The As It Happens Files (4 page)

Before Malmesbury a Canadian pig had gone AWOL out west, and the media had dubbed him Francis Bacon. (Bacon was a near contemporary of Thomas Hobbes, by the way. Coincidence?) At any rate, we had only to drop the merest hint—“What should we call the runaway pigs?”—and our phone lines lit up:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Pigs, Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Ed and Flo, Runaway Pork and Big Bertha, Piggly Wiggly and Greased Lightning, Rasher and Dancer, Sook Sook and Yuk Yuk, Bubble and Squeak, Bangers and Mash
and
Bangers and Dash
were some of the offerings from our listeners.

A man from Edmonton said he could think of no better names for a couple of fast-moving hogs than
Harley and Davidson,
and a San Francisco caller named our pigs
Footloose and Fancy Free
and wished them, “Good luck if you’re
listening.” I don’t think the CBC phone lines had received so many calls on one topic since the day they pre-empted
Coronation Street.

In the end, I didn’t die from exhaustion in the first year and a half, and I didn’t kill the show either; I just got hooked.

Radio that’s a gas

T
he genius of
As It Happens
as a concept is that it can be anything you want to make it, and it has always romped from the Grave-and-Important to the Silly-and-Preposterous and back again with great ease. Like a well-balanced diet, it offers up a nutritious daily helping of hard news—the meat and veg—and garnishes it with a variety of other stories—the
amuse-bouches,
palate-cleansing sorbets and desserts. Kings and queens there have been, as well as various other noblemen, presidents, prime ministers, advisors and hangers-on. It was easier to get the high-profile guests on the air before allnews TV, the hundred-channel universe and the Internet made competing demands for their time and attention and before the spin doctors took control of the politicians and their agendas, but the AIH chase producers can still land the big fish when they have to.

But first the cabbages.

In November 1998,
As It Happens
celebrated its 30th anniversary. We decided to put the audience front and centre for the occasion, inviting them to write lyrics for the opening theme and to speak up about their favourite stories from the past. Barbara Frum’s interview with former Maple Leaf Gardens owner Harold Ballard was a popular favourite, as were Michael Enright’s lesson in worm charming and Al Maitland’s moist experience with a beaver, but the most requested
blast from the past was Frum’s encounter with the Big Cabbage. As regular listeners know, we rarely pass up an opportunity to celebrate the growers of giant vegetables. The standard line of questioning isn’t hard to imagine:
How big? How heavy? … What did you feed it?
But on one occasion in 1976, Frum’s questions to Farmer McLaughlin in Bristol, England, were falling on deaf ears—literally.

The Goddamn Cabbage didn’t make it to air that night. The producer wrote it off as a “failed interview” and stuck it in her drawer. But she dug it out again for an end-of-year round-up, and it soared to the top of the charts, profanity and all.

Except in the United States. We love our American listeners, and we love the fact that public radio stations across the U.S. broadcast
As It Happens
in their own markets, but once in a while, we run afoul of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in Washington. The FCC have very strict rules about the sort of language you’re allowed to use over the public airwaves. They don’t seem to object to serial-killer dramas or hate messages or selling crap to kids, but they take a dim view of using words like
crap
or
goddamn
on the radio. It’s incumbent on AIH producers to phone Minnesota Public Radio when they think there’s something on the show that might bring censure down on our American fellows, so Minnesota can bleep it out before it hits the innocent air south of the 49th parallel.

The Internet, satellite radio and 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
Radio
Free 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:

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 interview.”

Which is why, four decades later,
As It Happens
can still sound as fresh as the day it was born.

Al Maitland, the man with the golden voice, claims he was mucking out stables when they called him in to co-host
As It Happens.
He was crazy about horses and always kept one or two about somewhere—not usually in the studio. But one year on his birthday, the crew did bring one in, wearing a blanket that said “Happy Birthday, Al.” He was a bit disappointed, he said, that he only got to keep the blanket.

At least the horse didn’t mistake the studio for a toilet, unlike the beaver that came calling when the show was campaigning to have
Castor canadensis
anointed as the country’s national animal.

“It was,” Harry told us on the 30th anniversary, “more fun than I realized at the time.” Also on that anniversary show, Barbara Budd recalled Grumpy the Goldfish, who was given the kiss of life by his doting owner (yes, in England); Dennis Trudeau impressed us with his memories of commuting to work every Monday morning from Montreal and returning Friday night; and Elizabeth Gray dazzled us with her ability to pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwlllantysiliogogogoch, the name of the Welsh town where her mother was born, which means “the church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio’s of the red cave.” Some of you probably knew that already.

Apparently, that’s not even the longest place name in the world; the Maoris have a longer name for a hill in New Zealand. It’s
Taumatawhakatangi …
plus 40 more letters, and it translates as “the place where Tamatea, the man with the big knees who slid down, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as ’landeater,’ played his flute to his loved one.” More like a short story than a name really.

But to get back to the anniversary. Michael Enright recalled the lady in Alberta who killed and stuffed little prairie dogs and then dressed them up and put them in tableaux: the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the Nativity scene at Christmas. We talked about the Reading Man and the time they tried to change the theme music and Al Maitland’s debut as “Fireside Al” and the struggle that producer Pam Wallin had had to get Zimbabwean guerrilla fighter Joshua Nkomo on the programme.

Pam flirted shamelessly with him, we heard, finally inveigling him into agreeing to an interview with Barbara Frum. Unfortunately, the day he finally acceded to Pam’s entreaties, Barbara was away. Enright was filling in for her, and Nkomo insisted on addressing him as “Barbara” throughout their talk.

And we remembered Barbara. More than anyone else, it was Barbara Frum who must get the credit for making
As It Happens
a daily event in the lives of many Canadians.

“She was the consummate journalist,” said Harry Brown. “She was meticulous and hard working, and she had a most beguiling tone.”

Harry recalled how she had taken him aside one day and told him that she’d been diagnosed with leukemia; she probably wouldn’t live to see her grandchildren. But then, he said, she seemed to put it out of her mind and carry on, and she never mentioned the subject again. Frum went on to host
The Journal
on CBC Television (with me) and died in 1992 at the age of 54. She lived long enough to welcome her first grandchild, Miranda.

November 18, 1998, was also the last time we had Al Maitland and Harry Brown on the air together. Al died a couple of months later of congestive heart failure; Harry’s heart gave out three years after that. Happily for us, their voices are preserved on tape. CDs of the collected readings of “Fireside Al” and “Front Porch Al” are steady favourites in the CBC gift shop, and Maitland’s reading of Frederick Forsyth’s
Shepherd
is an absolute must every Christmas Eve.