The As It Happens Files Page 3

  Speaking of animals, some of you may also remember a story from that time about Zippy Chippy the Losingest Racehorse (85 losses and no wins at the time of the interview) and Barney the Dinosaur suing the San Diego Chicken for copyright infringement—not, strictly speaking, an animal story, but so fitting, don’t you think, in that most litigious of countries to the south of us. Then there was the Memphis lawyer who was suing his partner for oinking in the office, or was it the other way around? It may have been the oinking lawyer who was suing his former partner for unfair dismissal. Either way, it was rib-tickling fun.

  And that, of course, reminds me of Bonnie and Clyde, the pigs on the lam. (Real radio, not ham radio.) It was the middle of January 1998 when two wild boar saved their bacon by escaping from an abattoir in Malmesbury, England (about 80 miles northwest of Reading). Jeremy Newman, the abattoir’s owner, told us how the pigs had made a break for it when they were being unloaded from a farmer’s truck. They went through a fence, across the road and, with several men in pursuit, piggy-paddled across a river and disappeared into the fields beyond. They were spotted a day or so later, hanging out in someone’s back yard, but by then, Mr. Newman had made up his mind that these pigs had earned their freedom. He wasn’t going after them and neither was the farmer, and that was the right sentiment for residents of the town where Thomas Hobbes was born.

  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.

  THREE

  Cabbages and Kings

  Radio that’s a gas

  The 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.

  BF: How big is big in a cabbage?

  FM: It’s five foot across the top.

  BF: So if you measured around the circumference …

  FM: No, across the top.

  BF: You mean if you cut it in half, it’d be five feet across?

  FM: Pardon?

  BF: If you cut it in half, would it be five foot across?

  FM: Pardon?

  BF: Hello.

  FM: Hello?

  BF: If you stand up next to your cabbage, where does she come to on you?

  FM: Up to me breast.

  BF: No kidding. You could roll that down a hill and kill somebody.

  FM: Huh?

  BF: YOU COULD ROLL THAT CABBAGE DOWN A HILL AND IT WOULD KILL SOMEBODY!

  FM: Pardon?

  [pause]

  BF: Have you cut it yet?

  FM: I dismantled it anyhow.

  BF: How did you dismantle it?

  FM: Pardon?

  BF: Mr. McLaughlin, how did you dismantle it?

  FM: [unclear]

  BF: How’d you get it so big?

  FM: I’m not telling you. [pause] I talk to it.

  BF: Mr. McLaughlin, what do you feed your cabbage?

  FM: Pardon?

  BF: WHAT DID YOU FEED YOUR CABBAGE?

  FM: I don’t hear you. What did you say there?

  BF: Mr. McLaughlin, I haven’t got the strength for you today, I’m sorry. Why don’t we call you on Monday?

  FM: I’ll be working Monday.

  BF: You’re working Monday.

  FM: You oughta come over to see it.

  BF: WHAT. DID. YOU. FEED. THE GODDAMN CABBAGE?

  FM: I’ll send you a picture of it.

  BF: I don’t want a picture of it! I just want to know what you fed it!

  FM: Huh?

  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:

  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 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.

  As It Happens probably gets more questions about The Shepherd than any other single thing on the show. Who wrote it? Will it be on this Christmas? Where can I buy a CD? (Answers: British author and journalist Frederick Forsyth; it’s on As It Happens every Christmas Eve; and the CD is now available from CBC gift stores.) A close runner-up would be Reading, as in Where did that Reading thing originate? Why do you keep making those references to Reading?

  The “Reading thing” goes something like this: whenever we have a particularly silly story from England—an interview, say, with a woman whose fondness for garden gnomes has led her to establish a gnome sanctuary—Barbara Budd will extro it by saying something like:

  Ann Atkins is the founder and keeper of the Garden Gnome Reserve, and we reached her in Abbots Bickington. That is 240 kilometres west of Reading, and from the Garden Sanctuary it would take 720,000 garden gnomes, lined up hat to hat, to reach dear Reading.

  In other words, Reading is the centre of the universe, and the story’s distance from the centre is calculated using a distinctive system of measurement.

  There are a couple of explanations as to how this silliness got started. One version is that one day, after interviewing someone in Reading, Al Maitland said, helpfully, “Reading is 30 miles west of London.” A few minutes later, there was a story from London, and Alan said, “[Jane Doe] spoke to us from London … which is 30 miles east of Reading.” It’s the sort of thing Al would have done.

  Former AIH producer George Somerwill, however, says his is the true version. He’d been working on the show for only about a week, he says, when he booked one of those wacky English people—a “tongue-in-cheek story” is how he puts it—who happened to be somewhere in Berkshire, not all that far from where George himself used to live and not far
from Reading.

  We recorded the item about ten minutes past five, and it was slotted early in the programme, so I had only a few minutes to cut it, top-and-tail it and write the green—in those days, we wrote our scripts on five-part green paper. When I came to the extro, I wrote: “John So-and-So spoke to us from … [whatever-the-village-was].”

  Then I thought, No one will know where that is. So I added, “which is nine miles from Reading.” And that’s what Al read on the air.

  Somerwill, in his innocence, assumed that this would make everything clear. He was set straight a moment later, when the show’s producer, Bob Campbell, exploded out of the studio, roaring, “WHERE THE HELL IS READING?”

  Everyone found this quite funny, so from then on, whenever anyone had a nutty story from England, he would cite its distance from Reading and, well, we’ve just never stopped. Somerwill, who now works for the United Nations in Liberia, says people still come up to him and say, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who used to work on As It Happens? Started that Reading thing?”

  I rather imagine it was producer George Jamieson who started measuring the distance in supine gnomes and the like; it’s the sort of thing he would do.

  In any event, the Reading references drive one poor soul right around the bend and straight to his phone. We call him the Reading Man.

  “You stupid, stupid people” is the way his message usually starts. “When are you going to stop these stupid references to Reading. It’s so STUPID!”

  And of course, the answer to the Reading Man’s question is: never. Our producers are a sick and twisted lot, I’m afraid; the more abuse they get from the Reading Man, the more determined they are never to stop this admittedly childish habit.