ssimpson wrote:

Can't forget the CityPulse News Test song: Warren Zevon - Night Time In The Switching Yard

I won the CityPulse news test once...  back in 78 or 79...   I won a copy of a book...   Dini Petty mispronounced my surname...  never did make it into T.O. to pick it up.
 

Glen Warren wrote:

ssimpson wrote:

Can't forget the CityPulse News Test song: Warren Zevon - Night Time In The Switching Yard

I won the CityPulse news test once...  back in 78 or 79...   I won a copy of a book...   Dini Petty mispronounced my surname...  never did make it into T.O. to pick it up.

Not to hijack the thread (although I’m going to do it anyway for a second) but the mention of the CityPulse Newstest brings back memories for me. I know the guy who came up with the question on a regular basis and I once asked him about it. It took some digging but since I never seem to delete anything, I found it in an old email. I don’t think he’d mind if I shared part of it here.

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Funny you would mention the Newstest. I was the guy who was charged with coming up with the question, in collaboration with a writer on the news desk. God, we hated that thing. It might not seem that difficult to create a stupid question, but once you get about six months to a year in, with the same topics coming up over and over and over, it gets hard to figure something simple and new, especially on holidays when nothing was really going on. And certain topics were taboo, like crime or accidents. (It would be in horrible taste to say “In what intersection did a fatal accident take place today?”)   
 
And that’s why we often repeated the same questions in a different way. One of our staples was every July 1st, when we’d asked “How old is Canada?” It was an evergreen, because the answer was different every year. We did the same thing every August with the latest edition of the CNE. Then there were the politicians. It was either “Who is the Education Minister?” or alternately “What is John Snobelen’s portfolio?” And on and on and on it went.
 
It many not sound like it, but it became a huge pain in the ass. And not just for us. Promotions hated having to find a prize for the week. And it would be mostly awful like, “the third correct caller will receive two tickets to ‘The Play No One Wants To See Or Would Ever Pay For’ now playing at the Terragon Theatre.” [No wonder Glen Warren never picked up his prize!- RA] (I used to jokingly say the loser got four tickets...)
 
Even worse was when the promotions guy was off on Monday and nobody knew what that week’s prize was. So we made it up, offering a “Citytv Prize Pack.” None of us ever knew what that was, of course, but I’m guessing they came up with station merchandise like a T-shirt or something.
 
Nobody liked this thing. The receptionist hated it because she had to take the phone calls, often from pissed off viewers who knew the answer, but weren’t the designated caller. And Mark Dailey tolerated it, because he had to go in and record both the question and the answer every bloody day. In typical Dailey fashion, he made it his own. “Now our CityPulse Neeeeewwwwstest…”
 
I remember the day it finally disappeared. They just decided to stop airing it. It was a huge relief to not have to come up with something that day. And then, around the year 2000, they decided to start an Internet news site. And lo and behold, the Webtest was born and for the next few years, the whole thing started all over again!
 
They never did let me use the one I always wanted to on April Fool’s Day. “Now our CityPulse Newstest: What is today’s Newstest question? If you know the answer, call us…” Oh well.
 
I still occasionally email my old collaborator, who has since moved out of the city – as well as out of the City – on July 1st and ask him old Canada is. He always knows the answer. And I tell him he’s won a CityPulse prize pack. Even after all these years, neither of us have any idea what that is.