gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Props from the fallen

This week saw the bittersweet bazaar known as the Royal Canadian Air Farce props & wardrobe sale. After 35 years on CBC Radio and Television, the Air Farce took its final flight.

 It's the end of an era, not just for the show but because it was one of the few A&E TV shows to still tape in the Toronto CBC building, using the last of the once-great horde of props and costumes built by generations of CBC craftspeople. Those days are over, and they aren't coming back. (See previous posts about the closing of the Design Department, and the subsequent sell-off.)

But it makes for one hell of a yard sale!

For two days, eager staffers were invited to pick over the remains of the Farce's unique creations. There are now strange objects scattered across cubicles on every floor.

The props area had coffins, statues, a bomb, rubber chickens and more, to say nothing of rather nice chairs, lamps and picture frames. In wardrobe, you could get labcoats, capes, hockey sweaters, muumuus, a Marg Delahunty costume and about a thousand ties (which eventually sold for a buck each.) Plus everyday sweaters, suits and pants - though every pair of pants I tried on were of Roger Abbott proportions - fit me loosely at the waist but barely reached my calves. Looked like knickers.

Still, I'm a sucker for weird junk, especially if it's a part of history. In addition to the fake switches and books pictured above, here's what I walked away with:

Impules buy - for $1 - a board game called "Separatist Careers"... you can even find the original skit online on the Air Farce site.

"Just be sure to avoid the Parizeau card, or you go home a loser." Priceless! And check out the Lucien Bouchard playing piece:

And for my dollar, they threw in a free box of Lloyd Robertson Hair Rinse for News Anchors:

But the crowning purchase - at a whopping $15 - was this Greek bust:

I think it's Pericles, but I'm not sure. He's currently backfilling for our encoder, who was sick that day.

Looking through that stuff was a riot, tempered slightly by the observation that the people selling off the wardrobe collection were a soon-to-be-unemployed seamstress and a scriptwriter.

If only I had bought the fake bomb, though! That would have been... never mind.