Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

school audience even though it was broadcast on the full network. Quaint though it seems now, in those days the CBC was thought of as a public service. Once my performance in a school broadcast conflicted with an exam I was to take in high school. I was in Grade 10 at the time. The principal kindly arranged for me to take the exam in his office after the broadcast provided I took a taxi directly from the studio to school and entered the school through the front door, an entrance normally reserved for grown-ups.
    Cuckoo Clock House , a Sunday afternoon show for children, was my bread-and-butter gig if such could be said for a twelve-year-old actor. As I have described, the producer, Norman Bowman, frequently did his casting by a call down the hall. A lifelong conflict began one fateful day. I was walking through the front lounge of the radio building on a Wednesday, likely doing a school broadcast, when Norman spotted me and called out as usual, “OK for Sunday, Bill?” Instead of responding with my usual cheerful affirmation I did the unforgivable. I hesitated. A friend of the family had invited me to ski with him in Collingwood on Sunday, a rare opportunity and one I had been looking forward to. “I’ll have to check and get back to you,” I replied. In the end I cancelled the skiing and did the broadcast but, whether as a consequence of my hesitation or pure coincidence, it would be one of my last performances on Cuckoo Clock House .
    Only once did I do one of the major radio dramas, which required two studios, one for the actors and sound effects, and another, separated by a glass wall from the first, for the full orchestra. The producer, in his raised control booth, visible to both studios, directed the production like a conductor, cueing the orchestra, the actors, the sound technicians, as well as the board operator who was in the control room with him, ensuring that the hour finished exactly on time, to the second. It is small wonder that producers were thought of as demigods.
    I returned to CBC Radio many years later, in 1977, as a producer of radio drama. What a change was there. Of course, radio drama had lost its preeminent position both as an entertainment and as a source of employment for actors. To say it was a shadow of its old self might be an exaggeration. But the main difference was the manner of production. Radio drama was no longer live. It was recorded in pieces and edited together like a film. Sound effects were usually recorded rather than manmade and the final work would be mixed together on various tracks in a post-production process not even imagined in 1950.
    By 1952, my days as a child actor were coming to an end. My family moved to the country, limiting my access to the CBC and other venues in the city. I didn’t make a successful transition to television at the time, perhaps hindered by being the tallest child actor around. And soon my voice changed, the end of the road for a boy actor.

To Live in Interesting Times
    What a stroke of luck. Imagine being close to the American theatre in the fifties, living in Britain in the first half of the sixties, as well as visiting London in 1957, and being in Canada in the late sixties and early seventies. For all three countries, these were classical eras and I was fortunate to be present for all of them. While there have been interesting individual playwrights in all three countries since, Edward Albee and David Mamet in the United States, Michael Frayn and David Hare in England, and a scattering of Canadian writers, how do they compare to the giants of earlier eras? Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge on Broadway in the fifties, to say nothing of the great musicals, West Side Story and My Fair Lady ; Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Robert Bolt, and Samuel Beckett in Britain; Michael Cook, George Ryga, and James Reaney in Canada. What unites these giants aside from their talent? I was there.
    Imagine a different sequence.