Getting Ready Now to Make Love: Remembering Night Walk-Night Ride-Night Moves

From 1986 to 1993, Global Television ran a most interesting alternative to infomercials and test patterns to fill the broadcast band in those wee hours before dawn. At around 3AM, after the late night movie, or reruns of Room 222 and The Mod Squad, this station would run a trio of shows: Night Walk, Night Ride and Night Moves. Night Walk had a whopping two episodes produced, while one each was prepared for Night Ride and Night Moves. Night Ride ran an hour, the others thirty minutes. (One of Night Walk’s episodes was also an hour, but usually the half-hour episode aired.) Each program had a similar but simple concept: a Steadicam would prowl the night-time streets of Toronto –mostly on foot, sometimes from a car window- while jazz music played on the soundtrack. For the next seven years, people would be seeing the exact same episodes night after night. To most, it was an interesting curiosity while flipping the dials before nodding off (it was languid enough to be a sleep-aid for some insomniacs), but for some night owls like me, this show was mesmerizing.

Most of the images consist of empty streets, half-darkened storefronts and skeletal building structures outlined by a dull fluorescent glow. And suddenly, life(!), as we see a fellow nighttime traveler pass by, or huddled in the corner of a restaurant. To the uninitiated, these programs may sound like minimalist filmmaking, but quite the opposite is true. Still, it was undoubtedly hard for some viewers to get excited about seeing empty buildings and people mopping floors.

These programs were the brainchild Michael Spivak, then Global’s vice-president of production, who also composed the music score. The shows were actually a sneaky way of getting revenue from SOCAN, for musical royalties from every time the programs aired. (SOCAN soon got wise, and then declared that any music played after midnight would only receive 10% the usual rate.) Whatever the intentions for the productions, the results became something else.

Whenever I’ve spoken to fellow nighttime viewers who remember these shows, their response is usually warm. Their reasons for enjoying the program are likely different from mine, however. When I discovered these shows in 1986, this solidified my desire to move to the big city. I was entranced by the warm hues of the city lights- at times these images make Toronto resemble a brightly-lit playground. However, because we’re seeing all these locations a half-day apart from the customary hustle and bustle of urban life, these settings all appear very peaceful. Watching these programs continuously became a meditative experience, where the night city seems like a different world from our own. Tapehead that I was, I made myself a VHS copy of these shows late one Saturday night in 1987. Watching them again in the overexposed glow of a Sunday morning sun, they didn’t quite attain the same allure. As such, I would revisit these tapes in the proper milieu after dark, full of nocturnal dreams and desires to escape. I even ran RCA cables from the VCR to my stereo to make audio cassettes to play the music in my car, so I could create a Night Ride for my mind, while driving around town at night. 

Thirty years later, long after having moved to the city, and since these shows became but a memory to insomniacs, and an amusing bit of nostalgia for YouTube users, I still occasionally put these tapes on, and I am more captivated now by how much the urban landscape has changed over two decades. It has surely become “of its time”, with the Miami Vice fashions of passersby, and the video resolution looking too fuzzy for our hi-def eyes, and most of all, Toronto hadn’t yet become gentrified with a condo on every corner. Regardless, this little treat still casts a spell. It isn’t hard to be seduced all over again by the neon and the calmness of the sleeping urban jungle.

And for jazz fans, these shows are also a treat, with the reflective mood perfectly scored by such top-flight local talent as keyboardists Joe Sealy and Bernie Senensky, saxophonist Mike Murley, drummer Barry Elmes, trumpeter Guido Basso, the piano-vocal team Sara Hamilton and David, and of course, who could forget the stratospheric singing of Sharon Lee Williams, who would be heard in the opening piece of Night Moves, usually shown as the first of the three programs, inviting the viewer to stay in this dreamland with “We’re getting to the moment we’ve been waiting for / Getting ready now to make love”. Yes, this show was a seduction in many ways. Since then, I’ve seen most of these musicians playing live in our fair city, and in every instance, I’ve somehow suppressed the urge to shout: “Hey, play that number you did in Night Walk!”

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UPDATE! This article originally appeared in Vol. 1, Issue #21, “A Tribute to Late Night Television”. Since then, the Night Walk cult has grown, thanks to their inclusion to YouTube, and remembrances from institutions like Retrontario.  There is also the “official” website My Night Walk, which recreated most of the original routes the walks and drives had taken through the city, this time in HD, showing how much the city had changed in 30 years. As of this writing, they’ve also produced a new Night Walk, as well as a new show, Night Glide. All of these can be viewed via the link above. You can also view a livestream, which continuously plays all episodes, replicating the feel of how we originally caught these shows on the fly!