Uncle Bobby's Globe and Mail obituary (Bobby Ash)
Hyfler/Rosner
May 25, 2007 Friday
'Uncle Bobby' took on Sesame Street;
After a start in British music halls, he kept children
spellbound with a popular Toronto television show
BYLINE: F. F. LANGAN, Special to The Globe and Mail
Uncle Bobby was the television personality played by Bobby
Ash on a long-running children's television show on CFTO,
Toronto's first private television station.
The program was low-key and featured the calm Uncle Bobby,
with his long blond hair, usually wearing his signature wide
tie and cardigan, interviewing children and the people they
would be interested in. There were simple cut-out
characters, such as Bimbo the Birthday Clown, brought out
when he read birthday greetings to children in the audience,
and real sidekicks such as Meredith Cutting, the Singing
Policeman.
"It was amazing being out with him and seeing how excited
children became. Children would just start giggling when
they saw him and ask him to do some trick, like make an
animal out of balloons. It was quite extraordinary," said
Christine Shields, an actor who worked with Mr. Ash at CFTO
before moving back to England. She spoke to him often,
including just days before his death.
The Uncle Bobby Show ran for 15 years on local television,
from 1964 to 1979, and for two years on the CTV network with
the title Uncle Bobby and Friends. Later, it ran in
syndication, including on the cable channel YTV, where it
was seen as late as the early 1990s.
"It was a relaxed program with interviews with people like
Police Officer John, the Craft Lady or Barry Kent MacKay,
who drew birds and talked about them with Bobby," said
George Cowley, who worked on the program as a stagehand and
cameraman.
There were also animals in the studio, guinea pigs, a rabbit
named Thumper and a raccoon. Mr. Cowley remembered two
problem ducks.
"Bobby would let them out and they would wander around
covering the cables in droppings," he recalled. There were
also a couple of caged talking myna birds, which would
occasionally cause havoc if they weren't out of the studio
before the talk program that followed the children's show.
Children liked the program so much that Uncle Bobby would
receive 250 to 300 letters a day, double that if a contest
was running.
"Producers attribute his hold on children largely to the
fact that he never talks down to them, and that his interest
in them is real," a Toronto Telegram article said in late
1964. "Mr. Ash's performance is almost entirely spontaneous
and extemporaneous. Since he appears five times a week, he
would have little time anyhow for preparation."
At first, the program was live. But the team would later
tape shows six at a time, twice a week. By the 1970s, Uncle
Bobby was syndicated to other CTV stations and was,
according to one critic, "the only show in Canada to hold
its own against stiff competition from American shows like
Sesame Street."
Bobby Ash was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, in the British
Midlands. It was an industrial town where his family were
music-hall performers, the British equivalent of vaudeville.
He first started work on the stage at five years old and
toured with his family after he left school at 14. During
the war, he was in an army "entertainment unit."
After the war, he used back pay and the tips he'd made doing
shows to buy a tent and go on the road. But he went broke
and ended up working at a circus, washing elephants. He
worked his way up and became a clown, then a high-wire
artist. But a sudden gust of wind blew him off the wire one
night and he was badly injured. When he returned to the
circus, it had closed.
For several years after that, he worked in repertory theatre
in England, doing everything from stage management to acting
in small parts. Among the actors he worked with was a young
Judi Dench.
The theatre work prepared Mr. Ash for a career in
television, and he started working for the British
Broadcasting Corp., first as a stagehand, then as a floor
director. He was working on Coronation Street when CFTO came
calling.
It was his television skills, not his work as a clown, that
brought him to Canada. He was one of a group of skilled
people managers brought over in 1960, about six months
before CFTO went live.
"He started as a floor manager and worked on a few
children's programs," remembered Murray Chercover, who was
vice-president of programming at CFTO and later president of
CTV. Mr. Chercover said Mr. Ash, who had done some on-air
work at CFTO as a clown, came up with the idea for the Uncle
Bobby Show and they gave it a try in 1964.
"We had a test group of children in studio and it worked,"
Mr. Chercover said. "Off camera, you wouldn't think he had
the personality to appeal to children, but he was able to
adopt the persona - although he was quite sincere in his
concern for the children."
The program was on for just half an hour a day - usually
starting at noon - but it was a 12-hour workday for Mr. Ash.
He arrived at the station at 6:30 a.m., prepared and took
care of his animals by himself. Afternoons were spent laying
groundwork for the next day.
Along with the television work, he was a co-anchor at the
Santa Claus parade, always mingling with the children who
recognized him from TV.
"He was a private person and quietly did a lot of things,
such as bring toys to children in hospitals," Mr. Cowley
said. "He would either buy the toys himself or get companies
such as Irwin Toy to make donations. He never boasted about
it. He didn't want people to know."
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Ash took a course in childhood
education at Seneca College. For about five years, he ran
two schools for young children called the Bimbo Nurseries.
He also performed magic at children's parties, where his
favourite trick was twisting balloons into odd shapes.
In June, 1994, he retired to Elliot Lake, between Sudbury
and Sault Ste. Marie. According to Ms. Shields, he loved
nature and liked to bicycle out into the wilderness of
Northern Ontario.
BOBBY ASH
Robert William Ash was born in Walsall, England, on Nov. 5,
1925. He died of a heart attack in Elliot Lake, Ont., on May
20, 2007. He was 81. He was married to an actress before he
came to Canada. They divorced. He is survived by a son and a
brother.