The As It Happens Files Read Online Free PDF

even short-wave radio make all these efforts rather pointless, but you can’t blame folks for trying. I even have a certain sympathy for the FCC’s attempt to uphold some standards; people have a right to expect that they can listen to the CBC without having a lot of foul language thrust at them. It’s just that we think it’s possible to draw the line a bit short of a total taboo. We do draw the line, as a country, at Howard Stern and Don Imus and their vulgar mockery of, well, of everyone who isn’t Howard Stern or Don Imus really. But goddamn cabbages we can handle.
    Cabbages and the like were also remembered by the show’s other hosts—Harry Brown, Elizabeth Gray, Dennis Trudeau, Michael Enright and Al Maitland—when we assembled them in our Toronto studio for that 30th anniversary show. Harry Brown recalled that the show was a product of the so-called radio revolution at the CBC, when people like Margaret Lyons and Val Cleary took an old medium that had been overshadowed by its flashy younger brother, TV,and gave it a thorough makeover. Harry said that when he joined
As It Happens,
he was the only one there with short hair and no love beads. Also, he smoked regular tobacco.
    The CBC had been founded on the idea that it should help bind Canada together as the railway had done in the 19th century; Val Cleary, Elizabeth Gray told us, had the idea that radio could
be
a train. In its first incarnation,
As It Happens
went on the air at 8:00 p.m. in Halifax, which was 7:00 p.m. in Toronto, and rolled through five time zones until they signed off in Vancouver at 10:00 p.m. Pacific Time. In other words, when the hosts were launching into their second hour in the Maritimes, they’d be saying hello to the listeners joining them from Quebec and Ontario; when they were saying goodbye to the Maritimes, they’d be doing a second hour in Ontario and saying hello to Manitoba and so on.
    The fact that Canada has six time zones always made things interesting for us when we had to update a story across the country. Those nights were ones when I paid close attention to the script to try to keep a grip on exactly which part of the show we were doing over, where and for whom. It takes an
idiot savant
to keep track; I played the
idiot
part, and the Desk furnished the
savant.
    When Harry Brown and company signed off in Vancouver at ten, it was, of course, one in the morning in Toronto. So if the show had aired every night, the pace would have taken its toll on even the youngest producers. But in the beginning, it aired only on Monday nights. Harry shared the hosting duties with writer Phillip Forsyth at first and later with artist William Ronald.
    In 1971 the Monday night team joined up with the people who were producing another young programme called
RadioFree Friday.
Barbara Frum and Cy Strange came on board, and the show went to five nights a week, with rotating hosts. Cy, like Harry, would have a long career as CBC announcer and programme host. His biographical notes in the CBC files read like something that Ted Baxter, the news anchor on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
might have written:
    Cy Strange grew up in a farming community in southern Ontario where he pumped vinegar in his father’s general store, shot rabbits for dinner and used to hitchhike 35 miles to sing and play the guitar on a 100-watt radio station in London, Ontario.
    In 1973 the format changed again, and
As It Happens
took on the shape it’s maintained pretty much to this day: a lively mix of music and talk and interviews with leading newsmakers. Then as now, there were other programmes playing music and talking to people on the phone; what distinguished
As It Happens
from those other shows was that instead of waiting for people to call
in,
the producers and hosts called
out.
“The telephone is a delightful instrument,” said Phil Forsyth at the time. “It can go anywhere, doesn’t cost that much, and on the air it sounds like a real conversation, rather than an