Fiona Reid, Al Waxman and Helene Winston played in King of Kensington, a CBC sitcom that aired between 1975 and 1980.CBC
King of Kensington, a wildly popular CBC sitcom that premiered 50 years ago this fall, had a major impact on how Canada understood itself and its changing cities in the 1970s.
But, long out of reruns and not available on streaming, the comedy about a shopkeeper in Toronto’s Kensington Market and his multicultural milieu has increasingly faded from collective memory.
CBC is combatting that national televisual amnesia by uploading 10 notable episodes of the Perry Rosemond-created show about Larry King (Al Waxman), his WASP wife (Fiona Reid) and his diverse group of pals to its streaming service Gem on Oct. 24.
While it’s only a sampling of the hundred-odd episodes that aired between 1975 and 1980, they will help younger generations of Canadians understand the significance of a series that at its height averaged two million viewers weekly (when the population was just over 23 million).
Adam Waxman, Al’s son and an actor and writer, grew up while the show was on the air and remembers how his father would be greeted on the street everywhere he went across Canada as “the King” just as his character – “a man among men, the people’s champion” as the theme song put it – was in the opening credits.
“Everybody watched hockey, The Beachcombers and King of Kensington in Canada‚” he recalls. “Everybody knew the hockey players – they didn’t wear helmets yet – and everybody knew Bruno Gerussi and Al Waxman.” (If you’re looking for The Beachcombers, by the way, it streams on APTN lumi.)
From the archives: The Prince of Kensington finally takes the throne
When Waxman died at age 65 in 2001, King of Kensington’s influence on the fabric of this country was taken for granted. The Toronto Star called it “the single most important entertainment series ever produced in English-speaking Canada” and a statue of its star by Ruth Abernethy was erected in Bellevue Square in Kensington Market.
Certainly, part of what made it important was how it paved the way. The episodes on Gem include guest-star appearances from Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin that originally aired a year before SCTV hit the air – and one with future SNL star Mike Myers making his professional debut as a child actor. (Myers later nodded to his origin story in Austin Powers by naming Elizabeth Hurley’s character Vanessa Kensington.)
“There’s a whole generation of performers who were inspired by that show,” Roger Abbott of the Royal Canadian Air Farce told the Winnipeg Free Press.
“It made you believe that it was possible to make a successful comedy series on Canadian television.”
But the King of Kensington was more than just an industry milestone. It was in some ways Canada’s response to Norman Lear’s All in the Family in the United States – but with the more liberal King a kind of “Archie Bunker in reverse” as journalist Bill MacVicar put it.
Al Waxman in 1998 at the Gemini Awards in Toronto.FRANK GUNN/CP
King, who like Waxman was Jewish, and his Jamaican friend Nestor (Ardon Bess) and Italian pal Duke (Bob Vinci) were part of plots that dealt with social issues from feminism to divorce, immigration to addiction – and, in one episode, even Quebec nationalism when the Rimouski Rockets came to town to play against the Kensington Comets.
But the way every episode of King of Kensington’s positively depicted multiculturalism was instrumental in popularly cementing the notion of Canada as cultural mosaic rather than melting pot.
“The virtues of the inner city become the virtues of the series – multiculturalism, tolerance, community involvement, and communal spirit – leaving implied the notion that these local virtues are national virtues as well,” television studies scholar Sarah Matheson wrote in a 2006 essay about the show.
If King of Kensington is a key to understanding Canada, why has it not been available to stream until now?
Contrary to one rumour spread on Reddit, the CBC did not accidentally tape over a bunch of episodes of the series.
On the contrary, the national public broadcaster has spent the last half-century carefully preserving it, Dan Dimopoulos, senior manager of content lifecycle at CBC, explains.
Dimopoulos’s department oversees and cares for the 1.5 million hours of content in the archives of CBC/Radio-Canada’s content – from 1936 in audio and from 1952 in the television.
King of Kensington, which was shot weekly in front of a live audience in Toronto, was originally stored on two-inch videotape – and all five seasons and the original, unaired 1974 pilot (in which an actor named Paul Hecht played King) were preserved.
At a certain point in the 1990s, however, the show was transferred to digital tape as part of a widespread migration of the CBC archives.
Then again the series migrated formats in 2015 – digitized into file-based assets and put into what Dimopoulos calls the “deep archives.”
“We have redundancy in that process, so multiple copies are made,” he says. “It’s extremely, extremely rare for us to need to go back to a second copy, so the system is robust.”
Now King of Kensington is essentially a click away internally at the CBC – but for the broadcaster to post any of the episodes on Gem or legally share them on YouTube (where you’ll find not strictly legal uploads of a number of episodes from VHS by fans) the process is involved.
Al Waxman’s wife, Sara, holds an external hard drive in a box, containing digitized episodes of King of Kensington and other Al Waxman files.sarah bodri/The Globe and Mail
Lisa Clarkson, who is CBC’s executive director of business and rights, explains that the show dates back to the dates when most series were produced in-house by the public broadcaster.
CBC could more easily air reruns of King of Kensington on its linear channel through its deals with the creative sector unions that existed at the time – but, to stream episodes, the business and rights team needs to, first, research who the actors and the writer and musicians were involved (not all the records are digitized) and then contact them or their estates and negotiate payments.
“We need to go to the individuals – in the King of Kensington case, 33 people – and get their individual approval or permission for a use that wasn’t contemplated at the time,” she says.
This is why CBC has few older shows on Gem and keeps them in the archives unless there is a clear cost benefit or an anniversary.
How much will it cost to put 10 King of Kensington episodes on Gem? Clarkson didn’t have the exact amount, but expected it to be in the “five or six figures” to be able to put them online for a one-year window.
If you want to watch the full five seasons of King of Kensington, you’ll have to head to a public or university library archive – or get an invitation to visit Sara Waxman, Al’s widow and a celebrated food journalist, at her downtown Toronto apartment. (She lives in the same building where she met her husband in 1968.)
Sara Waxman sits in her Toronto home, near a portrait of her late husband.sarah bodri/The Globe and Mail
I went to visit Waxman earlier this fall in search of the series before CBC confirmed it would be uploading episodes to Gem – and Waxman showed me the external hard drive where her digital files of the show reside.
Waxman has great stories about what the Canadian television industry was like at the time – how her husband fought for a parking space at the CBC and how she pitched in personally in the department that’s now called craft services.
“For the last taping every Friday night, I would make a sheet cake, put on frosting or icing, something about the theme of that show and I would put the number of the show,” recalls Waxman, who later released a best-selling cookbook called The King’s Wife’s Cookbook.
As for her son Adam Waxman, who joined us that morning to share memories of the King’s contributions to Canadian culture, he remains proud of what his father achieved with the show and afterwards on Canadian screens and stages as a nation-building artist. (He turned down an offer from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to take the post of Consul General to Los Angeles in order to act and direct at the Stratford Festival.)
“When we’re talking about, you know, elbows up and the need for a Canadian culture to exist separate from the United States with the things that are going on down there, that’s something we can look back to,” he says.