The CBC celebrates 50 years of broadcasting television to Canadians this September. It’s been an exciting history, full of controversy and triumph. As the nation’s public broadcaster it’s covered every major event from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth to the shocking drama of 9/11. Canadians saw Pierre Trudeau say ‘Just watch me’ to a CBC reporter, then call the troops into Quebec. Dief ‘the Chief,’ ‘Mike’ Pearson, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien have all trod the boards of our national stage, to be captured at the time and for posterity by CBC cameras.

Generations have grown up with the popular icons of the CBC. As children, they’ve seen Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant and Kids of Degrassi Street. Those who love comedy can recall with fondness the antics of Wayne and Shuster and latterly the more caustic sensibilities of CODCO, Rick Mercer and Kids in the Hall.

Aficionados of drama have been able to see a range of great actors over the years, from Barry Morse, Kate Reid and Don Harron to John Vernon and Gordon Pinsent to the stars of Street Legal and North of 60.

For country and pop fans, the names of Don Messer, Tommy Hunter, ‘our pet’ Juliette, Rene Simard and Rita MacNeil surely bring a smile in recognition of musicians who could deliver simple, flavorful tunes to a loving crowd.

And those who love high culture will never forget Karen Kain and Veronica Tennant dancing with Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev.

Sports has been a hallmark of the CBC over the years. Hockey Night In Canada has been around for all five decades and the Canadian public broadcaster has been on hand to broadcast the Olympics since 1954. The great staple of the CBC had been journalism. What other station has created more stars out of their anchors, interviewers and correspondents? From Adrienne Clarkson to Patrick Watson, from Barbara Frum to Knowlton Nash and from David Suzuki to Peter Mansbridge, the CBC has been exemplary in its presentation of hard news and documentaries.

But being a public broadcaster hasn’t been easy, particularly in recent times as budget cuts and harsh criticism have all but leveled the CBC. It’s interesting, and instructive, to look back at the past 50 years and see where Canada’s first national network has been and what it has accomplished.

The fifties

…Showtime, The Big Revue, Maggie Muggins, The Plouffe Family, Cross-Country Hit Parade, Juliette, Tabloid, Front Page Challenge…

It all started with a puppet and an upside-down logo. No one remembers the name of the technician who decided to polish the CBC logo seconds before the first broadcast in September 1952. With others shouting for him to stop, he managed to clean the logo, and turn it upside down. Too late to change things, the camera’s impassive eye registered the symbol of our national broadcaster, doing the first 180-degree turn in its history.

The camera then moved to Uncle Chichimus, an overweight puppet who provided the network’s first intentional comic relief. Along with his niece Holly Hock and Percy Saltzman, a real live weatherman whose shtick was to catch a piece of chalk thrown in the air after he made a forecast, they introduced the evening’s proceedings.

First up was News Magazine, a current affairs show. Harry Rasky, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, was then the show’s reporter. His main story was on the Boyd gang, Canada’s most notorious bank robbers. Rasky had no footage of the gang so he staged a scene with policemen jumping on motorcycles and pandemonium erupting in Toronto. The next day, he was astonished when people stopped on the street to praise him.

‘We were all young then,’ comments Rasky, ‘Most of us were in our twenties. But we quickly realized that television could be very important.’

After the news, ‘there was a kind of party,’ says Don Harron, who was introduced to the viewing audience as an ‘important star.’ Improvising quickly, he put on elements of the costume that transformed him from a sophisticated young man into a lovable middle-aged Ontario farmer. It wasn’t until the next week, on the CBC variety show The Big Revue, that he began to call his alter ego Charlie Farquharson.

‘I borrowed Norman Jewison’s hat,’ Harron recalls. ‘He was the floor director for the show and I’d known him since college. It happened to be his father’s hat. And Norman Campbell was around the set. He’d been directing Uncle Chichimus earlier and he was wearing a sweater that he wore off-duty during World War II. I borrowed both of those items and promised to return them in the following week. I never did. A museum’s got them now. Rasky had done an item on the Boyd gang, so I said, ‘They tell me that a bunch of banks have been robbed in Toronto by outside parties. That makes a change.”

During that first year, Harron was ubiquitous. He wrote a number of episodes of Sunshine Sketches, acted in numerous one-off dramas and guested on The Big Revue. The star of Sunshine Sketches, a comedy based on stories by Stephen Leacock, was a young Timothy Findley, who acted for years before he became a novelist. Another major star for the CBC then was Barry Morse, later to become famous in the States for his ongoing role as the implacable detective hunting down ‘The Fugitive.’

The ’50s was a great time to be working at the CBC. No rules had been established so producers, writers and actors could come up with a new idea and speedily find it accepted by management. It was the heyday for original televised dramas. Anthology shows like General Motors Theatre, Folio and First Performance aired new works by such young Canadian writers as Donald Jack, Bernard Slade and Arthur Hailey.

The Plouffe Family dramatized the lives of a typical Quebec family to millions of English Canadians. Variety shows like Cross Country Hit Parade animated the pop charts for millions of viewers. If you didn’t want to hear Robert Goulet sing another show tune there was a chance that Glenn Gould might appear in a documentary special, playing Bach brilliantly.

The innovative young producer Ross McLean ushered in an era in broadcast journalism with a ‘new variety show’ called Tabloid.

The CBC had no competition. No station could exist without its approval. Astonishingly, until the Fowler Commission recommended against it, the network held regulatory control over broadcasting. And the CBC had truly become a network: in 1958, it broadcast live from British Columbia to Nova Scotia for the first time, then an astonishing technical feat. Even if the logo had been upside down for a moment, everything was right side up for the CBC back then.

The sixties

…The Wayne & Shuster Hour, The Littlest Hobo, Don Messer’s Jubilee, This Hour Has Seven Days, Quentin Durgens M.P., Wojeck…

The ’60s was a time of great tumult and upheaval. Society was changing rapidly. The first post-war generation was growing up, eager to rattle the chains of anything that seemed to be hidebound and conservative. Canada celebrated its centennial with the best party the nation ever threw, at Montreal’s Expo 67. It was a decade that started with the curmudgeonly presence of John Diefenbaker in federal office and ended with the bold, fashionable Pierre Trudeau dominating the political scene.

The CBC mirrored that time. The network was a mass of contradictions. Don Messer’s Jubilee, a musical revue starring a group of resolutely unfashionable Maritimers, regularly drew three million viewers to the CBC. Despite its huge rural appeal, the network killed it in 1969, in a desperate search for a youthful audience.

Another performance-oriented show, Festival, went for the opposite audience to Messer. Over the course of a decade, it featured the National Ballet of Canada dancing Giselle, the Stratford Festival’s production of HMS Pinafore and a documentary on Yehudi Menuhin. Yet it, too, was cancelled at the decade’s end, though without the massive protests heard over the demise of Messer’s show.

Two of the CBC’s finest dramatic series were launched, praised and wrapped during the ’60s. Quentin Durgens M.P. starred the multitalented Gordon Pinsent as a young idealistic politician who abandoned his law career to replace his father as a federal politician. A tough-minded series, it showed that the naive Quentin could barely deal with the hypocritical behavior of lobbyists and his fellow members on the hill.

John Vernon, as strong a male lead as Pinsent, starred as Wojeck, the fighting investigative coroner in the CBC’s other major hit. Based on the career of Dr. Morton Shulman, Wojeck tackled important issues like drug abuse, aboriginal rights and police brutality. Its gritty style matched the ’60s, but the series ran out of steam after two years and Vernon departed to a career as a character actor in Hollywood.

The big program of the era, and the one that enmeshed the CBC in controversy for years, was This Hour Has Seven Days. Producers Douglas Leiterman and Patrick Watson had spent years preparing for this show, which was a combination of hard-hitting news, investigative journalism, satire, interviews and music. At first cohosted by John Drainie and Laurier LaPierre, it acquired an even tougher critical edge when Watson replaced the fatally ill Drainie for a second season.

This crusading show took on hidebound reactionaries, wherever they were. That meant trying to make Ku Klux Klan members shake hands with a black minister; it also meant that they had to take on the management at the CBC. Their insubordination over many issues had become quite well known both to the public and inside the organization.

‘By then,’ recalls Watson, ‘we had the biggest audience of anything on the service except Don Messer’s Jubilee, so we just effectively told them to go screw themselves. We were pretty arrogant, I’m afraid.

‘The thing came to a head as we were preparing for the second season. For the upcoming federal election we proposed to have a telephone on the desk – and remember the shows were truly live in those days – and challenge the four party leaders (Pearson, Diefenbaker, Tommy Douglas and Real Caouette) to phone us, there and then, while the show was running, and agree to come on the hot seat with LaPierre. And management said, ‘You can’t do that because it would be interfering in the electoral process.’ We said, ‘Look, we’re going to make the phone calls anyway from our offices. So what’s the difference?’ They refused, so we said, ‘OK, if you stick to that, we’re pulling the show off the air.’ They caved in.

‘At the celebratory party where we all gathered around with our glasses, chortling how we’d pulled it off, our supervisor Reeves Haggan raised a toast to us and said, ‘I just want you to know one thing. You never win an ultimatum against the management and they will have their pound of flesh.”

They did. After the second season, and despite having garnered audiences that numbered in the millions each week, This Hour Has Seven Days was canceled.

The seventies

…King of Kensington, For the Record, Beachcombers, The Tommy Hunter Show, the fifth estate, Sesame Street, Rene Simard…

The media world in Canada had begun to change. A new regulatory and licensing body, recommended by the second Fowler Committee on Broadcasting, had been created in the late ’60s. The CRTC established Canadian content regulations (60% overall) and issued licences to the CBC for the first time in 1970.

CTV, established since 1961, was joined in the private broadcasting sector by the Global Network in 1974.

A chastened CBC, still struggling with its confidence after being attacked by very different sectors of Canada for the cancellations of This Hour Has Seven Days and Don Messer’s Jubilee, had to adjust to no longer being the only game in town.

Still, the CBC had more than its share of successes during the decade. King of Kensington was that unique thing, a truly original sitcom. Al Waxman was never better than as Larry King, the proprietor of a variety store in Toronto’s very ethnic Kensington Market. This genuinely warm and funny show sported a fine group of characters, including Fiona Reid as his wife Cathy and Helene Winston as his mother. With its ensemble cast and emphasis on the virtues of a community, this was the quintessential Canadian comedy.

Under the stewardship of Peter Herrndorf, then the recently appointed head of current affairs, the fifth estate quickly established itself as a superb show dedicated to investigative journalism. Hosts Adrienne Clarkson, Warner Troyer and Peter Reilly set a tough but entertaining tone that helped to garner the show an intensely loyal viewership. With the fifth estate as its spearhead, current affairs became what Herrndorf wanted, ‘a very strong, very hot department.’

While dramatic series came and went on the CBC, producer Ralph Thomas came up with a great concept. Why not combine the Canadian love of documentary with dramas? The result, For the Record, became one of the finest programs ever produced on the CBC.

The shows dealt with such important topics as government corruption, date rape and wife assault. Although some programs did become overly didactic, quite a number were artful, moving dramas. The list of contributing writers and directors for the series reads like a who’s who of fine talent in this country. Among them were Claude Jutra, Allan King, Rick Salutin, Anne Cameron, Francis Mankiewicz and Donald Brittain.

This is one series that deserves to be rebroadcast on CBC or, if it is deemed properly educative, Newsworld.

The eighties

…The Journal, Kids of Degrassi Street, Seeing Things, Street Legal, The Racoons, Love and Hate, Joshua Then and Now…

Governmental initiatives reflected the growth of the private sector. The Canadian Film Development Corporation (latterly Telefilm Canada), gave money to independent producers eager to make work in the cinema or for broadcast. Smaller, local stations like Citytv, run by former CBC journalist Moses Znaimer, began to make an impact on viewers and critics. Increasingly, and particularly for drama, the CBC found itself coproducing specials, series and MOWs.

The content on the CBC began to feel old to many Canadians. Hockey Night in Canada and The Nature of Things were still lively institutions, but what about Beachcombers and Front Page Challenge? In order to remain fiscally responsible, then president Pierre Juneau’s team began to bring in more ads and more U.S. fare. The identity of the CBC began to slip away.

There was one major exception to this drift. In 1982, at the instigation of Herndorf, the daily hard news show The National was boldly moved down to 10 p.m. from 11p.m. Combining it with a superb magazine-oriented show, The Journal, the CBC reaffirmed itself as a public network devoted to broadcasting the news of the world to Canada.

‘Our sense was that there was a real appetite for people to get news much earlier – an hour earlier – and that the 11 o’clock news was simply too late for a lot of people,’ recalls Herrndorf, who ascribes his motivation and those of such colleagues as Mark Starowicz, Tony Burman and Knowlton Nash to a ‘combination of wanting to have the CBC come back to a time and place where it was must-see television for the Canadian public, an ability to capture changing habits and changing trends and the desire to create a national stage on which the great events could be played out. Once again, we would be must-watch television.’

The CBC broadcast some lively dramas during this period, most notably the quirky Seeing Things, about a clairvoyant reporter, and Street Legal, a sexy and melodramatic look at a law firm. Both shows featured charismatic performers – Louis Del Grande in Seeing Things and Albert Schultz, Maria del Mar, Cynthia Dale, Eric Peterson and Sonja Smits in Street Legal stood out as top TV talent.

Responding in part to pressures from the CRTC and opportunities from the CFDC, the CBC began to make miniseries and MOWs. Joshua Then and Now and Love and Hate featured fine performances and were extremely well written by, respectively, Mordecai Richler and Suzette Couture. The only problem was – couldn’t these shows have been broadcast as easily on Global or CTV?

The nineties

…Road to Avonlea, Witness, Adrienne Clarkson Presents, The Valour and the Horror, Kids in the Hall, This Hour Has 22 Minutes…

Although good Canadians aren’t supposed to outdo the Royal Family, the CBC more than one-upped the Queen in the ’90s. She had her annus horribilis; Canada’s public broadcaster had a decade filled with enough horror to match a Stephen King novel.

First off, there was the controversy around The Valour and the Horror itself. A three-part documentary about Allied activity during World War II, it upset veterans’ organizations so much that the filmmakers, the McKenna brothers, were sued for libel. The Senate investigated charges that the films deliberately misrepresented Canadian war heroes.

As the broadcaster, the CBC was placed in a terrible position. Should it stand by the filmmakers or abandon them due to public outcry? Ironically, The Valour and the Horror won the Gemini for best documentary series while the public broadcaster was backpedaling over its commitment to the work.

Secondly, Watson unceremoniously retired as chair of the CBC in early 1994, months before he was due to step down. The brilliant broadcast journalist had been terribly unsuccessful as a high management official. Though circumstances clearly had worked against him, he noted at the time, ‘My colleagues thought I could reverse the law of gravity.’ Watson then spent the rest of the decade attacking the CBC for its failure to live up to its mandate as a public broadcaster.

Thirdly, what had Watson been up against? The federal allocation to the CBC was cut by $200 million per annum between 1994/95 and 1998/99.

Here’s what famed film director Daryl Duke (Payday, The Thorn Birds) said, in part, to the CRTC in 1999: ‘The CBC has been powerless to avoid being thrown into the flames for at the heart of its continuing problem were acts of political betrayal – the appointment of men who by their very nature and talent were incapable of giving the CBC what it needed most…vision, a sense of the nuances of our nation, a knowledge of our multi-cultural reality. These men, once appointed could only undermine what we needed most in this country – a leader in the realm of ideas whose care for artistic integrity was personal and profound.

‘Who but a Borgia would appoint Gerrard Veilleux, an accountant from the Treasury Department, to be president of the CBC? Mulroney did. Who but a Machiavelli would put Perrin Beatty at the head of our most precious cultural institution? Jean Chretien did. Beatty was the man who was on the very Mulroney cabinet which began the massive cuts to the CBC.’

Despite it all, the CBC continued to broadcast some excellent fare. Adrienne Clarkson presented some fine arts documentaries; The Road to Avonlea was a lovely adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s work; Witness became the best program for broadcasting independent docs.

Of them all, the one show that stands out is This Hour has 22 Minutes. Harkening back to the cheekiness of Watson and company, this East Coast satirical newscast combined comedy and politics in a potent blend. It was uniquely Canadian and very – well – CBC.

The zeros

…ZeD, CBC News: Sunday, Disclosure, Made in Canada, Opening Night, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Trudeau, Canada: A People’s History…

It’s the zeros and the CBC is looking up. A new management team has come in and the venerable network is being transformed. In its quest for new creativity, there’s a crazy new show called ZeD.

On their opening night, it’s like a party. There’s music and things are a bit chaotic. Everyone is young – in their twenties. The host asks viewers to e-mail in their responses to the show and the CBC. The first electronic missive coming in transforms the logo. Against that familiar CBC backdrop, there’s an injunction. ‘Under no circumstances will we allow your brain to flat line. Failure is not an option.’

Fifty years later and anonymous Canadians are still playing with that logo! Has the CBC gone full circle?