Read All About It!...

Many years ago, before Elmo was all the rage on PBS, there were shows like Read All About It! According to Wikipedia...

Read All About It! was a Canadian educational television series produced from 1979 to 1983 by TVOntario that aired during the early to mid 1980s; It also aired in repeats in the 1990s. It starred David Craig Collard as Chris, Lydia Zajc as Lynne, Stacey Arnold as Samantha, and Sean Hewitt as Duneedon, ruler of the galaxy Trialviron. In the second season Michael Dwyer joined the cast as Alex. The main goal of the show was to try and teach viewers about skills such as reading and writing & history in the midst of an entertaining program...

Read All About It! focused on Chris who inherited his uncle Derek's coach house after his mysterious disappearance. The show took place in the fictitious town of Herbertville, where Chris and his friends Lynne and Samantha started a newspaper called The Herbertville Chronicle in uncle Derek's coach house. The coach house contained two artificially intelligent robots: Otto, a device which communicated by printing it's thoughts on paper; and Theta, a talking computer with an integrated monitor. The coach house also held a transporter which allowed teleportation to and from the galaxy of Trialviron, as well as transporting many literary characters like the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, Merlin the Magician from King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, and Captain Hook from Peter Pan into the coach house. The first season focused on the newspaper uncovering a conspiracy by mayor Don Eden (the alter ego of Duneedon, the ruler of the galaxy Trialvaron) who wants to claim King's Park as his own to get a rare mineral he needs to invade Earth...

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that there will ever be a DVD release in the immediate future. According to writer, Clive Endersby...

Unfortunately, as far as I know there are no plans to do anything with ... [Read All About It]. Due to special 'educational' arrangements (ie: lower fees) that channels like TVOntario had with the various unions (writers, actors, directors, musicians) renewals of clearance rights and royalties had to be paid in advance for a set number of years — rather than an after-payment of a percentage of sales as is normal for commercial programs.

Because of the cutbacks (or lack of growth) in funding for these types of stations, they cannot afford to renew these clearances 'up front' which would decimate their program budgets in any one year. Both TVO and the various union members would dearly love to switch these contracts to a 'percentage of a sales' system but the law is the law and neither side can change an existing contract without agreement from all who signed it.

Fortunately, YouTube came through for me once again. Although the quality of the source video is somewhat poorer than I would like, at least I have something for the archive...