that little Capitol 45 rpm record with its purple label, roll it, fade it under, and then cue the announcer in the booth to begin listing our programme rundown for the day?  Since we used recorded music to open and close every segment of each live show we did, the popular orchestras of the late 1950’s were as familiar to us as are the rock bands to today’s generation.  The music of Les Baxter, Morton Gould, Stanley Black, Frank Chacksfield, David Rose, Billy Vaughn, Percy Faith, David Carroll, Russ Morgan, and Andre Kostelanetz was used to introduce the news, weather, women’s features, commercials, played under silent film footage or became background music for studio fashion shows.  So too was the music of Robert Farnon and his Orchestra whose never-to-be-forgotten Peanut Polka was employed for so many different segments on so many of our shows that it’s a wonder the LP didn’t wear right through!

For a full week, those who were guiding my apprenticeship at the station allowed me to sit in the back of the small control room and watch the regular audio man flipping switches and riding audio levels.  I had made a drawing of the small Northern Electric audio console which I studied at every opportunity until I could see it with my eyes closed.  This was my first real job and I was bound and determined to do it right.  Finally, the evening came when it was decided that I should try to do a real live on-air station break.  For the very first time in my life, my hands were sweaty as I mentally ran through the process of switching from network sound to film sound for two commercials, then to a promotional announcement on audio tape and then back to network sound.  Well….I got most of it right and everyone around me said, “See?  Nothing to it!  You’ll be operating in no time!”.  Personally, after that 90-second teeth-clenching event I would have been quite happy to sit in the back of the control room for several more months but you can’t learn to ride a horse by sitting on the corral fence and so, over the next few weeks, I was regularly dropped into the hot seat and allowed to operate, do things wrong, learn to do them right and slowly learn the audio trade.  My smugness at having learned how to cue up an LP or 45 was quickly shattered a few weeks later when I rolled a 78 rpm for the intro to the late movie.  No one had bothered to tell me that I needed to cue these particular records much further back from the needle because they took longer to come up to speed.  Thus, this theme with its beautiful violin opening, sounded like a World War Two air-raid siren moaning horribly as it slowly achieved the right number of revolutions to bring it up to 78.  I sat there dumbfounded at this ghastly sound as the Switcher-Director sitting beside me, hurled torrents of abuse upon my head.  Incidentally, that piece of music that I had mangled do badly was Terry's Theme from "Limelight" by Frank Chacksfield and his Orchestra.  Ah yes....I remember it well.  Now do you see how a simple piece of music can bring back both pleasant and unpleasant memories from the past?   

My vocabulary began to expand not just with the witty curses and blasphemies that I heard from my co-workers but with technical terms such as wow, segue, cross-fade, feedback, sibilance, and reverberation.  I learned to splice audio tape and how to do so in a hurry because we only had one Ampex 600 tape machine and on the night shift, all of our announcements, promos, and many commercials were recorded on reel-to-reel audio tape.  I was shown how and where to plug in the studio microphones for various shows and how to wind up audio cable…a tiresome task from which I could not escape for the next  37 years. 

I quickly discovered that many who appeared on television were simply putting on an act and even though they seemed to be all smiles, warmth and good nature on the screen, they could quickly become something totally different when the camera light went off.  Answering the control room phone while working the night shift became a study in diplomacy because you never knew whether you were talking to some obnoxious drunk or an upset sponsor who wasn’t happy with the live commercial you had just done for him.  Upsetting a sponsor could cost the station real money and just might result in costing you your real job!  After doing audio on the afternoon women’s show and the 6 p.m. newscast for a couple of weeks, I was allowed to do the Thursday night country music show.  Let me just explain that this programme went live to air; the musicians set up their equipment in one part of the studio while we did the news, weather, and sports in another part.  There was only a 90-second station break between the two shows; we had no rehearsal or run-through of any kind and the first time that any of us in the control room heard this music was as it was being broadcast live to the viewers!  Once again, my boyish confidence at being able to handle the audio console was shattered and crushed to a fine powder as I fumbled with the volume control pots and tried unsuccessfully to get some sort of balance between the vocalist’s mike and the guitar, bass, and fiddle mikes.  Mercifully, the switcher leaned over, made the necessary adjustments on my console and got it straightened out.  Learning to be an audio man was obviously like being at the front in wartime…long periods of boredom punctuated by short bursts of sheer terror!

It was about this time that I did my very first celebrity interview; that is to say that I hung a microphone around his neck and then did the audio portion of the programme.  He was Colonel Tim McCoy, an American cowboy star of those two-reeler western films of the 1930’s; I could even remember seeing comic books of his adventures when I was a kid.  Next time you watch Around The World In Eighty Days, keep your eyes peeled in the sequence where Passepartout gets kidnapped by the Indians; Colonel Tim McCoy plays the U.S. Cavalry Officer who leads the rescue party.  He was appearing on our station to promote his Wild West show which was touring Northern Ontario at the time.  A real old Southern gentleman, he insisted on shaking hands and saying, “Howdy!” to everyone in the studio.  During that long, and I must add, hot summer of 1958 (because we had no air-conditioning in that small stuffy control room), I learned the skills necessary to become a competent audio operator.  We were never called technicians; that imposing title was reserved for the maintenance guys who looked after the transmitter.  When people that I met in my travels would ask where I was working and I replied the TV station, their response would always be the same…”Really?”, they would say and look mildly impressed.  “That must be a very interesting job!”.  One afternoon in the studio, I bumped into two kids that I had known in high school.  They had come up for our Saturday teenage dance party and as I laid out yards of cable and stuck microphones onto stands they regarded me with what I can only hope was awe and envy.  My education continued in late summer as I was shifted from the audio console into the telecine area where I learned the ins and outs of the two 16mm projectors, the slide projector, and a devilishly tricky beast called the tel-op machine.

Mike Oldfield sitting at switching controls. The console where he learned to do audio is at his right.

In September, our station was the first in Canada to go on the air with a live early morning show and I volunteered to be part of the crew.  After several weeks of ironing out the kinks in this pioneering new production, I and the others who rose at the crack of dawn, received a letter from the General Manager thanking us for our hard work and informing us that we would be receiving a salary increase because of our efforts in launching the new show.

During my four-year stay at this small station, I was to receive several other increases in recognition of my labours.  In 37 years of broadcasting, these were the only merit increases that I ever received and were the only acknowledgements that I had done a good job.

That fall, I returned to my old high school one evening for graduation exercises and received my Grade 12 diploma.  My old classmates had all gone their separate ways and we compared notes on our various triumphs and downfalls.  Some of them had gone on to very prestigious occupations and many had settled into mundane jobs.  I had no desire to trade places with any of them.  I had found myself a niche in life; I wasn’t in show biz but I was darn close to it and whatever the road ahead might hold for me, it was going to be far more interesting than moving papers from the In basket to the Out basket or walking up to a prospective customer and asking, “May I help you?”.  In the years to come, that road led me away from North Bay to Kitchener, Toronto, and eventually Vancouver, and although at these other stations I served my time doing audio on commercials, game shows, early morning shifts in Master Control, Romper Room, and more newscasts than I care to remember, I did take part in some exciting times, worked on some big shows, and crossed paths with some big name celebrities.  I did audio on the first colour TV broadcast in Canada, sat beside heavyweight champ Sonny Liston during a title fight (he chuckled at some of my jokes) and beside country singer Bobbie Gentry at a production dinner (apart from saying “Hello”, she was in no mood for small talk and I never did get to ask her why Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge), encountered screaming Beatles’ fans who wanted to trample us to death and drunken Hamilton football fans who pelted us with their empty liquor bottles.  Still, there was no escaping the dirty work.  I got soaked with rain and sleet as I wrapped up audio cable from a particularly nasty Santa Claus Parade in December, dragged frozen camera cable across the field at a bitterly cold Grey Cup Game and laid out and wound up several miles of the stuff at the Mosport Racetrack.  During my long and meandering television journey, I was to shake hands with Tommy Smothers and the Archbishop of Canterbury, work with Dick Clark and Dame Vera Lynn, sit down to coffee with actor Broderick Crawford, chat with violinist Isaac Stern, and accidentally hit Pierre Berton in the head with a boom mike!

But all of that lay ahead of me as I sat at my audio console in the summer of 1958.  One evening, past midnight, as we had just completed a reel changeover during the late movie, the switcher turned to me and asked, “So…are you still happy that you came to work at the TV station?”.  Without hesitation, I replied, “Oh, yes!  Absolutely.  This is my first real job and so far, I have no regrets.  Besides…there’s no telling where it might lead!”. 

Mike Oldfield spent 37 years in the technical end of television in a career that took him from his home town TV Station in North Bay, Ontario to CKCO-TV, Kitchener; CFTO-TV in Toronto, and finally CBC Vancouver.  This is the first of a series of articles about his early years in the business.