Behind the Scenes at CBC Edmonton

Alright, so we're at CBC Edmonton with Ron. How you doing?

I'm good, how are you doing, man? I'm alright.

So where are we? We're in a mall in Edmonton, eh?

Yeah, this is the southeast corner of City Centre downtown, and this is not the largest mall because we all know that's West Edmonton Mall, and I don't want you to make that mistake. But this is a very big mall. It runs about 3 blocks, and we're at the southeast corner of it, right off Churchill Square, which is kind of like the center point of the city. We're right near the main performance hall in the city, we're near the Art Gallery, the soon-to-be-reopened Art Gallery of Alberta. City Hall is near here. Law courts, police. It's kind of right in the heart of downtown Edmonton, and we're operating here for studio purposes on the ground floor for radio, and then on the third floor we have a radio and television newsroom and the two television studios for English and French supper shows.

Can we go look at those? Absolutely.

And then this is the control room for the main English radio on-air studio, so all of the local programming that goes through Central Northern Alberta emanates from this studio.

So this would be your regional shows?

Exactly. Morning Show Edmonton AM, parts of our province-wide noon show Wild Rose come comes out of here, and then our afternoon show Radioactive from 3 to 6 in the afternoon. So all the Monday to Friday shows that are produced here in Edmonton come out of the studio.

And where's the actual voicing booth?

Oh, that— you have to go through here. This is the control room, as you can see, for Studio 2. And then this is the actual studio itself. And as you can see, we're right on the street corner, right on— this is one of the busiest corners in downtown Edmonton. The main public library is here. Churchill Square just across the street is a massive redevelopment downtown they did a couple years ago for the city centennial.

Tell me the, uh, the worst horror story or most embarrassing experience. You must have people who come up to the window and pound on the window and try and get on the air, or hold up signs not realizing that it's not TV.

Yeah, no, I've had some people pound on the window, absolutely. And now, because we're in downtown Edmonton and because I'm in here at 5 in the morning, you get people who are in the final stages of partying. So they're—

At 5 in the morning?

Yeah, they're either on their way home and not really aware that it's 5 in the morning. Frankly, they're not even aware of where they are, but they're attracted to the sound because we have speakers outside our studio, so you can hear to the shows out on the street. And they hear and they're attracted to it, and they come in and they start waving at you. I've had guys play air guitar outside the window. I had a guy flash me once. Oh, I had one time during the football playoffs a couple of falls ago, Edmonton was playing Saskatchewan in the Western Final here in Edmonton. And I said, well, you know, for all the talk about, you know, how so many Saskatchewan Roughrider fans still live in Edmonton, I said, you'd never know that. All I see is green and gold, green and gold. And a guy showed up outside the window I guess was challenged by what I said on the air, and stood outside and all of a sudden opened his coat like this, and he's wearing a Saskatchewan Roughriders sweater underneath it. So it was quite funny.

Did you ever react on the air? Like, have you ever said, "Just to let you know, the pounding that you hear outside is—" or is that kind of a no-no just because it encourages them more?

Actually, you know, to be honest with you, you would never be able to hear it inside because the glass is so thick. I don't know how many panes there are in this, but it's because the buses— this is a huge bus stop right here, so you can imagine the rumbling sound of buses would come right into the studio if it wasn't protected with all those very, very heavy panes of glass, and then, you know, all the soundproofing that they do in studios and that. So no, you actually— people can pound on it and it's never gone out over the air, at least not on the morning show. Can I try? Yeah, sure, go for it. I think you're pounding louder than the people that ever pounded on my window before. I just heard that.

And now, what is this book here? Looks like a cheat sheet book, The Chronicle of Canada. Well, that's—

oh, that's great, because, you know, sometimes the guests don't show up and you need to have something you can immediately pull out and say— and just start reading from— did you know, for example, that on this day Prime Minister Thompson died at Windsor Castle, and that of course meant that Sir Mackenzie Bowell became our Prime Minister? This was on December 22nd, 1894. Were you doing your blog in 1894? Uh, 1892, actually. Yeah, so you were around even before this. Well, then you would remember this because it's probably on your blog.

How often do you actually consult this?

Uh, never. No, I did actually know, uh, one time it was— we were doing a Canada Day show and there was a question and about a We were doing a Canada Day quiz, and there is a question from a listener about the accuracy of the answer, and this thankfully confirmed that our answer was the right one. Otherwise, I would have been so badly embarrassed. And these connect people to CBC.ca, so people who are coming by our storefront here in City Centre can just come in here and they can log on get programming information, that kind of thing, email shows. So they're set up. And then we have all the monitors that are set up here. We actually had a performance of a choir from Edmonton who are doing a fundraiser later today because they're off to Africa. They've got an Africa project with a number of youth choirs there, so they're performing. And then we'll be using this area as well for a live performance at noon hour as part of NexFest. So this is very busy today. And then later today we're wrapping up our Food Fight series with a cooking demonstration in here as well. Couple of food folks from Edmonton.

And behind us looks like there's another studio.

Yeah, this is exactly a mirror image of the studio that I just took you in, Studio 2. This is Studio 1, and this is where our French morning show, our French noon show, and French afternoon show goes across all of Alberta because they have quite a— it's unknown to a lot of people, but the Francophone community in Alberta is quite huge, and it dates back to the days of settlement back in the late 1800s when Father Lacombe And missionaries came to Alberta. They brought with them, of course, and along with fur trade, an awful lot of Franco-Albertans now can trace their roots back to that. So we've got a big French radio presence here as well. And that studio is exactly the same studio like when I work out of for English radio.

Okay, so we've gone up a floor.

Yeah, actually two floors. We're on the third floor now of City Centre, and this is where our newsroom is. So all of the the programs that are produced, radio and television, English and French, all of the editorial muscle comes out of here. This studio, one of two, and again they're absolute duplicates just like the radio studios are downtown, or downstairs rather, this is for CBC News at 6 anchored by Portia Clark, and this is where we do our 1-hour 6 o'clock show which goes again to central and northern Alberta, and then there's a duplicate show done for Calgary and southern Alberta down at CBC Calgary, so they would have a similar similar setup there.

And what is this? There's like a light that would— if you're sitting here at her station, it looks like the light would kind of come up underneath her chin like a horror movie.

I think it's probably something to do with television. You know, that's why I'm in radio. So that's the backdrop. And then in the wintertime, when the sun sets at about 4:00 in the afternoon, doesn't rise till about 9 o'clock in the morning because we're so far north, they turn this around. And if you look right over there behind the cameras, you see the cityscape. That would be the backdrop behind Portia during the dark days of fall and winter.

So this is the newsroom we talked about earlier? That's right, yeah.

And this is a— it's one of the— it was the first in the country actually that brought together English and French radio and television. And now a number of other stations have also gone that same route. I think Ottawa has, and I think there's plans for a number of other cities. But yeah, so everybody that at one time was split into two different buildings in two different locations on the south side of Edmonton All moved downtown about 3.5 years ago, and so all of the radio and television programs are produced out of this newsroom. Well, one of the things that allows you to do too is you can start a story in the morning on Edmonton AM, and then you can develop a story during the course of the day on the afternoon show on radio, but also on the TV supper show at 6 o'clock. So you give the— I mean, certainly for listeners and viewers, there's continuity to the coverage as well. You can't assume that just because you ran it at 7:15 in the morning, they heard about it at 5 o'clock in the afternoon or at 6:15 at night. So it does give, I think, a much more comprehensive coverage. It also is great when it comes to sharing material, so you're not all doing exactly the same thing, you know. You can find your own take on a story and still actually have some elements of it that you can share from either television or from radio. So as we walk further down the hallway here, this will take you to the French television studio. Where Olivier Dorivage does the 6 o'clock news for all of Alberta, right out of this studio here. And then as we walk a little bit further this way, master control for radio is on our right-hand side, and that serves all of the radio signals that come out of CBC Edmonton, English and French. It's really small. No, that's the booth. See how much bigger this room is? And these people are actually keeping us on the air. If it wasn't for them, we'd be— there'd be no signal. So now, is this—

this is master for radio and TV?

Um, I don't know. What are you asking me for? I'm a host.

Does anybody know? Radio. This is radio master control.

Radio. Radio master control. Yeah. TV master control is actually in Toronto.

Is that true? Really? They don't switch anything here anymore.

Now, as you come out of the master control and walk down this hallway, this is editing bay after editing bay after editing bay. For both French and English television. So again, for cutting stories for the 6 o'clock news, this is where all that happens. And this is my favourite place in the entire CBC Edmonton, right here, this is ingest. You get to ingest right here. Sounds like something. What the hell does that mean? You know, it's, there's a committee that's been formed and they're going to let you know what that means. And then just as we walk down this hall a little bit further, there are more radio studios down this way, including a studio where we can actually record performance and mix performances that are recorded live, because now with shows like Canada Live that Matt Galloway is hosting evenings, we've got a lot of— oh, it's locked. Oh nice. Let me in please. But trust me, honestly, inside there is this beautiful audio board where they mix a lot of the, a lot of the shows both shows with Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, but also we did a show with Corb Lund, who's one of the funniest guys, one of the great, great alt-country guys in the country, and he's an Edmontonian, and they recorded a show with him at the Jubilee Auditorium here, so they can— it gives them just mixing. There's also an actual studio large enough that you can bring a group or combo. You couldn't bring the Edmonton Symphony in, but you could bring— you could easily bring, you know, a trio or quartet in to record a show there. This is the library. And this is everything that— that's Lee Onisko right there. She is the most important person at CBC Edmonton because she knows everything about what goes on inside here. This is where we keep all of the discs. I don't know where she gets them all. She's got the best record collection ever. How many CDs you got, Lee?

You know, I just counted the vinyl downstairs and there's 37,000 albums, so what would you suggest about about, um, just put 2,000 on the shelf, maybe 50,000.

Uh, you know what I think is interesting is you folks have the same— I'm assuming that the orange dots are the same in Vancouver, that the orange dots mean it's CanCon, Canadian content.

Green dots mean that it's AlbertaCon.

Oh, green dots mean it's Alberta content. For CanCon, we've got to meet a certain target of Canadian content, but is there an AlbertaCon target?

Uh, well, not for the collection. For playing, yes. As a librarian, my first feeling is to have as broad a collection as possible. So out of that, what goes on the air is selected by the programmers, and they have quotas to meet. Not so me. Everything goes on, everything goes on.

But Lee could find stuff, you know, because we do a music column on Edmonton AM, and quite often you'll— it might be a band that's, that's kind of breaking into the music scene here, but they'll have taken their their musical cue, if you will, from music of another generation, and sometimes it's only available on vinyl, and Lee's got it. Wow. She's got it all.

This is the third floor fire wardens. I'm not going to show their names, but so this is awfully organized. In the event of a fire and you're on the air, what do you do?

I immediately turn to the fire warden, who actually is also our technical director on Edmonton AM. Clem Albert is the TD on— Has it happened? No, but the fire alarm went off once when we were doing a show from— because quite often if we've got a live performance in Centre Stage that I showed you earlier outside our studio door. I was in there doing a show and the fire alarm went off. And so we had to go to network programming and evacuate because that's the rule. So there I was standing out in the street waiting for the fire department to show up, and they showed up and gave us the all-clear, and we were back on the air in 15 minutes because it was just a false alarm. We had just had a bunch of problems with, I guess, wiring.

I don't know, our staff pulling the little switch.

No, our staff would never do that. They're dedicated to the craft of broadcasting, Todd, and Never, never would they ever allow frivolity to break out. Yeah. Thank you very much. I'll see you next week. Okay.