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Gzowski interviews McLuhan

Broadcast Date: Dec. 13, 1977

In Peter Gzowski's undergraduate days, freshmen slipped copies of Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride under dormitory doors. The fascination was with the raunchy title, says Gzowski, because the book published in 1951 was more about advertising and less about sex. Gzowski is an adoring interviewer today, having much respect for the professor who is the only academic in the world right now studying the effects of media.

They speak about politics and Gzowski attempts to find out whether McLuhan failed grade six.

Gzowski interviews McLuhan

• The title of McLuhan's first book The Mechanical Bride (1951) was inspired by Marcel Duchamp's painting The Bride Striped by Her Bachelors, Even.
• Marshall's younger brother Maurice McLuhan told Derrick de Kerckhove, a student and assistant of the professor's, in a 1980 CBC Radio documentary that Marshall had failed grade six.

• At the time of this clip, McLuhan remained a devout Roman Catholic, attending mass daily, though in a 1972 diary entry he wrote: "Cat-gut and cat-calls cum Gregorian. The mass gets longer, limper, lumpier."
• McLuhan converted to Catholicism in university at the age of 25 after a friend asked him why he was not in the Church.

Gzowski interviews McLuhan

Medium: Television

Program: 90 Minutes Live

Broadcast Date: Dec. 13, 1977

Guest(s): Marshall McLuhan

Host: Peter Gzowski

Duration: 6:59

Last updated:
March 5, 2008