Read All About It!

"Read all about it! Discover all the news. Read all about it! Track down all the clues. With interesting people there's a mystery to be solved. An adventure is unfolding so why not get involved? Come on and read all about it!"

I don't know I was never really scared by this show. Nothing really seemed to scare me when I was a kid. It was a low budget TVOntario production aimed at older kids but I used sit on the floor with my dad after a pretty rough day in JK and watch this show. I remember my brother being freaked out by this show but I was never scared by it. Not even a little bit. :)

I remember watching it in 8th grade; the year was 1989 and not in a reading class. My history class. We watched it because my teacher was just slack like that. But I really enjoyed the show.

Out of the blue a few weeks ago, I thought about "Read All About It". It's interesting in the 80s that a lot of the educational shows on American PBS were Canadian shows. But I have to admit, they were cool.

And there's this other sci-fi-type PBS show about reading that was American way. The main character is a librarian and something kind of catastrophe was about to happen, but a mysterious man puts her in some kind of deep sleep/suspended animation and then centuries later, she is awaken to a future Earth. It's kins like a strange mixture of "Escape from New York", "The Warriors" and a few other movies together. I can't think of the name of the show.

It was a good show for kids. It involved three teens who start their own newspaper the "Herbertville Chronical" They discover that the coachhouse where they work in is able to transport people to different galaxies and the excitement starts.

Although it was a cheezy TVO production, I remember being intrigued by it when it first came out when I was ten!

A horror TV series that's completely educational? Lol. Only in Canada! Read All About It (1979 – 1983) is a science-fiction fantasy television series for children. It is a 2 season series and is placed in the town of Herbertville. It is about a coach house where a young boy, Chris' uncle mysteriously disappears leaving behind not only the coach house but two artificial intelligence robots including Theta and Otto. Theta is a computer that can communicate through talking via an integrated monitor and Otto is a device that can communicate by having his thoughts outputted on paper. A teleportation device is also discovered that can transport Chris and his friends to the planet Trialveron. Chris and his friends set up a newspaper called The Herbertville Chronicle and use the coach house as headquarters while unearthing an alien plot to destroy earth.

Read All About it was produced by TV Ontario and is a Canadian Educational Film. Each episodes is about 13 minutes in length and the series focuses on the main theme of encouraging viewers to read and write and think for themselves. Cast includes Craig Collard, Lydia Zajc, Stacey Arnold and Sean Hewitt. Michael Dwyer came on crew for the second season. The series is scary, fun and highly educational. I've re-watched the entire series recently as an adult, and it's still just as delightful.

Man oh man, I can't believe I'm actually gonna comment of this! Welp, here it goes. I remember one summer day during 1979 that the first pilot aired for Read All about It! The original cast was much older with the exception of the boy and possibly the girl too who carried over into the eventual series itself. I recall a young teen being trapped in time, always on the run and not exactly sure of his whereabouts. This was where his friends would haplessly look through the monitor of him running for his life, trying to deduce where geographically and which era historically he was trapped in.

It was captivating! It had all the makings of a cool detective show and sure enough, the final product hit the airwaves a short time after. There must be a list of all the TV Ontario programming and cast lists to their incredible array of educational shows. All us Generation X'ers would be interested to read a possible 'Where are they now?' section just for fun. Too bad kids nowadays don't have half the quality shows we had back in the late 70's/early 80's. They're missing out on some of the most insightful educational shows in quite a while.