Ernest J. Dick is currently corporate archivist for the cbc. In addition to his experience in film television archiving, Dick is past-president of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and also has a longtime career in sound to round out his credit roll.

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No one has been more successful in anticipating the future of broadcasting than Moses Znaimer. He has had his share of both successes and failures, but none can dispute that he has had a relentless focus on the future.

Many might not share all of his enthusiasms, nor approve of how he has altered the broadcasting environment, yet all acknowledge his success and his ability to

psyche out the future. Sentimentality or a romantic attachment to the past are qualities that no one has ever associated with Znaimer.

We spend a lot of time in this industry psyching out the future. Audio-visual technologies and program formats come and go so fast that it takes a lot of time and effort to keep up. We don’t have the time to worry much about the past. Moreover, we tend to be suspicious of exercises in nostalgia, determined to keep our focus resolutely on the future.

So, what is Moses Znaimer doing collecting old tv sets?

He has assembled a collection of 250 television sets, 12,000 assorted television tubes, lamps, capacitors, etc., some 1,475 schematics and manuals for televisions, 200 items of tv memorabilia and a library of over 300 books, 1,200 magazines and 300 still photographs. Half of these tv sets came from the private u.s. collector, Arnold Chase, and it is an embarrassment to the Smithsonian curators that they did not keep them in the u.s.

Znaimer has been working together for three to four years now with Gary Borton, 20-year collector of television memorabilia and proprietor of a Toronto store, Popular Culture, to build this collection.

Znaimer has assembled a serious and professional staff led by Liss Jeffrey, senior research associate at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. They have been busy for the past year and a half cataloguing this collection, establishing the MZTV-Museum within the CHUM/Citytv building, and preparing the ‘Watching Television’ exhibition currently on display at the Royal Ontario Museum until Sept. 15, 1996.

The Institute of Contemporary Culture at the rom opened the exhibition in mid-November, and apparently visitors like the exhibit and are spending more time in this gallery than they do anywhere else within the complex.

Sixty tv sets were selected from the MZTV-Museum collection, including experimental sets from the 1920s; the RCA Phantom Teleceiver made of Lucite for the 1939 World’s Fair; Canadian television sets made by Rogers Majestic (1949), Addison Industries (1950), and Electrohome (1963 & 1966); and four different models of everyone’s favorite – the Philco-Predicta.

Television memorabilia on display from the collection include viewer-reception cards, catalogues, lunch boxes and thermoses representing the Hopalong Cassidy, Davy Crockett and Tom Corbett Space Cadet programs, selected TV Guides, comic books and games.

They tell the story of television reception from the experimentation with television of the 1920s to the advent of multimedia and the home computer in 1975. The Canadian story and achievements are represented although certainly not flaunted.

All is displayed in conventional museum style – behind barriers or under glass. Such museum ‘enshrinement’ here invites us to examine anew the objects from our rec rooms where familiarity really did breed contempt.

Despite Znaimer’s preference for moving images over the printed word, the exhibition has a good deal of text describing each artifact and in a time-line providing the highlights of the history of tv reception.

Museum designers these days tend to favor a minimalist approach to providing much information or context about objects on display, but on this occasion they avoided this existential style. Perhaps they considered that an ephemeral medium such as tv does require lots of explanation. This context is well done and appreciated by visitors to the exhibition who are apparently reading a good deal of it.

An exhibition about watching television must include samples of tv programming, and MediaTelevision at City prepared five tantalizing and delightful video collages that play on continuous loops. These work very nicely, but hopefully next time exhibit visitors will, in fact, be able to control what they want to see – following Znaimer’s own dictate that ‘television is an instrument to be played.’ Also, it would have been instructive to see accompanying credits run alongside the video collages on the miniature tv sets.

A virtual museum visit can be explored on computer at the rom or at home at the Web site mztv@bravo.ca. The virtual museum visit will be updated regularly and thereby should keep the exhibition dynamic. Including this virtual museum tour on diskette with the exhibition catalogue that sells in the rom bookstore would be an appropriate melding of media.

Many undoubtedly expect to see a good deal of Znaimer, City, MuchMusic and Bravo! in this exhibit, but their story is not told here.

Sure, we can find the 10 commandments of television according to Moses, but we are not expected to take them more seriously than other quotations about the impact of television that proved to be insightful, dead wrong or ironic.

And one can watch selected excerpts featuring Znaimer from his three-hour, much-panned epic tvtv discretely tucked into a corner, in no way commanding our attention.

One has the complete sense that the curators and designers of the exhibit were left to their own devices. They can take considerable pride in the rigor and dynamics that they have accomplished. Indirectly, the exhibit does, therefore, reflect well on Znaimer, although it certainly does not promote him.

The Speakers Corner concept from City was brought into the exhibit and invites visitors to recall their television watching memories. Selections of these video recollections can be played back within the exhibit as well as on the virtual museum tour and on the MZTV-Museum Web site.

This is an apt adaptation from the now gritty original Speakers’ Corner on the corner of Queen and John Sts. in downtown Toronto and, incidentally, an excellent way to make museums interactive. Indeed, why have museums not been doing this before now?

Znaimer tells us that he started collecting tvs because he fell in love with the Predicta, the late-1950’s Philco apotheosis of tv design. I suspect that this infatuation is costing him more and is more headstrong than previous amours. Many a museum has begun as a love affair and proved to be a perpetual drain on resources as well as disillusioning for the founder.

Znaimer further suggests: ‘A society starts turning into a culture when it first shows an interest in preserving its past.’ Perhaps, Znaimer wants tv to be taken seriously? Good for him! It is high time that Canada’s successful broadcasters want to be taken seriously for more than their ability to make money.

Znaimer is doing what a good many have talked about in Canada for some years. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters established an endowment fund in 1967 as its centennial project to set up a broadcasting museum.

cab has funded some worthy projects but never came close to establishing a museum. In Brantford, Ont., millions were raised to build an ambitious Communications Museum/Science Centre that now serves as a bingo hall.

The cbc had ambitious plans to turn the public spaces of the Toronto Broadcast Centre into an interactive broadcast museum and learning center. Budget cuts axed these plans and a modest museum only arose through the dedication of a few zealous cbcers and the volunteer efforts of cbc retirees.

Maybe Znaimer’s MZTV-Museum will stimulate a revival of these ambitions?

Will Znaimer continue what he has begun? Watching Television is an exceedingly responsible and well-done introduction to our television heritage. There are dozens more stories to be told, be they nostalgic and defamatory; be they heroic and cowardly; be they ennobling and embarrassing.

Let’s hope that Watching Television is only a beginning!