Radio broadcaster, Canadian television pioneer and West Vancouver resident Don Brinton received the Order of Canada at a recent ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
The award is “the big one,” according to Brinton, who has also earned the title of the Western Association of Broadcasters’ broadcaster of the year as well as snagging a spot in the Canadian Association of Broadcasters hall of fame.
Speaking with the North Shore News prior to making the trip to Ottawa, Brinton said he suspected it was the TV movies he championed as a producer in the 1970s and ’80s that earned him the honour. Likely the best known of his efforts was 1984’s Tramp at the Door. The Depression-era drama chronicled a Manitoba family confronted by a hobo purporting to be a long-lost relative.
The movie had a budget of $400,000, according to Athabasca University movie database. While it might not be Avatar money, the budget represented a pretty penny in an era when other TV stations either didn’t have money to spend or the will to spend it.
“They weren’t all Oscar-winning movies … but they were pretty darn good for Canadian productions,” Brinton said of the TV movies. “I’m proud of all of them.”
In an era when Canadian content was a rarity on the airwaves, Brinton frequently recruited Canadian writers, directors and actors for his TV movies.
Brinton is the rare broadcaster who began his career – quite literally – from the ground up.
As an agriculture student at the University of Alberta, Brinton was inspecting the permafrost of the Northwest Territories when he ran into a family friend who helped him get a little experience in the day’s dominant broadcast media: radio.
“I was fascinated by radio,” Brinton recalled.
After three years spent broadcasting for the Alberta Federation of Agriculture, Brinton caught the eye of station owner George Richard Agar Rice, who’d been manning the airwaves since 1922.
“He saw some kind of spark in me that I didn’t know I had,” Brinton recalled.
The next thing he knew, he was a news reporter – publicizing what he called: the new medium of television. “We had a lot of fun getting ready for that, because no one knew what the heck they were doing,” Brinton said.
