Courtesy of family
Philip (Pip) Wedge, a pioneer of Canadian television and long-time executive at CTV Television Network who helped shape Canadian viewing habits for decades, died in Toronto on April 15 at the age of 97.
Born in England, Mr. Wedge got his start in the early days of Britain’s commercial television, producing game shows for Associated-Rediffusion and often writing the questions. A game show brought him to Canada in the mid-1960s and to CTV, where he stayed for 28 years, primarily as vice-president of programming for the privately owned network.
In that job, he would make the pilgrimage every May to Los Angeles, where TV buyers would haggle with producers and decide on their lineup of shows for the fall season. Mr. Wedge would compete with CBC, then later with the Global Television Network as well, to acquire the shows that he figured Canadian viewers would watch. Some programs would turn out to be hits while others bombed.
“It’s really an inexact science,” Mr. Wedge told Playback magazine in 1994, with typical modesty. “The reality is that when you bat .500, you’re doing remarkably well.”
“Pip was a natural as a TV program director,” said Lloyd Robertson, who anchored CTV’s national newscast from 1984 to 2011 and was a close friend. “He knew the hits when he saw them and he knew his audience.”
“No matter that he was from Britain, his experience in both selling and buying of TV shows had given him a finely honed sense of what worked with the greatest number of people,” Mr. Robertson continued.
Philip Lomas Wedge was born in London, England, on Dec 2, 1928, the third child of Frederick Wedge, a tobacconist, and his wife, Maud Wedge, who went by the name Bobbie. His older brother quickly dubbed him Pip, after the character in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. The nickname stuck.
Young Pip was a keen student, but his education was disrupted by the onset of the Second World War. For a time, he was evacuated to the countryside, but he insisted on returning home to London and was enrolled in an emergency high school, where war was a daily reality.
Mr. Wedge recalled writing exams in 1944 as the Nazis were attacking London with V-1 unmanned flying bombs, known to the British as doodlebugs.
“These bombs sounded like a motorbike engine. When they came over our classroom, the teacher would announce, ‘Everyone down!’ and we would crawl under our desks.” When a bomb’s engine went silent, the fear was that it had reached its target and was about to detonate. “So we prayed each bomb would carry on and hit somewhere else,” he said.
After high school, Pip worked with his father as a deckhand in Portsmouth Harbour, on England’s south coast, on a boat carrying naval personnel and supplies to nearby ships. Then he got a job manning the switchboard at a London advertising agency. In 1946, Mr. Wedge volunteered for the Royal Navy. His dream of attending university and becoming a teacher was never to be.
While training as a telegraph operator in Glasgow Harbour, Mr. Wedge listened to U.S. Armed Forces radio and was hooked on the sound of American popular music. He became a keen follower of Musical Express, the leading pop music magazine in the United Kingdom, and managed to meet Steve Race, one of its columnists, who offered the young Pip a job as his assistant.
That led to a reporting job at Musical Express and in 1953 to a position as a publicist with Philips Records. Mr. Race later convinced Mr. Wedge to join the consortium that won Britain’s first commercial TV licence. Mr. Wedge began working for the new TV service, known as Associated-Rediffusion, first in light entertainment and then as manager of quiz shows.
It was the era of live television, which meant that performers and production crews didn’t get a second chance if they made an error.
“It taught people to think on their feet,” Mr. Wedge recalled in an 1988 interview for the History of Canadian Broadcasting project. “Some people weren’t always as good as others in learning their lines and people might have a couple of drinks before a show and the effects might show up on air.”
Mr. Wedge was in charge of selecting contestants and writing questions for Double Your Money and Take Your Pick, among the most popular shows on the station, but he found himself in a professional rut. Then came the opportunity to produce pilots for localized versions of Double Your Money in Canada and in Australia.
Mr. Wedge ended up taping 42 half-hour shows of Double Your Money in seven cities across Canada that were shown on the fledgling CTV network in the 1964-65 season. When the project ended, he was offered a job producing quiz shows in Montreal. He jumped at the opportunity.
Once permanently in Canada, Mr. Wedge was struck by the fast pace of the work. Whereas in the U.K., he was producing one show a week live in prime time, “in Montreal, I was producing two prime-time game shows, five times a week. Sometimes, we’d do five or six shows in one day.” In addition, he began producing TV specials about Expo 67.
He loved his new home. “Canada is a wide-open country where nothing seems impossible if you’re prepared to work,” he wrote in an article for Fusion, an internal publication for his previous employer in the U.K.
“He really liked Canada,” said his wife, the former Elisabeth Kingdom, whom he met when she was working as a hostess for Take Your Pick. They married in 1965 just before leaving for Canada and had a two-day honeymoon. Coming to Canada meant opportunity for Mr. Wedge to expand his horizons and escape the class system in England, she said.
In 1967, the couple moved to Toronto, where Mr. Wedge initially supervised daytime and variety programming and developed specials for CTV before being named promotions manager and director of development.
“This was a much more democratic environment than what I’d known in London. They took me at face value. They knew what I did, and none of my background mattered. This was a key element in my being happy with CTV,” Mr. Wedge told Playback magazine in a 1994 profile.
Mr. Wedge was put in charge of developing co-productions with American firms, including TV specials starring Kenny Rogers and Sonny and Cher that were produced in Toronto. In 1973, he was appointed vice-president of programming, a job he held for the next 21 years.
Every spring, Mr. Wedge would head to Los Angeles for the “May screenings” of offerings for TV’s fall schedule. He would be accompanied by Murray Chercover, president of CTV from 1967 to 1990, and at times by owners of CTV affiliates.
Although CTV would often lose out in the bidding to the CBC, which had more money to spend, Mr. Wedge was adept at finding winners as well, shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Love Boat. At times, he would be forced to buy a package of programs. “You may have to take a show you didn’t want to get the one you do want,” Mr. Wedge said. “The preferred show may triumph in the ratings but the second show will predictably fail.”
In the early years of CTV, when the network was owned by station owners as a kind of co-operative, the boardroom atmosphere was sometimes “very fractious,” according to Robert Hurst, a former president of CTV News. But Mr. Wedge was a calming influence. “He would watch a lot of the in-fighting between the network and the local owners but he always had a smile on his face.”
“He was one of those people who would smooth things over,” said his wife Lis. Mr. Hurst also appreciated Mr. Wedge’s support for the news division, even when owners complained about the high cost of covering events like a national election. “Pip was a steady and faithful and enthusiastic supporter of the news division,” he said.
Despite Mr. Wedge’s role in buying U.S. shows to fill prime-time spots on CTV, he never objected to the Canadian content rules imposed by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
He called the rules “essential” and “very sensible.”
“Television is a business and you wouldn’t blame businessmen for wanting to make the most money they could,” he said. If the rules allowed for 90 per cent U.S. content, TV owners could have made more money but Canadian culture would have suffered.
Mr. Wedge retired in 1994 but remained active in the industry as a consultant and adjudicator for the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. He also served as president and executive director of the Canadian Communications Foundation. He was appointed to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2006.
Mr. Wedge would also meet regularly for lunch in Toronto with two other buddies from CTV, Mr. Robertson and Tim Kotcheff, a former CTV vice-president for news. The get-togethers continued until recently, even after Mr. Wedge began using a wheelchair.
Mr. Wedge leaves his wife, Elisabeth; their son, David Wedge; and three grandchildren.
Pip Wedge always felt he was a lucky man who had travelled a long way from his origins. “It was like going to heaven, going to Los Angeles, staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel … this place of legend. I often had to remind myself that I was, after all Pip Wedge, born in Forest Hill, Southeast London, in 1928.”
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