The Coast Community TV Story
Forty years ago, the community channel on the Sunshine Coast got its unique start, as a totally volunteer driven channel, run by Marta MacKown, Maryanne West, and a group of students at Elphinstone Secondary School. In June of 1979, they hosted a “Community Television Forum” to determine the community support for a volunteer run Community Television Station. As you can imagine, the support was great, and here we are in 2019 getting ready to celebrate our 40 year anniversary.
Velcrow Ripper, a student of the original Television Production class, who has gone on to become an award winning filmmaker gives some insight on the start of the channel, “We were actually an after school group, we called ourselves ESRP, Elphinstone Student Research Productions. Our mentor and teacher was Marta MacKown and she came up with this idea of creating a broadcasting community station. We actually went to the CRTC on a school field trip, presented our short video and said, we as students want to run the local cable station, we can do it! And they said, okay, you can. And they accepted our motion and this was born.”
Eventually they made the decision to bring in a broadcast professional, Steve Sleep, to help the volunteers and manage the station. “I was working for the CBC when Coast 10 TV got started and had the opportunity to help Marta and the students with some of the technical aspects of their TV station. They were already well established in the community and when the job to manage the station became available, I jumped at the chance to work with the class and the community, and help the community channel continue to grow.”
This great partnership between the community channel and the school still continues to this day, and we see amazing students come through the Television Production Class every year and go off to do amazing things in the industry.