Christopher Ward secured his place in Toronto television history 25 years ago this weekend — October 21, 1983 to be precise — with the debut of City Limits, a Friday and Saturday overnight prototype for a music video station, airing on Citytv. The application for a national spin-off channel, MuchMusic, was due to be heard that winter — becoming the first of two specialty cable channels to be licensed in Canada, along with The Sports Network — and, with a library of record company promo tapes at 99 Queen St. E., the logic was that a trial run would help to show that it could be done.
The host (pictured, above left) was not necessarily as ambitious.
“I didn’t even want to do television,” Ward reveals. “It wasn’t an important medium to me.”
What he was doing around that time was a stint with the Second City Touring Company. This was a second professional performing career for the 34-year-old Ward, having already been a Warner Bros. recording artist whose power pop was tempered into CanCon yacht rock on the album Spark of Desire. The single “Maybe Your Heart” peaked at No. 17 on the 1050 CHUM Chart in the summer of ‘78.
But the exposure afforded an opportunity to play bandleader co-host on the CBC’s after-school tween talent show, Catch Up, which for some reason decided to incorporate an interlude of live rock music between kids showing off their science experiments and gymnastic postures, the wholesome antithesis of The Gong Show. “A couple of girls in Heidi outfits came on with a table full of bells on which they were playing ‘Somewhere My Love,’” recalls Ward. “Trying not to laugh was my biggest accomplishment at the time.”
The big record company contract expired after one record, though, leaving Ward’s follow-up stranded on an indie label from Edmonton. However, he had already started pursuing improv comedy through Second City.
“I can’t look back at this as some grand design,” says Ward. “I just wanted to have a creative life that was challenging and fun.”
And while he scaled the ranks to the Touring Company, riding in the van that famously picked up Mike Myers the day he graduated from high school to join the troupe, Ward shifted focus to another goal — getting then-girlfriend Alannah Myles on the path to some kind of glory.
Taking his exit after one last second-string show at the Old Firehall Theatre, where he was given an Elvis bust and a pie in the face, Ward was approached by Citytv staple The New Music’s producer John Martin about becoming the host of something called City Limits.
“I was apprehensive at first because I was trying to put myself back in the world of music,” says Ward. “He asked me if I needed the money — which I did. And then, he told me that I could do anything I wanted.”
Moses Znaimer, whose management career was banking on this experiment to convince the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to warm up to the Much idea — a certain license to print money given the epochal success of the no-budget all-music programming of the two-year-old MTV — thought Ward was a decent enough candidate for consideration out of a field of several. Yet, nobody else was ever approached.
The concept required a capable ad-libber with some sense of authority about music — at a time when video playlists were still being determined by which acts made the most viewable ones, regardless of what they sounded like. A host breaking the fourth wall in the control room in the wee hours wasn’t entirely new — three years prior, The All-Night Show on Channel 47 earned a rabid cult following with the premise of a security guard idling the after-hours away with a pile of experimental films and vintage tapes. City Limits was more of an overnight high-tech hootenanny — this six-hour flow of four-minute hits was a crash course in the ADD future of viewing.
“It just felt like we were completely labouring in obscurity,” says Ward. “There would be someone answering the phone, but we didn’t think it was anything more than a couple of nuts with nothing better to do than call a TV station.
“I knew it was catching on when people would approach me in public with these very strongly stated thoughts — about something like which video by the Clash we should play more often. But, as complaints go, they were pretty benevolent. I was always treated nicely.”
And, with that, came a low-key comedic approach that played off the captivity of an insomniac audience. Clips of Mike Myers dropping by in the middle of the night would also serve Citytv and MuchMusic highlight reels for years to come. Ditto the footage a still-unknown Bon Jovi, foraging through the renovating offices for a copy of their video, which no one had bothered to properly catalogue.
“The ideas were a by-product of boredom in the middle of the night,” says Ward. “I’d be getting ready to leave at 6am, and the director asked me if I’d ever been into the sub-basement of the building. Going down there would then become fodder for the next night.”
Subsequently, the approach provided a template for MuchMusic — where the line between office space and hosting stage was blurred, and the wage-slaves flipping the switches were themselves a cast of characters. The style might have run its course but, 25 years ago, it represented something truly genuine.
The full-time music channel was approved in April 1984, which meant City Limits shifted in purpose from a real-time demo tape to a trial run for The Nation’s Music Station. Ward, whose weekdays were still preoccupied with working on the Alannah Myles project, was tapped to segue into a full-time role that fall.
“This was incredibly exciting,” says Ward. “It was just myself and J.D. Roberts for the first few months, and we worked seven days a week, with a common work ethic. There was a feeling that this was important. And we had to make it great.”
City Limits, as an overnight show, unfortunately faded into the ether as MuchMusic did most of its live broadcasting in the daytime. The program name was retained, however, as a Sunday afternoon slot for Ward to continue doing comedy bits between the videos deemed too offbeat for regular rotation. “What this meant at the time was that when the Red Hot Chili Peppers came to town,” Ward recalls, “I was expected to interview them.”
Yet the fonder memories are reserved for the artists that Ward grew up with, from Leonard Cohen to George Harrison, trying to figure out how to market themselves to the generation being weaned on this video thing. And at least one VJ wasn’t interested in stepping over the line with his own idols.
“I could never be the disciplined interviewer they wanted me to be,” says Ward. “Since I had already done the thing myself, I had too much sympathy for what they were going through. I could never be a critic.”
The renewed ambition Ward was nurturing as a songwriter started to take shape, though. He released an EP of songs under his own name in 1987, and then Alannah Myles scored a worldwide Atlantic Records deal in 1988. While no longer a couple, their collaboration included the song “Black Velvet,” inspired by Ward’s trek to film segments about the 10th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s passing amongst the faithful at Graceland.
Gradually, as the single was gaining airplay, he took off for a vacation in St. Bart’s, where he ended up breaking a glass in his hand in the middle of the night — severing a nerve with nobody around to help. Taking this as some kind of sign, Ward decided while recuperating to shift his focus back to where it was before City Limits arrived: “I just called one day and said, ‘Look, I think you’d better stop paying me.’”
Without ceremony, that was basically the end of Ward’s career of talking into a camera — until a few months later, at least, when MuchMusic interviewed him in March 1990 about “Black Velvet” hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. For the next decade, he was based out of Los Angeles, writing for mainstream pop acts.
Following a spell living in France with his wife and daughter, Ward returned to Toronto with them five years ago, and is currently on the board of the Songwriters Association of Canada. This past summer, he served as a judge on a YTV talent show, The Next Star. “The show was about mentoring kids,” he explains. “I wasn’t expected to say anything nasty.”
Having made no ongoing effort to keep a video archive of his own, Ward is gradually getting copies of old footage, if just to show his 12-year-old daughter that there was time when MuchMusic would even play host to an interview with Phyllis Diiller or Stephen King, because they could.
A quarter-century after City Limits, with the corporate media empire stationed since 1987 at 299 Queen St. W. sliced and diced into convergent banality, Much has launched a weekly show aspiring to translate the shambling guerrilla chaos of online viral video to television. The title: We’re Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Honestly, why even bother?
Ward, however, concedes he doesn’t give the television industry any more thought at age 59 than when his detour into the medium began in October 1983.
“I never did anything that involved a script or teleprompter,” he says. “The only thing I knew about broadcasting came from the purveyors of the thing I loved the most. And those people who cared enough to communicate something about music were important people in my life.”
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