Today on the Scroll: A first look at the forthcoming documentary on The All-Night Show, the program that brought nocturnal counterculture to early-'80s Toronto, a city that was otherwise pretty much asleep.
By the time the documentary 10,000 Shiftless Nights makes it to air this spring, it will be coming up on that many days since the cancellation of The All-Night Show, which ran on channel 47 from Sept. 1980 through Aug. 1981.
That’s the closest they could come to a nice round anniversary number in the process of immortalizing an era in local media history. But as the conversation wondering what traditional broadcast platforms are good for in the future goes on and on, it might be useful to recall a time when freakish short films, new-wave bands, black-and-white sci-fi shows, singing cowboy serials and other random acts of television could be tied together by a laid-back guy wearing a uniform.
Chuck the Security Guard, a character played by Chas Lawther, was stationed in the control room — after the multilingual station “signed off” for the night, once Jim and Tammy Bakker were finished singing for salvation money on The PTL Club.
He was often bouncing lines off an alleged cameraman, Ryerson Dupont, the heard-but-never-technically-seen avuncular British accent of Errol Bruce-Knapp.
“My sons who are now 21 and 18 are seeing these clips for the first time through Facebook,” says Lawther. “The pace of it is so slow compared to anything they grew up with, it’s an entirely different world. I had to explain to them that a lot of these bits were done live, at 4 or 5 in the morning. It’s difficult to relate to it now.”
Much like how it’s tough to relate to the fact that a dozen full-time staffers were assigned to The All-Night Show, some performing technical tasks that now come standard with every home computer. A laconic shift worker can create his own show online, but the professional context that created The All-Night Show is perhaps unfortunately part of the past.
“We were part of the generation that William Holden ranted about in the movie Network,” explains writer and director Michael Lennick. “It was the second generation of television, which grew up watching the first. We were completely under the influence of our childhood impressions and fantasies.
“The concept was inspired by Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo, except we wanted to bring that attitude to the overnight hours. And this was in a city where you couldn’t even get a meal after 11pm.”
The documentary also cites inspiration from local monster movie hosts like Zacherly and Ghoulardi — if not the recently deceased Vampira — who wrapped their macabre sarcasm around kitschy B-flicks that were bought on the cheap.
The All-Night Show, however, was programmed by producer Jeff Silverman with three audiences in mind: experimental short films, music videos and original effluvia in the first hour for the freaks; then Chuck’s segments wrapped around episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits; then '30s and '40s shorts appealing to the old folks who woke before Jim and Tammy rolled again at dawn.
This appeal made Chas Lawther the most recognized cult figure in town, never again able to quietly ride the streetcar to his “security guard” job at the channel 47 studios at Lakeshore and Bathurst.
“It wasn’t just a TV show, as if I had a starring role in The Beachcombers,” says Lawther. “It became more like a club, where anyone could phone in to be a part of it. And there was also a very real connection to the creative scene that was emerging around Queen Street at the time.
“We were only on for that one year, so I think people have associated the show with the specific things that happened to them personally during that year. The death of John Lennon was a huge part of that.”
The night after Lennon's murder on Dec. 8, 1980, Chuck tried to bring some much-desired levity to the proceedings by calling random phone booths around the world.
It also happened to be the year that Jim Carrey was pounding local pavement for any exposure as a celebrity impressionist, which he practiced on The All-Night Show in surreal bits inspired by the Clutch Cargo superimposed lips, more than a decade before Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
The bathhouse raids on Feb. 5, 1981 also became an issue during the run of show, as Chuck’s biggest fans included both cops working the third shift and the gay night owls who were arrested en masse. “It was like a family squabble,” says Lawther. “And the one topic I think I could’ve said more about as a character.”
Nonetheless, the show was a bona-fide local hit, producing around an hour of original content five nights a week. The most enthusiastic eccentrics in the audience increasingly fed the program with material.
“We must have been more trusting back then,” figures production assistant Claire Lemieux-Lamarche. “People would deliver us food in the middle of the night. And we’d eat it. Nobody felt it might actually be poisoned.”
Yet, when it came time to negotiate a second season of The All-Night Show, the phenomenon was apparently a victim of its success.
With no expectation of being able to sell commercial time during these uncharted and unrated late-night hours, channel 47 founder Dan Iannuzzi originally farmed out the sales work to boiler-room operations. They negotiated one-year deals with advertisers like Crazy Joe’s Drapery, who snapped up time on the cheap.
The station, originally known as MTV (“Mutilingual Television”) ran into financial difficulty because Iannuzzi’s concept of programming in different tongues throughout the day meant viewers wouldn’t stick. A concept ahead of its time for what was still basically a five-channel universe.
As the story generally seems to go, Ted Rogers was glad to swoop down and save the operation, as long as it was available for a low price. An overnight show that advertisers regarded as more valuable than the rest of the programming would drive up the cost. So, even though the mischievous Iannuzzi was a fan of The All-Night Show, that was the end of that.
The salvaged CFMT-TV (now called OMNI) tried to retain the overnight formula without the Chuck wraparounds, but it was a fast flop. Italian teen sex comedies proved to be more successful in the time slot.
10,000 Shiftless Nights will sum up this countercultural confluence in 66 minutes, though, when channel 47 runs it later this year. Perhaps it can be viewed as a pre-web Toronto parallel to We Live in Public, the documentary about millennial-age internet fishbowl implosion Pseudo.com, showing younger folks what people did for kicks before YouTube came along.
Not to mention an opportunity for the creators and viewers to flash back to those disappearing collective cathode experiences.
“For all we knew going in, the show was designed to appeal to a small like-minded set of lunatics,” says Lennick. “Tiny, voracious pockets of enthusiasm, like how John Cleese once described Monty Python fans.
“I’ve made literally hundreds of these documentaries, but this was the most difficult one for me to work on, because it took me a while to figure out exactly what I wanted to say about what The All-Night Show was.
“When you’re standing in the middle of the debris field, it’s hard to see the scope or scale of the thing that you have done.”
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