Learning Day: Night Walk (Patreon)

Remember when TV stopped? When the constant flow of sound and imagery would cease for a few blessed hours each night? Maybe you don't. TV channels used to switch off at a certain time of night like a club turning on the lights and kicking everyone out at 2 AM, and it was just as depressing. Much better now that there's endless distraction and we need never face ourselves and one another under the stark, revealing overheads.

As a child insomniac during the slender slice of history when you might have a TV in your bedroom but not a computer, I became intimately familiar with both the test pattern screens that would display to end a day of broadcasting as well as the alien landscape of late-night programming. YTV, Canada's children's network, showed old British sitcoms like Yes, Minister and Are You Being Served? after midnight. Showcase put on Red Shoe Diaries and old Italian exploitation flicks, which was the closest thing there was to porno for a teen without private internet access or a nearby hobo woods stash in those benighted days.

I saw strange cartoons like The Oblongs, Spy Groove, and Spicy City. I saw bits of '80s trash like Masters of the Universe and Beyond Thunderdome. I saw Amanda and the Alien and for years after associated Stacy Keach with lesbian shower scenes for reasons I could not readily explain.

The wonderful thing about this experience was how you would stumble onto the strangest movies and shows and, since the internet was still pretty rudimentary, you would feel like you were being let in on some kind of secret. I suppose that feeling of discovery is the same reason why infinite scroll short-form video is so compelling — you're mostly seeing trash, but there's always a chance you'll stumble onto gold. Except instead of endless videos of teenagers dancing and middle-aged men patiently explaining interesting facts, you were scrolling through about thirty channels with the sound off so you didn't wake your parents, completely at the mercy of the guy doing closed captioning to understand what the hell was happening in Vampyros Lesbos.

But the strangest thing I saw in those solitary hours which never again shall return was a program created to replace the colored bars that signalled the end of a broadcast day. It was called Night Walk.

Night Walk features no characters, dialogue, narration, education, or animation. It simply consists of a long slow shot taking the viewer on a walk through the ritzy Yorkville neighborhood of Toronto and the Yorkdale subway station while jazz music plays in the background. This goes on for one full hour.

Night Walk was most popular with insomniacs, inmates, and presumably also dogs whose owners left the TV on. It was obviously created as a cheap filler, possibly as yet another consequence of the CanCon laws which mandated that broadcasters dedicate a certain percentage of their airtime to Canadian-made programming. Goodhart's states that once you turn metrics into goals, rational actors will attempt to fulfill the goal by the letter, forgetting the intended spirit. That's how we got multiple, competing dubs of Dragon Ball Z and, incidentally, the ancient "over 9000" meme — since redubbing a Japanese cartoon with Canadian voice actors technically counted as Canadian content.

Similarly, Night Walk was produced by Canadians. Did it have any obvious cultural value or elevate any Canadian voices? Not really. But nonetheless, it counted. Every hour of Night Walk that Global aired was one less they had to show Mount Royal or Bumper Stumpers or The Littlest Hobo and could instead transmit American crowd-pleasers like Married… With Children or The Simpsons. And because I know you're going to ask: The Littlest Hobo was an '80s traveling guy rights wrongs type of show ala The Hulk, except it was a dog instead of a man.

Maybe you're thinking that there has to be something more to this. They couldn't possibly just film a ride on the subway and set it to some soulful saxophone, could they? Of course they could. It was the 1980s, the same decade in which Michael Berk and Douglas Schwartz used the same script about a feral wolf child across three different television series. If you were a white man in the '80s, you could basically just do whatever the fuck you wanted.

From the subway, Night Walk takes us down Yonge Street, a busy commercial strip in downtown Toronto. It's here that the vocals kick in, with the voice of a woman named Sara Hamilton crooning "I need you now, can't wait 'til we're all alone," as the cameraman wanders down a filthy sidewalk while strip club bouncers and cheap booze joint patrons gawk. Yonge Street in the '80s was Toronto's answer to Times Square before Giuliani, and even through the low-rez footage you can practically taste the grime.

Fun Toronto fact: one of the Yonge Street strip clubs that survived into the 2000s, the iconic Zanzibar, appeared in the Ed Norton Hulk movie. Hollywood's been passing Toronto off as New York for decades, but you can't fool me! I walked these streets. I was sick on these streets. I was told I had to leave a club because they thought I was wasted but I was actually just really bad at dancing on these streets.

Later, we stroll through the lobby of the downtown Sheraton Hotel and down into Toronto's PATH, the network of underground passages running below the city streets. From a modern perspective, this is the most "retvrn"-coded of all the segments, as we're exposed to the luxe corporate decor of the Mall at the height of its cultural relevance. Oh, to smoke a cigarette in a tiled, mirrored, plant-adorned temple to capital! This is where views spike, as the zoomers who stumbled upon the video simultaneously point at their phones and whisper "liminal space."

Night Walk ends by playing the opening footage in reverse. Was this, perhaps, an artistic decision, a gesture towards the inevitable return home at the end of a night out — a return, indeed, to the earth itself at the end of life? Fuck no. It was to extend the running time.

Speaking of, Night Walk wasn't a one and done. They horned in on Bob Seger's racket by making one called Night Moves that took viewers inside the convention centre and through Chinatown, including brief dips into a couple of restaurants where patrons stare in confusion at the camera, with no idea of the future of omnipresent surveillance that awaits.

Night Ride is perhaps the most aesthetique of the series, featuring a drive down the Don Valley Parkway and through Toronto's streets. If you replaced the jazz with vaporwave or city pop, this would have done huge numbers on lockdown-era YouTube.

Night Walk even got a sequel series online in 2019. By then, however, the idea of long, commentary-free walk videos had become commonplace. As such, Night Glide and the other modern entries in the Night Walk canon will be merely a few of the thousands of videos that the teens of the 2060s can peruse as they bemoan that they were born in the wrong era, wishing they could have been around when The Amazing Digital Circus, rap country, and generative AI were in vogue.

But even then, the original Night Walk will represent something its successors never will: blatant corporate fraud.

History is filled with scams, cons, schemes, and bunko jobs that seem obvious in retrospect. In the '90s, you could invent stuffed animals except full of beans and produced in waves of artificial scarcity and make millions. Hell, watch Bonnie and Clyde and see how easy it was to rob a bank in the days before CCTV. If you got out of the building, there wasn't really anything anyone could do. Looking back, it's easy to see all of these loopholes and arbitrage opportunities. But it takes a true visionary to see them in their own time. The team that created Night Walk was made up of such people, like director Bill Elliott.

See, the channel that created Night Walk, Global, went on air in 1974. They had lofty dreams, they did. Hoping to stand out from the publicly-owned CBC and the commercial CTV by broadcasting original, Canadian content, Global lasted two months before it had to be bailed out by corporate interests and was forced to pivot to as much American programming as was legally permissible.

By the '80s, Global had abandoned any pretense of its original mission and was essentially competing with CTV. Their top '80s guy minds, supercharged by cocaine and racquetball, were pumping out new and exciting ideas for making money everyday. And that's how Bill Elliott came up with the idea for Night Walk. By recording original music for the series, Global could exploit a loophole that would allow it to claim royalties from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada on its own programs.

Fucking brilliant. Or, it would have been, anyway, if SOCAN hadn't immediately caught on to the scam. I'm imagining someone at their office getting a royalty claim for 100% of an original jazz composition aired at 2:30 AM on something called "Night Walk," opposite a Sonny Bono plane disaster movie.

Such is the story of humanity. Man builds walls. Man builds battering ram to knock down walls. Man builds bunkers.

Or, man builds music licensing program. Man creates gauzy late-night TV series to exploit licensing program. Man changes rules of licensing program so that music played after midnight is valued at only 10% of normal rates.

Somewhere, in the far future, an enterprising hacker combines the ancient raw data of Night Walk with a custom-grown hantavirus to initiate a biodata attack on the crypto reserves of the barely-sentient, building-sized ElonMusk-X8-J2. They make trillions before X8-J2 spontaneously evolves immunity to the virus and then explodes due to an error in its genetic encoding. A holo-vid of the stroll through the giant's pulsating, wet remains becomes a fixture of nostalgia for teens in the seventh millennium. "wish i wuz vatborn back when ppl had flesh," fleshfan6674 psionically comments. "whose still watching this in 6696," the reconstructed technosoul of Bill Elliott adds.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Elizabeth Shope, briefly classified as Canadian content after walking past a camera after midnight.

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