Hands up, everyone who grew up getting their news from Citytv’s anchor babes trolling the newsroom and Chippendale boys driving round Toronto in branded SUVs with handheld cameras to capture what was hip, hot and happening in Toronto.

No shame in owning up. There was nothing oatmeal-bland about City. No shellac-coiffed anchors. No blond, blue-eyed journalists who looked like they played Scrabble in their spare time.

City and its personalities such as J.D. (now ‘John’) Roberts, Terilyn Joe, Mary Garofalo, Ann Rohmer and Daniel Richler felt, by contrast, irreverent and indulgent, both on and off the set – all part of their appeal.

And though City has seemed for a generation a single-minded, ever self-promoting monument to cofounder Moses Znaimer, it was Phyllis Switzer, mother of now-prez and CEO Jay, who first applied to the CRTC in 1971 for a local TV station licence, which was granted in November of that year.

Switzer had a background as a print journalist and had been the first information officer for the Canadian Cable Television Association. Her husband was Canadian cable pioneer Israel ‘Sruki’ Switzer. Znaimer, meanwhile, had been over at the CBC, helping to create Cross Country Checkup on the radio and hosting Take 30 alongside Adrienne Clarkson. After Znaimer failed to convince CBC programmers to adapt Cross Country Checkup for television, he struck out into private broadcasting.

One year later, on Sept. 28, 1972, Switzer and principal shareholders Znaimer, Jerry Grafstein and Edgar Cowan launched City on nose-bleed UHF channel number 79, bringing Torontonians an urban, modern, richly polyglot and culturally diverse ‘city’ hitherto not visible in Canada’s largest broadcast market.

An early example of City programming was Free for All, three live hours of talk airing Sunday nights between 1972 and 1974.

Artist and host William Ronald was eager to stress the simplicity and directness, even the coarseness, of local television, recalls City VP of production Marcia Martin.

‘It fit who we were. We were young and urban, doing things off the cuff. You didn’t have to go through layers of management to get a show on TV. If it could work – boom, you were on,’ she says.

To convince Torontonians to erect UHF antennas so they could watch City, Znaimer began programming Baby Blue Movies – basically soft-core porn offerings – on Friday nights at midnight.

Necessity figured elsewhere in establishing City’s low-cost, make-it-up-as-you-go attitude to TV production. The original CRTC application for City promised a local TV station made by and for Torontonians. The station began production and broadcast from the former Electric Circus nightclub at 99 Queen Street East.

Little money early on

And Martin insists there was little money available for programming, at least early on.

Montreal’s Bronfman family bought a 45% interest in debt-ridden City in 1975 (with the original principals retaining 25% and the rest held by minority shareholders), before selling that holding to CHUM Limited, led by Allan Waters, in July 1978. CHUM bought out Znaimer’s share in 1981, keeping him on as the station’s creative force. Meanwhile, Switzer held the corporate reins as senior VP of programming and community relations until 1982.

The completed purchase in 1981 signaled the start of a long and successful partnership between City and the Waters family that today has created an international benchmark for local television.

In addition to CHUM’s launch and rebranding of TV stations across Canada as City look-alikes – including Alberta’s A Channel stations recently acquired from the Craig Media purchase – the competition has gotten in on the act, too. When CTV and other rivals launched their own local TV stations in recent years, they copied City’s formula: lots of local programming produced and broadcast from a hip address, with movies and U.S. shows dominating primetime.

Today, City’s blue and red logo and programming approach are also behind station format licences in Argentina, Singapore and Spain.

Key to City’s ‘street-front, store-front’ concept is producing and airing entertaining programming in front of large windows or at street level in the downtown core.

Indeed, City’s studio-less environment means programmers can shoot in and around CHUM’s headquarters at 299 Queen Street West, where City moved in 1987, either by using 35 in-house ‘hydrants’ – basically glorified wall plugs – or laying cables and assembling a camera and audience outside to deliver the latest news or weather.

CHUM’s program format also calls for hiring hip, young local talent to reflect the city it wants to project on screen.

In Toronto, that meant Znaimer ignored older viewers who complained they couldn’t understand Jojo Chintoh, the first black face on City newscasts, through his thick Ghanaian accent. And when David Onley, a childhood polio victim with leg braces, started work in 1984 as a City weatherman, Znaimer insisted Onley be shown on camera in full, leaning on his cane if necessary, and not just from the waist up.

‘It’s not accidental that we really tried to represent the full spectrum on City. [Znaimer] sought out those people whom you didn’t [traditionally] see on TV,’ notes Sarah Crawford, CHUM VP of public affairs.

(The ever-elusive Znaimer, still officially in the CHUM fold as a consultant despite stepping down as VP of corporate development at CHUM and president and exec producer of its TV stations, did not return multiple phone requests for an interview for this story.)

City has also encouraged personalities to brighten its broadcasts. Anne Mroczkowski, Gord Martineau and Mark Dailey are fixtures at the station. Dailey, aka ‘The Voice,’ also helped brand the station and introduce its offerings. And City introduced video journalists for nimble, all-videotape newsgathering, well before rival broadcasters similarly cut labor costs in competitive times.

‘Sure, it came out of economics. But we also learned it was easier getting one reporter with a camera into an event than a five-person film crew,’ Martin insists.

Other innovations that enabled public accessibility at City include the Speakers Corner video booths, which enabled anybody to walk off Queen Street and record a message that could later be aired, and QT-QueerTelevision, an early gay-themed magazine show.

And while today FT-FashionTelevision, The Originals, MT-MediaTelevision and The NewMusic sell in more than 120 markets worldwide, up until a decade ago they were produced for broadcast on City alone.

Only in 1994, when Catalyst Distribution found a market at NATPE for City shows, did CHUM choose to launch a global distribution arm, CHUM Television International.

CHUM’s many specialty channels, starting with MuchMusic in 1984, sprang in large part from news, music and entertainment programming produced for City.

To be certain, City has known disappointment. CHUM lost out in a 1993 bid to win the Channel 5 licence in Britain. And it took City decades to break into the Vancouver market – and only through acquisition, when CHUM bought CKVU-TV from Global in 2001. The New VI in Victoria was launched weeks earlier.

But ultimately, Znaimer, who bowed out from active management at CHUM in 2003 to pursue his own projects, perfected method television with City, inventing a free-form, emotionally inspired way of portraying news, music and entertainment, while rival broadcasters remained staid and traditional.

Martin is proud that broadcasters everywhere are today copying a City model her station has stuck with throughout.

‘More broadcasters do these things today,’ she says. ‘But we did them 30 years ago, when people said City would never work and we’d fail. We were pioneers.’

-www.citytv.com