On not your average day in April 1994, Arthur Weinthal, vp of entertainment programming at ctv, sat in his office at the network’s old building on Toronto’s Charles Street.

Pictures of children and grandchildren littered the bookshelf to his right, the signature stack of sharpened pencils rested on the desk, and on the highest shelf of the bookcase was the infamous pillow, easy to reach in case the opportunity to use it presented itself (see MacMillan, p. 24).

Weinthal was assuming nothing today, just waiting, maybe praying, at the old pine kitchen table that has served as his desk since 1976. Word was cbs was making the call today, deciding whether or not to buy the pilot and seven episodes of Due South, produced by Alliance Communications and ctv. To produce a show in Canada, place it on a u.s. network and simulcast it: ‘This was the dream,’ says Weinthal.

For those who monitor the machinations of the Canadian broadcasting industry, the climax is old news. For the record, the call came before noon. The only thing Weinthal remembers saying to Alliance president Robert Lantos was, ‘Thank God,’ and almost two years and 34 episodes later, Due South is in its second season on cbs.

So g’es one of the peaks in Arthur Weinthal’s 30-year career in television programming and production, all with ctv. As the man deciding yea or nay to the programs ctv puts its money behind, he says ‘no’ three times as often as he says ‘yes,’ and has thus been dubbed gruff, inflexible, the devil himself by some, and ‘Dr. No’ regularly by distributors on both sides of the border.

Long weathering the griping inherent to the job, Weinthal this year celebrates his three-decade anniversary in programming at ctv, having earned the respect and admiration of the industry.

In addition to his day job, Weinthal serves as proxy representative to the International Council of the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences, a member of the board of trustees of the Motion Picture Foundation of Canada and a member of the board of the Canadian Film Centre. He is the recipient of the cftpa’s Jack Chisholm Award for Lifetime Achievement and the newly anointed chairman of the board of the Banff Television Festival.

A notorious perfectionist with an equally notorious hot streak, variations on the adage ‘d’esn’t suffer fools gladly’ comes up repeatedly in interviews with friends and colleagues, as do references to smart, funny and people-savvy, with an unquantifiable and invaluable horse sense for what will attract an audience to a television program.

In three decades, he’s never felt the urge to change jobs. ‘You go to something else because you need change. This business changes constantly.’ The formula for success in programming is equally straightforward, he says.

‘Show up, have standards, know your audience, and make sure you’re right more often than you’re wrong.’

It’s simpler than that, says Pip Wedge, a friend and longtime colleague who retired in 1994 after 28 years with ctv as the executive in charge of foreign programming and managing the network’s inventory.

‘He’s had incredible success in the field he’s chosen because he’s driven by an insatiable need to get things right.’

Success, yes, but Weinthal readily admits to some mistakes. Not renewing Seinfeld and Cheers because the price was getting crazy, for example. But being the catalyst levitating Due South, e.n.g., The Campbells, and Bright and Early, the prototype for what is now Canada am, stands him in good stead, as d’es having big-money draws like Roseanne, Murphy Brown, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and most recently er, frontlining the ctv stable.

Once faced with choosing between er and Chicago Hope, the reason for taking er, a series for which ctv paid this season ‘more than I ever, ever, ever, ever thought we’d pay for a program,’ was as much a testament to Weinthal’s horse sense as any program he’s greenlit over the past 30 years.

There were the usual predictable criteria: sharp writing without a wasted word, really interesting characters. ‘But when you ask why it was a better program, I don’t know. It’s not really a question of asking ‘Is that a good program?’ The question is, ‘Do I want to watch that again next week?’ Some of it you can quantify, some of it’s luck, and some of it’s instinct.’

Where the instinct came from is anyone’s guess. There are two tv sets in the Weinthals’ Toronto apartment and five at the much-loved cottage in Hockley Valley, but Weinthal, the son of Polish immigrants, grew up without a television.

He was born in Montreal in 1932. His dad sold coffee and tea door-to-door and his mum worked as a seamstress. Radio was his first telecommunications experience, working as the night news editor at CFCF Radio in 1953 for $45 a week, armed with all the radio training an English and psychology degree from McGill University provides.

A year later, it was production and program manager, and from there to Harold F. Stanfield Advertising where he assumed the role of producer for radio and tv commercials. The Sylvania account was under his wing, the closest he’d come to television, then an embryo industry, which from a distance held all the glamour and attraction of an adult’s cocktail party to a child.

In 1960, he went to Ronalds-Reynolds Advertising where he handled, among other accounts, Texaco and Timex.

While the young Weinthal got his fill of the advertising business, the broadcasting industry was putting down roots. The government, playing its hand to make television a bigger force, had issued the call for second stations in major markets. Winning the Toronto bid was an upper-crust consortium led by John Bassett and Foster Hewitt, and cfto launched in January 1961.

ctv pioneers Spence Caldwell and Peter MacFarlane soon showed up on Ronalds-Reynolds’ doorstep to pitch programs for sponsorship to Texaco, and, in the process, built a relationship with the company’s account executive.

A year later, over the moon with an offer of an $11,000-a-year salary, Weinthal, then 29, packed the wife and kids into the blue Chevy and made the nine-hour trip on the under-construction 401 to Toronto. He would join the team of Caldwell, MacFarlane, Michael Hind-Smith and Ross McLean as the executive overseeing daytime programming at ctv.

‘I’ve always felt very much at home in the city,’ Weinthal says in retrospect. ‘And I always, always wanted to be in broadcasting.’

In broadcasting he was, soon in the thick of what former ctv executive Peter Sisam calls the ‘blood-letting and spear-chucking’ era of the network in the 1970s. Sisam, now vp of the International Management Group, says Weinthal was then demanding, exacting, perceptive and blindingly articulate.

With ctv and its affiliates competing for programming and the business side of the network an unholy mess, management meetings were a nightmare.

‘We’d be going in circles for hours, but Arthur could take the situation and pull it together in three sentences. He always had a way of cutting through the crap. He has a temper, but he blows and then it’s gone. He has no time for stupidity and he’s a great judge of character. If he thinks someone is an idiot, they generally are.’

That Weinthal’s opinion counts is also evident amongst members of the broadcasting and production community with whom he’s spent the better part of his life.

Kevin Shea, former president and coo of Atlantis Communications and now president of Global Television and eastern operations for CanWest Global Communications, first met Weinthal in 1976 at a meeting of the Children’s Broadcast Institute in which Weinthal served as director and first vice-chairman.

Shea and Sylvain Walters, way ahead of their time, had come with the hope of getting the cbi’s support on an application for a children’s television service.

Weinthal was ‘very gentle’ about it but he maintained that they were going to have a very difficult time getting the idea off the ground, Shea remembers.

About 12 years later, the first year Shea’s startup kids channel ytv had a presence at the Banff Television Festival, Weinthal saddled up to him at the opening festivities cocktail party.

‘He said, ‘Hats off to you and your friends at ytv. You’re making us all stand up and take notice when we all thought you wouldn’t be around for three months.’ It was like the Senator of Canadian programming and Canadian production was giving us his blessing. He had no idea of the impact it had on me at the time,’ says Shea.

Those who regularly negotiate with Weinthal in his deal-making capacity for ctv or have been on the receiving end when promises aren’t being kept or performances aren’t up to par may sniff at these kinds of anecdotes. But you can’t be warm and fuzzy all the time and be as good as he is at the job, says Gail Morrell, vp corporate communications and program director at ctv.

Morrell and Weinthal met at cfcf in the early ’70s when she was a green promotions writer and he was the network brass. She gave him a wide berth at the time but her office is now just down the hall from his on ctv’s pristine 18th floor. She has, in her capacity as program director overseeing affiliate relations and scheduling, had ample opportunity to see the deal-maker in action.

‘He comes across as very stern, but he has extremely high standards with exquisite tastes, so that g’es with the territory. I’ve learned an enormous amount from him. He’s a tough negotiator and d’esn’t give in easily. At the same time, he’s very articulate and shows his emotions. You know when Arthur’s happy and you know when he’s not happy.’

All the analysis is perhaps a little glaring for the essentially private Weinthal, who keeps a picture of his cat alongside the family photos, loves Woody Allen movies, worries ‘all the time,’ and avoids er because ‘watching it before bed makes me too anxious.’

He’s quick to admit to a temper, but it is, as Shea says, well-placed and necessary. TekWar, broadcast by ctv and produced by Atlantis and Lemli Productions, was at one point behind in production and not meeting its promised availability to the network. Inevitably, Shea and the TekWar powers were summoned to a huddle in Weinthal’s office.

‘We got a roasting from Arthur and we deserved it. The good news is, he’s direct. You’re not ever wondering where you stand. It happens, it’s not personal, the problem gets corrected, and you move on. It’s business.’

Other good news, according to colleagues and friends, is that working with Weinthal makes one privy to his sense of humor, which Morrell calls ‘a sharp, quick wit’ that makes for a lot of laughs up on the 18th floor.

Not surprisingly, some of those jokes go back to who he is, ‘a man with high standards who expects those around him to have the same high standards,’ says Debbie Rudka, his executive assistant for the past seven years.

The job placement agency warned her to expect a strong-willed personality when she went to interview for the job. Responding to his query of her good qualities, she told him she was a perfectionist.

‘To this day, seven-and-a-half years later, I’ll make a typo and he’ll say, ‘You told me you were perfect,’ and I’ll say, ‘No, I said I was a perfectionist,’ ‘ Rudka laughs.

‘He may not admit it very readily, but he’s a big pussycat. He d’esn’t like to waste time but he knows there’s a game to be played. He likes people but he’s better in smaller groups. Basically, he’s a family man who really enjoys what he d’es.’

To test the theory that someone having had the same job for three decades still wakes up pumped to go to work, ask Weinthal about a television program. Any program. Then get comfortable. Try Circus, the ’70s hit about circus performers which he pushed into development and then spent copious amounts of time with the animals and their trainers. Even try the competition’s inventory, Seinfeld, one of his personal favorites, for a gauge of how the man still loves television.

‘It’s a heretical thing to say, but television is not an ideas business; it’s a craft business. When I think of what those story meetings must be like, taking the stupidest ideas in the world and breaking them down into three stupider ideas and then managing to weave it into a wonderful 30 minutes, I’m constantly amazed.’

The benchmarks of his career though are measured in Canadian programs. Due South, naturally, but others like The Campbells, the first to actually take a Canadian winter and weave stories around it, and documentaries like last year’s on the rise of Nazism in Canadian schools, ‘which I did just for me.’

But pressed to name his favorite production – ‘That’s like asking which one of your children are ugly’ – Alliance-produced e.n.g. is best loved.

‘It was a solid script from day one, it was all Canadian, about us. The subject matter was socially relevant, always entertaining, and week after week for five years we turned out solid entertainment. When people said, ‘Isn’t it great that people are watching a Canadian show,’ I said nobody’s watching it because it’s Canadian. They’re watching it because it’s good.’

That a production community existed to produce the show is owed directly to the creation of Telefilm Canada’s Broadcast Development Fund in 1983, says Weinthal, who pegs it as the single biggest policy initiative enabling and sustaining a healthy production industry in this country. It suddenly became possible to get money into the system in a way that benefited the producers and allowed broadcasters to satisfy their licence requirements, he says.

Cancon has been key to industry evolution and for as much quibbling that g’es on about the cost of producing Canadian, the statute has forced, moreso enabled, Canadian broadcasters to carve out an identity for themselves distinct from the factory to the south.

‘This business has been created by a population that demanded it and a production system that could take advantage of it. People didn’t picket in the streets to see Canadian shows, but as a broadcaster you knew very quickly that if you couldn’t be better, you’d better be different, so we found ways to appeal to our viewers first and foremost. When we’re lucky, like Due South, we appeal to the rest of the world.’

Due South being an exception, from the beginning there proved to be a world of difference between making Canadian programs and making a profit on them. American distributors easily cracked the 49th parallel, but selling Cancon across the border had been the impossible dream for most of Weinthal’s career.

‘When people ask me how long it took to get Due South on cbs, I say 18 years. I’d be in Los Angeles and I’d say, ‘Why don’t we produce shows in Canada and you can run them and we can simulcast?’ And they’d look at me like a side order of asparagus they hadn’t ordered and say, ‘Very interesting idea, Arthur. Next time you’re in l.a., do call, and we’ll have lunch.’ When it happened it was an achievement. It was wonderful.’

The bigger achievement, though, is how far the Canadian broadcasting industry as a whole has come in the past decade, he says. Asked to wax nostalgic about the ‘golden age’ of television, Weinthal says we’re in it.

‘What’s produced today is of infinitely greater quality, more socially responsive and entertaining than what was produced 10 years ago. No social issue is taboo. What we cover has more impact on people through entertainment than anything we can point to in the past.’

While he’s accustomed to being the bad guy amongst those who have mounted unsuccessful program pitches – ‘It’s difficult to hear, but some ideas just won’t work. I’m fair and that’s the most anyone can ask’ – Weinthal has come under industry criticism of late for not buying Canadian feature films.

The response is, as it is for any program purchasing decision, that he buys what he believes people are going to watch. Who those people are is always top of mind and if he needs to be reminded of them, he comes down from the ctv ivory tower on Yonge Street.

Case-in-point: Several years ago, muddling over why a favored highbrow series was failing while Stars on Ice was on a steady ratings incline, Weinthal drove through the east end of the city.

It was almost 6 p.m., raining, and people were trying to parallel park on the narrow side streets. They’d drag their briefcases out of the car and schlep into the house after a long, gray day at the office. ‘That was my answer,’ says Weinthal.

‘We thought the more sophisticated show was important. These people wanted to be entertained. They were watching Stars on Ice.

‘Broadcasting is, in my view, a very noble profession. You’re involved in entertaining people, helping them have a good evening. They bring you into their home. You’re not working to impress the guy in the office next to you, or even yourself, although if you can do that too, great. But it’s not for you. It’s for ordinary people and I’d forgotten that. Briefly.’

His has been no ordinary contribution to the evolution of the Canadian production industry, and for the record, for the legions who have asked, no, he isn’t thinking about retiring.

After 30 years, the 64-year-old Weinthal is thinking about new ctv specialty channels, of making ctv ‘more of an entity’ with other blockbuster programming like the three-part Beatles special the network simulcast last year, and of the sizable ratings he’s willing to bet Gulliver’s Travels will draw in February, ‘although my job is such that I can say that with great confidence and the next day be a monkey.’

So quell any thoughts about retiring. The word is hardly applicable, he concludes.

‘My father told me that if you like what you’re doing, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. I’ve beaten the system. I’ve never worked a day in my life. It’s demanding, constantly forces change, but the whole world crosses my desk.’