22 Minutes as Newhart Hockey Filler

I remember when CBC Television would run endless episodes of Newhart and The Golden Girls to fill in the gaps around hockey playoff time. It seems that This Hour Has 22 Minutes is now playing this role: as far as I can tell, the post-Canada Now period now contains endless episodes of this programme.

Speaking of which, brother Steve relayed the story of how he listened to the hockey game earlier in the week by calling brother Johnny on his cell phone. Johnny put the cell phone up to the computer speakers where the game was streaming in over the Internet. Amazing.

When my mother was growing up in Cochrane, the hockey broadcasts used to come up, days later, on the vinyl records on the train from Toronto where the station in Timmins would broadcast them on the local radio. How times have changed.

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Submitted by Alan on

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I think in the 70’s CBC Maritimes was allowed to tread a separate path in the pre-playoff transmission period. The time zone difference before the live broadcast from either Montreal or Totonro had to be filled and we used to get British sitcoms before the days of airings on TVO, Vision TV, PBS, etc. I distinctly remember one from when I was in grde 7 or so called the Upchat line about a guy who lived out of a railway station locker and lied and sponged through the day. Other years we saw the Sherlock Holmes series. By comparison, another slot with reruns of old topical jokes and Rick Mercer’s face is a sad replacement.

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