MCTV live!

Fifteen minutes to air. As the student newscasters and camera operators wait nervously out on the MCTV set, chaos reigns in the control room.

"OK you guys, get into position!" roars teacher/producer Greg Boutestein, a big, boisterous man with the voice of a sports broadcaster.

Headset half-perched on his head, Boutestein is stalking the length of the narrow, windowed control room as he snaps out commands like a football coach. Where's my prompter? Fix that iris! Where are my keys!?

"Is your mike on mute?!" he asks a student in disbelief.

"Again, consummate professionals after 20 years!"

The pressure is on for the MCTV crew at Morinville Community High School (MCHS) this March 12. Not only are they producing their 20th anniversary show, but they also have a mob of MCTV alumni on set witnessing their performance.

And on top of all that, the headsets have gone dead.

"We haven't had an outage in probably 13 years, and on the 20th (anniversary) episode the headsets go down!" cries Boutestein.

No time to panic! There's a show to do! Boutestein goes through the stations. Studio, ready? Yes. VTR, ready? Yes!

"All right, into the abyss we fly!" he says.

"Standby opening credits!"

Live on Channel 10

Today, MCTV is a for-credit course where students produce a half-hour news and variety show each week using a full-fledged TV studio.

But when it started, it was just a wild idea cooked up by then-students Mark Woollven and Allen Gould.

The year was 1994, and MCHS had just opened as one of the most technologically advanced schools in western Canada.

MCHS was a pilot school for the new Career and Technologies Studies program, explains Boutestein. Not only did it have a darkroom and hundreds of computers, it also had a full-fledged TV studio – one with a device from cable provider Videon that let them broadcast live on Channel 10 to Morinville, Legal, Gibbons and Bon Accord.

"There used to be literally a big red button," Boutestein says.

"You hit that button, you were live on air."

Woollven says he and Gould heard about the studio the summer before and knew they wanted to play with it. They spent all summer drafting a proposal for a student-produced variety show and pitched it to principal Paul O'Dea on the second day of school.

"That's great boys … but we don't have a teacher yet," Woollven recalls O'Dea as saying.

Undaunted, Woollven and Gould gathered 20 others and spent the first semester learning how to use their shiny new toys with the help of Ms. McLaughlin, a CTV Edmonton technician brought in to set up the studio.

Gould says he's honestly not sure how he and the rest of the original crew convinced the school to support their project, although he suspects the years of tech support he and Woollven had given the staff helped.

"We just cashed in five years of goodwill."

Boutestein says he became the course's first (and so far only) teacher next semester after having earned his teaching degree in December.

"I was literally fresh off the turnip truck," he says, but he had a radio and TV arts degree and had spent six years working for ITV Edmonton (now Global Edmonton).

Boutestein says the students actually knew more about the studio than he did, as they'd had four months to play with it. They even did a few unauthorized broadcasts before he showed up.

"The kids were learning from me, I was learning from them."

The first official MCTV show was broadcast live to four towns and MCHS televisions on March 10, 1995. Co-hosted by Woollven, it featured badminton, a hairy hamburger, and, inexplicably, a fake ad for Lipton's iced tea.

The whole first season was just "insanity," Woollven says.

"It was almost entirely ad-libbed."

A lot of the show's structure (or lack thereof) came from its circumstances, Gould says. It was a half-hour since that was their lunch-break, and it was live since they knew they didn't have time to tape a perfect take.

For a set, they hijacked some stools and a cart with a television on it. For segments, they shot whatever they could find or make up and had the hosts improvise the rest.

Woollven says they did a lot of taste-tests as a result. One of the worst of these compared the breath-freshening powers of Certs and Tic Tacs.

"We decided to create the experimental platform by eating an onion," Woollven says – a raw white one that he bit into like an apple.

"I nearly vomited live on air."

Safety standards were also a little lax in the early years.

Boutestein remembers adjusting the studio lights back in 1995 when the ladder slipped, leaving him hanging from the lighting grid "in a V-shape" with his legs around the ladder, all alone, yelling at the top of his lungs.

"It felt like an eternity."

Fortunately, MCTV member Chasity Tjernstrom heard him and righted the ladder for him, he says.

"Apparently, she did that more than once," Boutestein says, although he only recalls the first time.

Incredibly, Boutestein says he almost managed to get into the same fix earlier this month. This time, he had a student hold the ladder when he felt it wobble.

"I'm still doing stupid stuff and it's 20 years, now!" he cries.

Through the ages

MCTV became a formal course in 1997, with students working on the show during lunches and after school. Complex parodies were common in this early period, including spoofs of Knight Rider and The X-Files.

Boutestein says Shaw bought Videon in 2001 and put a stop to MCTV's community broadcasts, saying that the show didn't meet broadcast regulations.

"That was a blow for us," Boutestein says, as it took away most of their potential audience. YouTube has been a big help in that regard, he says.

MCTV shifted away from parody and toward hard news around 2005, Boutestein says – a natural evolution, as news pieces were quicker to do. Students would cover stories such as fires in the parking lot, floods in South Glens, and the 2012 secular school debate.

MCTV crewmembers grew skilled at their craft, winning 10 Skills Alberta medals for TV and video production between 1999 and 2010 and the People's Choice Award at the 2000 Red Deer College film festival.

But the crew's most ambitious project was likely 2001's Survivor: Small Town Alberta – a 15-episode parody of the popular reality TV show complete with immunity challenges and tribal councils.

"We literally shot footage continuously for 36 hours," Boutestein says, amassing some 156 hours of tape in all.

It took 10 months to edit the show together, and students had to wait a full year to find out the winner. Tapes of the episodes flew off the shelves at Morinville's Uptown Video, with each rental raising cash for charity.

Stay tuned!

The crew erupts in cheers as the credits roll one hour and 24 minutes later.

Sharing in the celebratory cake afterward is Tim Evans, a 2013 graduate of MCHS and a proud MCTV veteran.

He says MCTV gives you a real connection to your school and community, as well as work and people skills you can't get anywhere else.

"You take away a sense of what pride feels like," he says.

"To be a member of the MCTV alumni, that's something special."

Many MCTV alumni, including Woollven, now have full-time jobs in the TV and radio industry.

Gould credits the program's longevity to the hard work of Boutestein and the many students that came after the original crew.

"Looks like everyone's still having fun. As long as everyone's still having fun … we'll be back in 30 years for the 50-year retrospective."

Boutestein says he plans to keep on with MCTV for as long as he's allowed to teach it, and hopes to get an invite to that 50th anniversary show.

"I get paid to play with toys every day of the year … who the hell wouldn't want this job?"