CBC Pioneer, Trans-Canada Matinee's Pat Patterson, Broadcaster and writer 1921-2005
Dan Say
Trans-Canada Matinee was a national afternoon
programme much like Sounding Like Canada, or
This Country in the Morning derived for the
Trans-Canada Network of the CBC, contrasted
with the Dominion Network. As the Dominion
network was dissoved in 1962, many T-C Network
programmes appeared there.
Helen Hutchinson was also a later host of T-C M
On the two CBC networks, see: http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/networks/networks_CBC_Radio.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060327.OBPATTERSON27/TPStory/
?query=pat+patterson
POSTED ON 27/03/06
PAT PATTERSON, BROADCASTER AND WRITER 1921-2005
CBC pioneer hosted Trans-Canada Matinee, launched Polka Dot Door and wrote
umpteen documentaries, plays and musicals but always turned down accolades
SABITRI GHOSH
Special to The Globe and Mail
KINGSTON -- Even in the form of a disembodied voice, Pat Patterson
turned heads. Her firm yet supple contralto, one CBC listener wrote,
was "the most beautiful speaking voice" she had ever heard.
Furthermore, said the fan letter, Ms. Patterson's show Trans-Canada
Matinee "has helped me raise my children, kept me informed on world
affairs, and acquainted me with the little but interesting people in
the world -- and always with a chuckle." Added the Sturgeon Falls,
Ont., writer: "Your audience has always felt that Matinee was you,
Pat."
For Ms. Patterson, there was no higher compliment. As striking in
person as her radio voice insinuated, the prolific broadcaster, author
and composer wanted her work to speak for her; she was merely the
transmitter. "She was very retiring and very unassuming," said her
partner, Sheila Gilbert. "Her attitude was, 'I don't want anything. No
fuss, no muss.' "
In later years, she recoiled from public attention, even failing to
show up at the 1986 Gemini Awards to pick up the John Drainie Award
for lifetime achievement in broadcasting. Orphaned amid the
festivities, the plaque was eventually retrieved from a garbage bin
(so the story goes) and delivered in private.
The lifetime it celebrated was rarely discussed by Ms. Patterson. All
she would reveal of her early years was her birthplace, Victoria, and
the fact she earned a licentiate in voice and violin. A precocious
only child, she co-wrote her high school's anthem with next-door
neighbour Lucy Berton, a sister of writer-historian Pierre Berton. At
21, she joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and drove ambulances in
Britain for the Red Cross. Returning to Canada in 1944, she moved to
Toronto, where she hoped to have a career in advertising.
An agency man referred her to a friend, who referred her to another
friend who worked at the CBC. There, she landed jobs in the record
library and continuity department.
"It was strictly the understudy in the wings department," Ms.
Patterson told Peter Gzowski on a Morningside interview in 1986. "An
announcer by the name of Frank Herbert was doing an afternoon concert
hour, and I planned that program -- I planned the music and so on. One
day, he was ill, and no one could be found to take his place. And the
boss said, would I like to try it? So I did. And that was it: I was
hooked."
In 1948, the CBC gave Ms. Patterson her own nationwide show, Pat's
Music Room, half an hour of her diverse musical selections. She also
lent her voice, programming skills and writing talents to a host of
other network enterprises, prompting one columnist to dub her a "Jill
of all trades."
When the CBC joined the television revolution in 1952, the poised and
telegenic Ms. Patterson led the charge. She often served as a
pitchwoman for live-to-air commercials; writer June Callwood
remembered seeing her in one for electric stoves, "the kind that she
just stands there and says she just loves her stove."
As Ms. Patterson's reputation grew, Ms. Callwood's husband, Trent
Frayne, was sent to interview her for Chatelaine. "You two would be
great friends," he told his wife. When the women met through a mutual
friend, the CBC's Dorothy (Dodi) Robb, they did indeed get along
famously.
"We had the same sense of humour and the same ethics about behaviour
-- she was a little more Victorian than I was, but we were both very
proper women," Ms. Callwood said.
When the still-single Ms. Patterson became pregnant and decided to
raise her child herself, she turned to Ms. Callwood for support. "That
was very unusual, to keep a baby in those days," Ms. Callwood said.
"What people did was hide out and give the baby up for adoption, but
she was not going to do that. At the CBC, which was more broad-minded
than most places, it was still a bit of a shocker."
Through resourceful time management and the help of close friends, Ms.
Patterson managed to rear her son, David, while working on three radio
and two television shows at the same time. It was a remarkable feat
that she divulged to no one but the most trusted of intimates.
She found sanctuary, as well as creative satisfaction, in her
profession. "You sit in that booth and you are quite private," said
fellow CBC employee Liz Fawkes, who befriended the older woman and
later babysat her son.
In the pinnacle of her CBC career, Ms. Patterson was chosen to host
Trans-Canada Matinee in 1961. Aimed at a daytime audience of women --
even as that audience's perceptions of itself and its role were
shifting -- the public-affairs program offered interviews with the
likes of W. H. Auden, George Balanchine, and Laurence Olivier.
"If and when women achieve that mythical status they keep fussing
about, CBC Matinee should deserve some of the credit," wrote Toronto
Telegram columnist DuBarry Campeau in 1968. "It is lively and literate
and any woman or man listening to it will be both entertained and
informed."
Though upset by the abrupt cancellation of Matinee in 1971, Ms.
Patterson smoothly segued into children's entertainment, arguably the
love of her professional life. In the 1950s and '60s, she had
collaborated with Ms. Robb on a children's musical fantasy, an
after-school TV program, and three children's musicals. Now, the
partners set to work on a new children's program, The Polka Dot Door.
Besides composing the buoyant theme song -- still hummed on
schoolyards and playgrounds across Canada -- Ms. Patterson also
co-wrote the first 60 shows. "She had a sense of play, she had a sense
of fun," said Ms. Callwood, citing these as the cues for Ms.
Patterson's approach to writing for children.
In a 1973 interview, Ms. Patterson also spoke of her strong sense of
responsibility. "I think we're so conditioned, so tuned into the fact
we're writing for children, we have to take care." She wanted her
plays and programs to act as "good influences," she said, "if not in a
moral sense, at least in a getting-along sense."
Ms. Patterson's words and music were behind many of the most durable
children's shows of the 1970s and '80s, including numerous Sharon,
Lois and Bram specials and Fred Penner's Place. She also developed and
hosted short-run CBC radio series, and wrote plays and documentaries
for radio and TV. Her proudest achievement -- a docudrama on the life
of landscape painter and war artist David Milne, A Path of His Own,
which she also narrated -- won seven Canadian Film and Television
Awards in 1980.
A scrupulous craftswoman, she was a critic of her own work, too. In a
1990 letter, she asked the editors of The Encyclopedia of Music in
Canada to drop all references to her musical Henry Green and the
Mighty Machine, "as it had a very brief life, while the three musicals
previously mentioned have continued to get productions after more than
20 years."
But real life allowed no such revisions. In the late 1980s, Ms.
Patterson had a permanent falling-out with Ms. Robb, which affected
her personally as well as professionally. Even more devastating was
her son's death in 1994 from cancer. "That was a disaster," said Ms.
Fawkes. "You don't want your children to go before you."
----
Pat Patterson was born in Victoria on Dec. 4, 1921, and died
in Toronto on Dec. 19, 2005, of cancer. She was 84. She leaves her
partner, Sheila Gilbert.
--
Everyone was listening to the CBC
http://www.statcan.ca:80/english/freepub/87F0007XIE/2004001/data.htm
Bobcat
news:e1a88l$ss$1...@morgoth.sfu.ca...
> Special to The Globe and Mail
> KINGSTON -- Even in the form of a disembodied voice, Pat Patterson
> turned heads. Her firm yet supple contralto, one CBC listener wrote,
> was "the most beautiful speaking voice" she had ever heard.
Pat Patterson was born for radio. When she broadcast to countless listeners,
she had the knack of speaking, not at them, not even to them. She spoke WITH
YOU. Not with thousands. With you. One person. Very few broadcasters could
connect like that. Lister Sinclair could do it. It's a quality almost
completely missing from CBC Radio today - that intimacy, that contact.
And Pat's voice was enormously listenable. How many times have you turned
the radio down - or off - because a voice grated on you? There's a harsh
timbre in some women's voices and to a lesser extent, in some men's voices
that's literally a turnoff. Television voices are much worse. No one pays
any attention to how hosts sound - it's all about how they look.
They (and their employers) should be locked in a room and forced to listen
to Pat Patterson's and Lister Sinclair's voices - until they get it right.
Dan Say
Short clips of Patterson (with guests) on Matinee in CBC Archives
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-75-1390-8678/science_technology/great_lakes_pollution/clip1
and
http://archives.radio-canada.ca/400d.asp?id=1-68-2152-13098-11&wm6=1
and another six minutes
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:gZvmeH5Z8MMJ:159.33.65.179/IDCC-1-69-100-550/life_society/expo_6
--
We all used to listen to the CBC
http://www.statcan.ca:80/english/freepub/87F0007XIE/2004001/data.htm