The As It Happens Files Read online

  But even that line, I have learned, was written for Al by the show’s writer at the time, George Jamieson. When I joined As It Happens, George was the senior producer. He was responsible for writing the bills and tie-off lines, which he did between bouts of consulting with the chase producers, briefing me on dead blues musicians, listening to interviews being taped, keeping tabs on developing stories, making popcorn and watching the webcam located at the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Peter in New Orleans. Except for the webcam part, George had been doing this for as long as anyone could remember; he made it seem easy. In fact, the only time I remember seeing George break into a sweat was the night we lost Dalet about five minutes before air time.

  Dalet was the name of the digital recording and editing system that replaced the old quarter-inch audiotape we’d used since around the time of Alexander Graham Bell, or slightly after. What I found disconcerting about digital recording was that, in my view, it didn’t actually exist. There was no nice solid little reel of acetate that you could hold in your hand, cut up, splice back together, carry to a machine and play. A digital recording was just a computer file—and we all know what happens to computer files.

  True to their form, all the radio news computers would occasionally get clogged up or crash or threaten to crash, and everyone would scramble to save what they were working on, but nothing really disastrous happened to us … until the night we lost the whole show just as we were about to go live to the east coast. Happily, I wasn’t the only techno-skeptic on the floor. When we’d switched to digital, Linda Groen, the show’s executive producer at the time, had decreed that until further notice every interview would continue to be recorded on our old tape machines, as well as on the computer. So when Dalet crashed, we had hard versions of all the material we’d collected for the show that day, but none of it was cleaned up or edited or timed or in any way ready for broadcast. And by the way, was there anyone in the room who still knew how to cut tape with a razor?

  At times like this, I would just go and sit down in the studio with Barbara; we’d cast a hopeful glance at each other, cross our fingers … and trust in our colleagues “out there” to get us through. The night we lost Dalet, there were a couple of people left who knew how to edit tape. Someone threw the first reel on—the interview was perhaps a tad too long—and while it was running, someone else was cleaning up the next bit, and so we got through it. If memory serves, our digital files were recovered before we hit central Canada, so the show was clean for the rest of the country.

  Later, George and Kent Hoffman, our technician at the time, rigged up some sort of back-up system with guitar cables and duct tape to ensure that if the computer in the studio crashed again, they could still play back the show from another computer at the Main Desk. It worked like a charm.

  When George decided it was time to move on, the rest of us were dismayed. Not only did he have the writing and journalistic and people skills that made him an ideal senior producer, he was also the show’s memory. When there’s a turnover of producers and hosts, as there often is, it’s important that someone remain who can say, “We did that story last May.” Or when a Big Name dies, “Liz Gray did an interview with her in 1987. Ask Archives to find the tape.” Or in some cases, “Whatever you do, don’t book him for an interview. No one can understand a thing he says.”

  George had the memory, because his days with As It Happens dated back to when the show came out of an old mouse-infested former girls’ school on Jarvis Street in Toronto, where they’d had to gallop up and down stairs to hustle scripts and tapes from the production office to the studio.

  Those were the days when you had to enlist the help of a Bell operator to find the number for the newspaper editor you were trying to reach in Katmandu or the FARC spokesman in Colombia. Some operators were very good at it. They probably thought of themselves as part of the production team—and so did the radio people. George recalls that one day when he called Bell to ask for a line to Africa, the operator came back with, “Isn’t it Mr. Somerwill who usually calls Africa? I hope he’s not ill.”

  In the event, the show didn’t crash when George Jamieson left, but it did require two people to take his place. Leith Bishop took on all the responsibilities of senior producer except the writing; that task we entrusted to a skinny, pony-tailed guy called Bob Coates. Bob was in his 30s and had been loping about the place for several years at that point, though so quietly you hardly knew he was there some days, until he started serving up his little gems. Like all good producers, Bob could turn his hand to almost any kind of assignment, but his preference was for music and art and quirky marijuana stories, and he had a talent for finding something amusing in almost any situation. It was when he moved into the writer’s chair at As It Happens, however, that Bob really found his stride.

  I don’t know where or how Bob learned to write the way he did, but maybe his early exposure to Harlequin romances had something to do with his literary development. Harlequin was where he met fellow producer Greg Kelly in 1989; Bob worked nights and Greg worked the day shift. As Greg recalls …

  …from time to time, our paths would cross. And the only way that I could keep my sanity throughout the day, doing this drudgery of proofreading Harlequin novels, which is what Bob was also doing, was to keep a rogues’ gallery of the worst sayings and abuses of the English language that you’d come across reading these things, and I would record them or get people to hand them in to me. You’d get things like, “She walked past him at a run.” Or “Bitch,” he said, “but the word was a caress.”

  When I met Bob, I found that he was keeping his own rogues’ gallery. Bob maintained that one of the hallmarks of really bad writing was the prevalence of “ly” adverbs. So, instead of conveying speed, you would simply say “quickly.” And if you got a lot of these “ly” adverbs going on, you knew you were going to get bad writing. The most egregious example of that that Bob ever came across is one that I will always remember Bob for: “Aaron raised his eyebrows evaluatively.”

  And that, to me, sums up Bob’s sense of humour.

  His sense of humour and his sense of style. Not that Bob found it easy to write the show. No one does; it can be a terrible grind. The writer’s responsible not only for the bills and tie-off lines, but also for all the other scripts in the show, including the introductions. The individual story producers submit drafts, but they often need a lot of rewriting. Former As It Happens producer Neil Morrison remembers what it was like to have Bob Coates as a mentor:

  After I’d written an introduction, Bob would clean it up and do a lot of work on it. And in the beginning there was a lot of work to do; Bob always made it a completely different piece of work. And I used to study, study, study how Bob did this. I would look at my version and then look at Bob’s version and be depressed and discouraged by how much better it was. Then at one point—I think I’d been sending in scripts to him for about three months—he came to me and let me know that, for the first time, he didn’t have to change anything in my intro. It was a crowning moment for me. I thought, Finally I’ve got something that passes the Bob test.

  Neil was one of the people who filed his scripts early enough for Bob to polish them. There were others who didn’t quite manage to file sometimes until just minutes before the intros were due to be read on air by Barbara. So … it’s ten minutes to showtime, the writer’s scrambling to finish the bills and the tie-off line and to make sure the first scripts, at least, have been delivered to the hosts—and maybe the topics aren’t so inspiring that night.

  “I need your intro, Laurie. Now!”

  “You try writing a fresh lead to your 32nd story on mad cow!” Laurie wails.

  “DOES ANYONE HAVE A TIE-OFF LINE FOR THE GUY WHO DID THE NOSE JOB ON THE DUCK?”

  “Who burnt the popcorn?”

  “Has anyone seen Barbara and Mary Lou?”

  “Have you checked the smoking room?”

  There is no longer a smoking room at the CBC, of course,
and Barbara and I have both quit, in spite of our convictions that inspiration—to paraphrase American writer Fran Lebowitz—is coded into the inside of the cigarette paper. Bob found his elsewhere—from staring at a blank computer screen. When he started chuckling quietly to himself, you knew he’d nailed it.

  When he wasn’t wrestling with scripts, Bob was still chasing the stories he loved: feature interviews with the glass artist Dale Chihuly when he came to town to open a new exhibit, or with architect Frank Gehry when he agreed to design a winery in the Niagara region. For some reason, these interviews always seemed to be scheduled for a day off, but it was never an issue with me. Bob’s enthusiasm was too persuasive.

  Bob never said so to me, but it must have been painful for him at times to watch me struggle through an interview with an artist whose work he loved—and which I admired but didn’t really understand. I was more comfortable with politics and science than with the arts stories. Like the other producers, he did his best to brief me, but there’s only so much you can do with me as raw material. I’ve seen Barbara wince at some gaucherie I committed when chatting with an actor or musician. I’m so un-hip that my “secret Santa” one year—Laurie Allan—presented me with her own Idiot’s Guide to Pop Culture. It listed critical facts about such pop icons as Lindsay Lohan, Fantasia, Dr. Phil and Prince—along with their photos.

  One day Laurie also provided us with a perfect example of why it’s always good to have people of different vintages on the production team: when the name Tito came up in a story, she didn’t connect it with the former President of Yugoslavia, while I had no idea it could also be referring to one of the Jackson Five singers.

  Bob, on the other hand, was very hip. His finger was on the pulse of everything that was happening in music and art and design—especially music. He loved blues and bluegrass and jazz and rock, and according to those who might know, he had a finely tuned ear for the best. When he had time to pick music tracks for the show, as well as to produce stories and write, the product sounded very good indeed. With all that talent, he might have been an arrogant shmuck—but he wasn’t. The truly amazing thing about Bob—the reason we all loved him—was that he was invariably patient with us lesser mortals. The only time I saw him angry was when a senior producer was being too hard on a young recruit, but even then he didn’t have it in him to be rude.

  We were lucky to have Bob with us, and we knew it. And then our luck ran out.

  “I had to go for a biopsy,” he told me one day when we were standing together at the photocopier. “There was a spot on my ear … and I have a swollen gland.” My blood ran cold. Bob looked really worried, and I could understand why. I think I knew at that instant that this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. Still, it was a shock when he called us a week later to tell us that his doctor had just confirmed the bad news: it was a malignant melanoma. A few days after that, Bob’s partner, Karen, was told she had breast cancer. This can’t be happening, we thought. How could this be happening?

  And how could we carry on at work as if nothing were happening?

  We did carry on, but the programme wasn’t at its peak in those days and no wonder. Everyone’s mind was elsewhere a lot of the time. Everyone wanted to be with Bob and Karen as much as possible, for as much time as Bob and Karen could put up with us. They were very generous with their time, the two of them. They shared almost all the time they had left together with many other people—with Bob’s family and Karen’s family; with Bob’s friends from the CBC and Karen’s friends from Nelvana, where she worked as an animation editor; with other friends from other parts of their lives. They did it as much to make us feel better as for their own distraction, I know. And all the while, Karen was getting radiation and chemo, and Bob was getting radiation and chemo, and both of them were generally feeling pretty damn awful.

  Karen, I’m happy to report, recovered from her cancer. Bob died at home on Saturday, November 30, 2002.

  Monday morning at As It Happens, we turned our attention to the tribute we would air that night. Producer Brooke Forbes offered to go around the building and record goodbyes from all the people who had worked with Bob. (The memory of this became especially poignant to us not long afterwards when Brooke also died of cancer.) Mark Ulster wrote a script; Barbara and I set down a few thoughts of our own; others resurrected some of Bob’s productions from the archives and selected the music. Actually, Karen picked the music, a song she and Bob both loved: “Rugged Roses,” by a Texas band called the Gourds. It starts like this:

  Tell me with yer eyes

  In silence let them ring

  The precious humming of our hearts

  In silence let them sing

  May our phantoms find their places

  Where ever that may be

  Let only the sound of love dear echo endlessly.

  The As It Happens tribute to a favourite son lasted half an hour. We could have done more but—grieving though we were—we didn’t want to embarrass Bob’s memory by appearing too self-indulgent on the air. The audience reaction told us we’d got it about right. There were no complaints, and many people called and wrote to tell us how moved they had been by the tribute and how grateful they were to have been given an insight into the people behind the scenes—and how much they wished they could have known Bob Coates, since he was obviously a very special person.

  Bob Coates set high standards, but I think he’d be pleased to know how hard people have worked to maintain them. Chris Howden and Adam Killick and Robin Smythe all occupied his writer boots when I was there and proved they were as devoted to words and language and laughter as Bob. Mark Ulster wrote the show for a while, then became its senior producer—an excellent one, by the way. I don’t know which one of them wrote the opening bills I reproduced at the beginning of this chapter, but I love the tie-off line—and I thought you might like to know how that whole philosophy joke thing turned out.

  The interview, in June 2005, was with a woman named Christine Tappolet, professor of meta-ethics at the University of Montreal, who had organized a contest for the magazine of the Canadian Philosophical Association. The aim was to find the funniest philosophy joke. She had selected four winners and—just to give you an idea—this was her favourite: QUESTION—What’s brown and sticky? ANSWER—A stick.

  “What was the joke?” I asked her.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  To be fair, the pickings were slim. Dr. Tappolet said that only 18 of the 700 members of the association had responded to her request. The problem was, she told us, “No one reads the bulletin; one of the goals [of the contest] was to beef up the readership.”

  But Talkback didn’t let us down. Here are my Top Ten listeners’ submissions for consideration as Best Philosophy Joke:

  Q: What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

  A: Make me one with everything.

  —Bob McLeod, Stittsville, Ontario

  “Nietzche is dead.”—God.

  —on a T-shirt spotted by Linda from Georgetown, Ontario

  Q: What’s the difference between a Stoic and a Cynic?

  A: A Stoic is what brings the baby, and a Cynic is what you wash him in.

  —a Ms. McQuarry from Calgary, Alberta

  The funniest philosophy joke in the world? I think it is simply this: “Define your terms” as the response to any philosophical question.

  —Tom Norris, Vancouver, British Columbia

  Q: How do you get a philosopher off your porch?

  A: Pay for the pizza.

  —Dave from Ottawa, Ontario

  René Descartes is sitting in a bar, and the bartender says, “Last call, René. You want another one?” Descartes says, “I think not”—and disappears.

  —David Gearlock, Frankfurt, Kentucky

  Q: What do you get when you cross a dyslexic agnostic with an insomniac?

  A: Somebody who stays up all night wondering if there is a dog.

  —Stewart Dudley, North Gower, Ontario<
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  Did you hear the one about the philosophy student who declined an invitation to a brothel in order to study for his finals? He wanted to put Descartes before the whores.

  —Ian Bowater, Los Angeles, California

  Did you hear about the student who left a note on the kitchen table? “Gone to philosophy class; your dinner doesn’t exist.”

  —Jill McCabe

  “If a tree falls in the forest”—shit, I screwed it up. The joke goes, “If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?”

  —this version called in by Duncan Thompson from McLean, Virginia

  I think I hear Bob laughing.

  SEVEN

  The Man in the Bear Suit

  Radio with all the grizzly details

  I’m not sure just when or why Troy Hurtubise decided to dedicate his life to making a bear-proof suit, but he’s been at it for quite a while and has acquired an international reputation for eccentricity. He’s also acquired an Ig Nobel prize at Harvard and attracted a fair amount of investment capital over the years. When I first spoke to him in November 2001, he was about to test the Ursus Mark VI bear-proof suit, i.e., a suit that he could wear for a date with a very large bear—a grizzly, say, or even a Kodiak, which is a brown bear the size of a polar bear.

  ML: Mr. Hurtubise, you have your suit all pressed and polished and ready to go, have you?

  TH: Suit’s all prepped and everything, yes.

  ML: Now, how are you going to meet your challenger? Are you just going to pour honey over it and stand in the woods or what?

  TH: No, I’ll basically just stand there and the handler will say, “Go at the suit,” and the bear will go at the suit.

  ML: What handler? Where are you going?