Beating Bannerman

Bits and Pieces of BC Radio History

Beating Bannerman

Postby cart_machine » Sun Oct 20, 2019 12:41 am

Here is Chuck Davis' column in the Province of Jan. 12, 1981. It's self-explanatory and a nice little snapshot of who was on the air back then. I've got a couple of pieces about Rafe at 'OR I'll put up in the coming days.

Evidently Chuck didn't know Fanny Kiefer at the time.

cArtie.

Rafe Mair's going to have a bit of a job when he starts his talk show on CJOR, starting Monday, Feb. 2. The 9-to-noon slot is dominated in the city at this moment by CKNW's Gary Bannerman, as the latest ratings indicate. At 9:15 in the morning, after the news, Bannerman shows up with a total of 54,600 listeners. That's well ahead of CBU, the CBC's Vancouver outlet, in second spot with 39,500. (The CBC show is Don Harron's Morning-side, but the figure is not strictly comparable, because it includes the corp's full B.C. coverage.)
Setting CBU aside, let's look at the 9:15 ratings lineup of the city's commercial stations. (Samples are taken every 15 minutes — I pick 9:15 because it's the first rating sample taken after the 9 o'clock news, and shows how the others are doing against Bannerman.)
(The names indicate who's on now; people may have been different when the ratings were taken in November. One example is CJOR, where Jack Lee, now with CJAZ, was part of the Burns-Keefer package):
1) CKNW — Gary Bannerman (talk) 54,600
2) CKWX — Bob Bye (music) 31,900
3) CJOR — Pat Burns and Sandy Keefer (talk) 27,500
4) CFMI-FM — Brian Arnold (music) 26,300
5) CHQM — Cam Lane (music) 23,900
6) CKLG — Gord Robson (music) 23 300
7) CHQM-FM — Maurice Foisy (music) 15,800
8) CFOX-FM — Jeff Hamilton (music) 13,700
9) CFUN — Jim Hault (music) 8,600
10) CBU-FM — Stereo Morning, a music show from Toronto 6,100
11) C-ISL — Arnie Celsie (music) 2,400
12) CJAZ-FM — Dan McAllister (music) 1,200
13) CKO — Jim Bennie (all news FM) 1,000
Co-op Radio and the multi-lingual CJVB don't subscribe to the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM) service, so they're not shown.
Looming over all this, of course, is Jack Webster's BCTV phone-in show. His 9-to-10:30 a.m. show had an average Monday-to-Friday audience of 80,000, but that includes Vancouver and other stations. BCTV wasn't able to give me Webster's city-only figures.
(But they did tell me his CHEK-TV audience added another 22,000 viewers on the Island.)
That lineup above doesn't indicate the over-all relationship of the stations: At 4 p.m., for instance, CKNW is still first among the commercial stations, but CKLG jumps up to second with CKWX close behind and CHQM a snug fourth.
Even after you deduct the out-of-town listeners, CBC comes in second in a couple of the morning samplings and third in several others within the city. That means, readers, that Bob Spence, CBU's interesting new morning man, has more Greater Vancouver listeners during stretches of his show than all the other commercial stations in the city except 'NW.
But in the late morning and in the city, it's Bannerman by a long shot.
User avatar
cart_machine
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 1710
Joined: Tue May 09, 2006 12:52 pm
Location: The Past

Re: Beating Bannerman

Postby jon » Sun Oct 20, 2019 12:20 pm

Not counting those I know through radiowest, I worked with and/or became friends with three people on this list. Sadly, all three have passed away in the last dozen years.

What makes that kind of weird is that I haven't worked in the Vancouver market since early 1972.

The numbers themselves are interesting, as I had access to all the Edmonton BBM books 18 months later, and FM was not doing anywhere near as well, compared to AM, here in Edmonton.

I am a little confused about Chuck Davis' comment that the CBU numbers include the entire province of B.C. Those Edmonton BBM books I looked at 18 months later only listed CKUA's numbers for Edmonton, not for all of Alberta, even though they already had about 17 FM and AM transmitters spread across the province.

Great find, cartie!
User avatar
jon
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 9256
Joined: Mon May 08, 2006 10:15 am
Location: Edmonton


Return to BC Radio History

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 77 guests

cron