Pip Wedge, a broadcast pioneer who helped shape the British and Canadian private TV businesses when first getting off the ground, has died. He was 97.
Wedge passed away peacefully and unexpectedly on April 15 in Toronto from natural causes after feeling unwell and taking a nap from which he never woke, his wife, Lis Wedge, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. “After nearly 61 years of marriage, I am missing him tremendously,” she said in a statement.
Born on Dec. 2, 1928 in Forest Hill, in southeast London, U.K., Wedge was named Philip by his parents so that they might call him Pip, after the Charles Dickens character in the classic Great Expectations novel. Following high school studies during the turbulent Second World War, Wedge in May 1946 took a job as a clerk and switchboard operator at a London advertising agency, before joining the UK Navy as a telegraph operator.
It was while Wedge monitored the airwaves around Glasgow Harbor aboard a navy ship that he also listened to the American Forces Network radio station as American artists like Doris Day, Jo Stafford and Johnny Ray performed on air. That pop musical interest eventually had Wedge catching the attention of veteran British musician, broadcaster and Musical Express writer Steve Race.
In a 1994 profile in Playback Magazine, Wedge recalled summoning his courage to approach Race, whom he did meet with and came away with a handful of the musician’s LPs in his arms. When it came time to return the records a few months later, this time Wedge came away with a job offer after offering some useful writing advice during their conversation.
“During our second meeting, Steve was writing his Musical Express column, so I looked over his shoulder, made some comments, which he put into the article. We really got on,” Wedge recounted. In June 1950, Wedge began writing concert reviews at the Musical Express for Race, and in June 1952, he became a reporter and eventually an assistant editor.
By 1955, however, Wedge heard from Race he was part of a license application to launch Associated-Rediffusion, Britain’s commercial TV station to compete against the BBC public broadcaster. So Wedge joined the TV station, helping set up their music department and then moving into light entertainment. That included producing in the rough and tumble world of early TV quiz shows like Double Your Money and Take Your Pick.
In spring 1962, Wedge felt a need to exit quiz show production in the U.K.: “I plateaued and had little hope of breaking through,” he recalled in the 1994 profile about any additional career advancement. But that exit came when Wedge was asked to produce Double Your Money pilots in Canada and Australia.
In Toronto, he set up studio space at CFTO-TV and found contestants, before doing the same in Sydney, Australia. By 1964, Wedge was producing 42 half hours of Double Your Money for the privately-owned CTV Television Network in five cities across the country, while editing the series in Toronto.
A year later, Wedge made the decision to take a job offer at CTV, first in Montreal in August 1965 and then at headquarters in Toronto from August 1967 as a producer under Murray Chercover, executive vp of the network and programming chief Arthur Weinthal.
In 1970, Wedge was promoted to director of development. Suddenly, he was no longer considered strictly a music man or a producer as back in class-ridden UK, but was judged a TV exec asked to help lead a Canadian TV network. “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,” Wedge recalled in the 1994 profile.
He worked at CTV for 28 years until his retirement in June 1994, with his duties including producing Canadian variety and daytime programming like a trio of Petula Clark TV specials and early seasons of W5, the network’s flagship news magazine series.
And Wedge bought CTV’s foreign programming, including U.S. studio series like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Soap and The Love Boat acquired each year at the Los Angeles Screenings, as he managed the network’s schedule. After leaving CTV, Wedge did consultancy work for the network and industry associations like the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.
In November 2006, he was inducted into the CAB Broadcast Hall of Fame, and a year later became for 10 years an adjudicator for the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which helped regulate taste and standards on Canadian TV for the CRTC, the industry regulator.
