He didn’t want to be an anchor. At least initially.
“I thought law would be my main choice. People seemed to make money from it and enjoy it, so I had my eye on that,” says Tony Parsons, the man who became the voice and face of BCTV News for over 34 years. Growing up in Ontario, a career in television news, especially on the west coast, was the farthest thing from the young man’s mind. Today, six years after his last broadcast, he’s remembered for his professionalism and longevity.
Tony’s no longer reading the news but he’s still on television. He’s the official spokesperson for NexGen Hearing, appearing in commercials and attending live clinics.
“They did the tests and it turned out I had bad hearing in varying degrees in either of my ears and so I was a candidate,” he says. “I was surprised. I didn’t think it was a problem.”
He became a patient and then a spokesperson.
“It’s peripheral sound that was my problem, separating sounds I want to hear from sounds that overlapped.”
Everything’s fine now. The issue has been corrected. But he never mentioned his hearing loss to anyone.
“He is private. Definitely,” says his wife Tammy.
Tony Parsons was born Anthony Parsonage in Gosport, England in 1939. In 1948, the family immigrated to Canada and settled in Feversham (near Owen Sound), then to Kitchener and finally to Sarnia, where his high school counsellor suggested a career in broadcasting.
“I got up in class to read aloud from a history book. I read a couple of pages and he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re planning on doing but you’ve got a great voice and you read well. You should think about broadcasting.’ It never, never entered my mind until he said that. Then he put me in touch with Ryerson in Toronto, and that’s where it all started.”
Tony entered Ryerson’s Radio and Television Arts program but left in first year, anxious to get some practical radio experience. He became a disc jockey and moved around southern Ontario in search of a better position and better money. First Stratford, Sarnia and then Guelph, where the program director changed his name from Parsonage to Parsons because “that’s what they did at the time.”
But spinning records and innocuous banter didn’t cut it for the young DJ, so by the time he reached Hamilton in 1960, he asked to be moved from chatter to newsgathering.
“The thing about being a DJ is that you have to explode little bombs of happiness all through the day and I just found I couldn’t do that on an ongoing basis,” says Tony. “I wasn’t the world’s best ad-libber. I like scripts. I like structure. That was more appealing to me than going in and doing a dance. So, I went to this news director at CHML in Hamilton and I said to him, ‘I really want to get on the news side of this because I don’t think I’m as good a DJ as I should be.’ And he said, ‘I’ll give you a chance, but you’ve got to work the late-night shift and sometimes all night just to get some grounding.’ I enjoyed it and I enjoyed being out on the streets as a reporter.”
It was a comfortable fit and, eight years later, he moved to Toronto and another radio reporting job. Within months, he moved again, this time to television station CFTO as an on-air reporter. Less than a year later, the weekend anchor position opened.
“Since I was there already, they said, ‘are you interested in trying this out’ and I said, ‘yeah, sure.’ It was the sort of thing I was hoping to get eventually. It just came a little earlier than I thought it would.”
Tony admits to being restless. And lucky. It’s a theme that has permeated his career, forever chasing “something that I thought would work for me for the long term.” So, when a job offer in Halifax came up in 1973, he declined it, opting instead to become CTV’s west coast bureau chief a year later in Vancouver.
“I didn’t know anything about Vancouver,” admits Tony. But after leaving his bureau chief position at CTV, he ended up at what would become the longest position of his career, 34 years as the lead anchor at local CTV affiliate CHAN, later to be rebranded BCTV, and then rebranded again as Global BC. His calm, measured and melodious delivery captured the public’s attention.
“I watched other anchors and picked some of the things I liked about them and made them my own. You could say I was self-tutored,” he says.
His delivery made BCTV a ratings champ.
“Again, it comes down to the ad-lib thing. I’m not a great gregarious kind of ad-libber. There were times when I just wanted to get on with it and get the story out there. I think I was a sincere kind of guy. I still am. I kept going because I believed in what I did and if you believe in what you do it transmits, I think, to the audience.”
He left Global BC in 2009 only to return in 2010 to anchor both CBC’s local evening newscast and the late-night show at CHEK in Victoria. For awhile, he flew between the two cities until Vancouver supplied a proper studio.
“Flying was fine. You get used to it. I taught myself to sleep on the way over.”
He finally signed off December 20, 2013.
Sincere. Unflappable. Trustworthy. Those are the qualities viewers remember; the image that Tony presented night after night. What viewers didn’t know was what was going on in their favourite anchor’s private life.
“They probably didn’t know that I wasn’t careful about relationships,” he says. “I think I was selfish and self-satisfied and that I was hard to get to know. I was pretty aloof when I was first starting out. I was trying to concentrate on what I was doing.”
Travel, shift work and the demands of the job took their toll. He admits to a long-standing extramarital affair. It all contributed to three failed marriages. His fourth is solid.
He also admits to bouts of stage fright.
“Yeah and, to this day, I don’t know how that happened. The initial stages of preparation and rehearsals for some reason unnerved me for awhile but as soon as I said, ‘good evening,’ I was fine.”
But it’s his penchant for self-medication that caused him problems.
“I had a drinking problem. I was drinking Scotch and then going to bed with cognac. My father was an alcoholic and that might have been a good thing in the sense that I watched him deteriorate. It got me off the booze, eventually, when I thought I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to end up like that.”
Maybe it was the job. In 1989, he was promoted to News Director and, in 1995, he became Vice President of News and Public Affairs.
“It was difficult wearing two hats,” he admits. He was still anchoring three telecasts, Early News, News Hour, and Canada Tonight as well as taking on administrative duties. As management, he had to let 11 reporters and presenters go in a corporate downsizing. Perhaps drinking alleviated those extra pressures, but he thinks it was the result of depression.
“I’ve always had some form of depression. Nobody’s ever told me how to control it or where it came from in the first place. I can still slip back into the crevasse on occasion,” he says.
And when those darker moments materialize, he copes with a self-administered five-minute exercise.
“It’s a form of meditation. I take an honest assessment of where I am and what I’ve accomplished and work my way through that and think to myself you’re really a fortunate guy. You’ve got all this, you’re making good money and things are going your way. What have you got to be depressed about? And that helps me through it.”
Indeed, Tony and Tammy lead a rich and fulfilling life. They reside in Kelowna and winter in Palm Springs three months of the year. Tony’s an avid golfer and likes to play three times a week with his friends, and more on his own.
“He’s out five to six times a week hitting balls,” says Tammy. “He’s in his glory.”
They met at a charity tournament in Kelowna in 2003. Tammy was part of his foursome. As the manager of two Okanagan area golf courses, she had already met her fair share of personalities and was unfazed by Tony’s celebrity status.
“To me Tony was just Tony. I never thought of him as a celebrity. He is a little bit shy,” she continues. “I think that comes from being in the spotlight all the time and constantly being recognized.”
He invited her to a Global Christmas party; they started dating and married in 2005. The couple is approaching their 14th anniversary.
They share a common interest in golf and travel. And dogs. While anchoring News Hour in Vancouver, Tony adopted Charlie, a cocker spaniel that accompanied him into the studio and sat at his master’s feet while Tony delivered the news. When Charlie passed, Jack stepped in to fill the void.
“Jack was mine,” says Tammy. “When I first met Tony, I had Jack and that was Tony’s big test. My dad used to say if a dog likes somebody, then it was a good sign, and Jack loved Tony.”
Jack, too, accompanied Tony into the studio. The couple now share their life with Lucy and Morley, two Cuban Havanese lapdogs. Tammy says she and Tony treat them like children and, yes, they have the run of the place.
It’s a good life, balancing golf, the dogs and alerting people to the possibility of hearing loss. And although nobody’s approached him, yes, he would be interested in sharing his experience with depression.
“I’m all for things that will help other people and that’s one of the reasons why I took on NexGen Hearing.”
As for returning to the anchor desk, “I’m not sure I want to be working in the business right now after what I’ve watched. It’s become such a bottom-line thing,” he says.
He laments over the concentration of power in the hands of a few media giants and the rise of social media, which has influenced the nature of presenting content, much of it unfiltered.
“Social media has done such a job on conventional broadcasting. I knew it would. Everybody knew it would. Nevertheless, I hope there will always be a place for an anchor. I think anchors are important. I think they connect to [people].”
Of the many awards he’s received over the years – such as an industry President’s Award, the Queen’s Jubilee Award or the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement of 2004 – perhaps the most rewarding is the trophy Tony won year after year at the TV Week magazine Awards – “Most Popular Anchor.”
“I think my success was based on my belief in what our viewers wanted to see and hear,” says Tony. “I became partly listening post, partly messenger. I never, never spoke down to my audience. I shared the stories of the day with them, but I never preached. Keep it simple and uncomplicated but interesting. To many people, I was the ultimate messenger and that, for me, was important.”
Sidebar- A chat with Tony
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give him?
“My advice would be to be brave. Don’t be afraid to say, ‘I can do this.’ Just make it your own and take ownership of what you know you can do.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“I think Cameron Bell (former BCTV News Director) fell into that mentor role. He would sit down with me for lunch or something and we’d talk. ‘How do you feel about this? You said this last night.’ He guided me in his own way through a lot of stuff. Mostly on my delivery.”
What are you grateful for?
“Sometimes you’re fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and everything clicks into place. You look back on it and you say, ‘it could have gone another way if I had of done this or that’ so I always considered myself lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I never had to apply for a job. I always had them offered to me.”
What does success mean to you?
“Peace of mind, a sense of achievement knowing that you’ve done it your way. I could break into song right now.”
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