In the gentle world behind the polka-dot door, stories were
read, songs were sung, tissue boxes were fashioned into castles
and stuffed toys were earnestly consulted as though, some day,
they might actually answer back. That world was the creation of
long-time children’s television producer and educator Ted
Coneybeare, who died Jan. 16 after a long battle with cancer.
He was 86.
Leo Howard Coneybeare, who created Polka Dot Door for
TV Ontario and produced it from 1971 to 1984, was born to a
farming family in Essex County in 1925. He attended Essex High
School before graduating from the London Normal School with his
teacher’s certificate. He worked briefly with the Armed Forces
in Canada at the end of the Second World War before he took up
his first teaching job in a one-room school house in the hamlet
of Oldcastle, near what is now the Windsor airport. He would
wear his uniform to class on the first day to intimidate the
students. He went on to teach in the Windsor public school
system, increasingly using audio-visual aids and crafts in the
classroom, while continuing his studies in education. He
graduated with a bachelor’s in education from Wayne State
University in 1952, specializing in art education.
After an itinerant career teaching in Toronto, Peterborough and
then in England, he eventually settled in Toronto in the early
sixties and joined the Ontario Ministry of Education’s teacher
education branch, transferring into the new educational
television branch in 1968. The ministry launched TV Ontario,
the country’s first educational channel, in 1970, and
Coneybeare was in on the ground floor: It was as Ontario’s
assistant superintendent of pre-school programming that he
created Polka Dot Door.
In contrast to the brasher tone and aggressively educational
material of Sesame Street, which had been playing on
PBS since 1969, Polka Dot Door took a quiet approach
animated by rotating pairs of hosts, one male and one female,
who chatted with each other and with the stuffed toys in a
vocabulary carefully limited to that of children five and
under.
“I think one of the biggest compliments is that people say,
‘It’s written?’ Yet I cross every T and dot every I,”
Coneybeare told a Globe and Mail reporter in 1984.
“Deliberately, the shows are not that polished – there’s a
hesitation, a naturalness. But it’s designed specifically for
the child, especially the child watching alone.”
That child-centred approach was key, said Jed MacKay, who wrote
scripts for the show under Coneybeare and took over as producer
from 1985 to 1993. The hosts’ chatter with the toys, an element
that was sometimes parodied as the long-running show was picked
up by PBS and provincial broadcasters across the country to
became a fixture in Canadian life, actually replicates the way
a child talks to toys, MacKay pointed out.
“Ted was the best friend that a child every had as far as TV
goes,” he said. “He really got kids. That was the secret of the
success of the show.”
Coneybeare’s talent for visual arts education was also central
to the show’s success, MacKay said.
“Ted was a genius at the art side, the creative side for
children. Any craft we made had to be with things every
household would have: The joke was we were always making
castles from Kleenex boxes,” he said, suggesting Coneybeare’s
childhood on a farm had taught him to improvise with what you
had at hand. “We had great props people who could build
fabulous castles from Kleenex boxes, but we always made sure
when the host did it looked more or less as it would if a child
did it … We always tried to engage with our audience.”
Initially inspired by the long-running British series Play
School, the simple format featured stories, songs and
crafts from the hosts as well as brief educational videos on
topics such as how flax is made into linen or how firefighters
battle fire. The content placed a great emphasis on the child’s
imagination – especially the kind of imagination that could
conjure up a multi-coloured kangaroo-like creature in a muumuu
who only spoke one word: Polkaroo.
Polkaroo appeared one day a week and never when the male host
was present – which has led to many knowing jokes as the
generation raised on Polka Dot Door grew to a less
innocent age yet retained great affection for the iconic
figure. Coneybeare himself was forced to play the role once,
during a photo shoot for a Polka Dot Door album cover,
when the actor who showed up was too large for the costume. To
this day, Polkaroo is TVO’s mascot, although the show itself
went off the air in 1993 as program production was outsourced
to independent producers throughout the TV industry.
Coneybeare received several awards for his work in arts
education and television, culminating with the Gemini Awards in
2010 where Polka Dot Door, the first Canadian
children’s television show ever to go into syndication on a
commercial network in the U.S., was the Masterworks honouree.
Coneybeare officially retired from TVO in 1982 but remained as
producer until 1984 before he took up a life of travel with his
long-time partner Raymond Snell, cooking and playing uncle to a
lifetime of friends and relatives. He and Snell had been
together since the late 1960s but only married in 2007 after
same-sex marriage became legal.
He was predeceased by Snell, his sister Bernice and brothers
Keith and Verne, but leaves his sister-in-law Phyllis
Coneybeare and a large extended family of nieces and nephews,
many still living in the Windsor area.
A memorial service will be held April 27 at 2 p.m. at The
Metropolitan Community Church, 115 Simpson Ave., Toronto.