1941 · Sponsored by Sweet Caporal

The Light Up and Listen Club

A tobacco company’s half hour, announced by the voice of the Metropolitan Opera

Sponsored programming is the part of Canadian radio history that gets least attention and did most of the work. A tobacco company bought the time, hired an American announcer with a famous voice, put a novachord player in front of a microphone and shipped the discs to stations across the country. The programmes were numbered, not dated, because they were built to be run whenever a station had a hole. What survives is a rare hearing of the commercial layer of the Canadian dial in wartime — polished, transatlantic, and utterly of its moment.

5 recordings · Toronto and New York

Surviving transcriptions of the Sweet Caporal series, numbered by programme (317, 318, 327, 328) rather than dated. Recordings held by the Internet Archive.