Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  Cameron assembled a small team of seven or eight for the new morning show. We occupied three dingy offices in the windowless basement of CFTO, the network’s flagship station in the suburb of Agincourt, well north of downtown Toronto. The lack of daylight and circulating air soon produced sallow complexions and constant colds, but we were eager. Early on we brainstormed possible names: Canada in the Morning was too long; AM Canada might be confusing; Canada AM put the country first and felt just right.

  My editorial staff of four chase producers pulled together seven and a half hours of interviews a week. The working day started at four in the morning, and the show went on air at seven. In the first year, it was a ninety-minute production, ending at eight-thirty; in the second, it went to two full hours. Since we could not start lining up the next day’s guests at such early hours, it was a long shift for everyone on the editorial side. Not everyone had the constitution to endure such a schedule, and staff turnover was brutal. One producer was so miserable and cranky at the prospect of arriving in what seemed the middle of the night that Cameron banished him to days. The subterranean quarters did not help, but comfortable in management’s carpet city a few floors above, Executive Producer Cameron was oblivious.

  We needed stars to attract an audience, and Cameron hired two high-profile co-hosts. Popular weatherman Percy Saltzman was lured away from CBC Toronto, and Carole Taylor, a local personality and show host, was called up from CFTO. Both were expected to draw viewers in the critical Toronto market.

  To the public, Percy was an easygoing yet polished performer in front of a chalkboard weather map, beloved for his signature toss of the chalk at the end of every meteorological report. But Percy was far more than that. He was a serious man, an intellectual in the European Jewish tradition, and as with many of his generation, the injustices of the Depression and the horrors of the Holocaust had deeply affected his outlook. He possessed a deep ethical sensibility combined, at that stage in his life, with a lot of anger. The world was a tussle between good and evil for Percy, and he believed that television could be an instrument for overdue change. At our story meetings he was full of ideas, most of them heavy with social relevance.

  Carole, on the other hand, had an engaging interviewing style that was perfectly matched to the largely female audiences for morning television in those days. Though her entree into television had been the crown in a Miss Toronto beauty pageant, she was nobody’s fool. In her early twenties, she had a sharp, incisive mind, as well as high standards and unvarnished honesty. She also had a perfect understanding of where she wanted to go and what she needed to learn to get there, an attitude that would eventually take her to a highly successful career in British Columbia politics.

  The show was launched on September 11, 1972, and in the early weeks our strategy was to position the much-older Percy as the lead personality and father figure, with Carole acting as his attractive assistant. That script did not last long. The story editors who produced and researched the segments wanted Carole to interview their guests. When these guests began to include political figures and other prominent individuals, Percy rebelled. We had a heated exchange in which I had to remind him that our show was primarily an entertainment vehicle with hard news on the side. He was not anchoring a documentary unit intent on exposing the corruption of government or the crimes of industry, even if that would have suited him better. I tried to persuade him to relax and enjoy himself.

  But to Percy, lightening up meant selling out. One morning he interviewed actor Michael Caine about his role in a justreleased war movie. Percy accused Caine of being a fake: What did a fancy-pants British actor know about war? In fact, Caine had fought in Korea as an infantryman in a London regiment, once engaging in hand-to-hand combat against Chinese mass attacks. He told viewers of being in the skirmish line the day the armistice was signed in Panmunjeom, afraid he might be the last man to die. It was riveting television but showed the risks of Percy’s style.

  During a week the crew spent in Ottawa, Percy also came off second-best in an interview with Pierre Trudeau. He told the prime minister that he was sick of Ottawa politicians fighting like children in a sandbox and suggested they should simply get together and agree to solve the problems of the country. Trudeau countered that, unfortunately, democracy was messy. If Percy could arrange for all those irritating and argumentative people to join one big political party in which everyone agreed on all policies, Trudeau said he would be happy to lead it.

  It became apparent that viewers were tuning in because of Percy but staying because of Carole. The tension between the two grew so great that we had to hold separate story meetings every morning. Decisions over who would handle which guests became a negotiation to test the wisdom of a Solomon. Percy’s irritability was compounded by the fact that he was not an early morning person; as the weeks passed, he arrived at the studio at 4 a.m. looking increasingly haggard and worn. Plus he was carrying a heavy workload, more than a dozen interviews every week. Don Cameron had made the mistake of telling him that he was to make guests earn their airtime—a hard news concept not appropriate for what was essentially a talk show. But Percy took it seriously. He researched every interview meticulously, and then felt deeply frustrated when the time given to his segments was, in his view, too short to develop his subject.

  His wife monitored the show at home with a stopwatch. Every “intro” and “extro,” and every segment, whether Carole’s or Percy’s, was timed to the second. At the end of the show, Percy received a full report and then confronted me. If Carole had been given even a minute or two more camera time, then I was failing to provide them equal exposure. He accused story editors of showing favouritism, steering their interview subjects away from him.

  After a time, he was right to complain. The audiences were responding strongly and positively to Carole, and we decided to shift the weight of hosting duties in her favour. Until then, very few women had been on camera in public affairs program-ming; they were largely confined to the petticoat ghettos of the traditional “women’s page.” We believed we had a potential new star and wanted to make the most of her.

  Though the tensions were kept from the audience, the show blew up in our faces one day only a few months after it began. Percy burst into the cafeteria where Carole was having coffee and, totally without cause, unleashed a verbal tirade at her. Carole’s cool self-composure seemed to upset him all the more. Pale and shaking, he went home, never to return. A doctor later told us he was suffering from exhaustion.

  I blamed Don Cameron and myself for Percy’s failure. We learned what many networks have discovered over the years— that compatibility is everything where co-hosts are involved, and doubly so on morning programs. Workdays that start before dawn are enough to unhinge even seasoned performers. We should have known too that Percy was not flexible enough to share the limelight with someone whose skills he could not learn to respect.

  Canada AM was soon off and running again under Carole and a string of other co-hosts. After a year, she left for W-5, the network’s weekly prime-time news and public affairs show. Norm Perry, another CBC alumnus who had most recently been an investigative reporter and program host at CFTO, eventually became Canada AM ’s long-running host, alongside Helen Hutchinson and others, most notably Pamela Wallin and Valerie Pringle. In my three years as producer and later as deputy director of news, I had to fire only two hosts, both hired on a whim by Cameron. One, a stunning former model, asked on air where Saskatchewan was and referred to London, Ontario’s Stratford Festival. The other was an eccentric Quebecer whose thick accent lost us our audience in the West and whose insistence on a silk shirt open to the navel and gold chain necklace cost us credibility in all parts of the country.

  As Don Cameron and Tom Gould, by then CTV’s vice-president of news, expanded the fledgling news service, I was promoted to assistant director of the unit. The producers of the national news, news specials, Canada AM, and W-5 reported to me. This allowed Cameron to hit the road whenev
er boredom overcame him, as it frequently did, and also relieved him of the blame whenever things went awry, which often happened.

  The news department—the backbone of any broadcasting company—had not yet jelled. The staff of mainly print-based news editors resented the recent CBC arrivals; worse, they knew little about electronic news-gathering techniques or sophisticated production technology, and resisted any attempts at change. We ex-CBC types were sure of ourselves in this arena and more than a little arrogant.

  That confidence did not survive the night of the federal election in October 1972. Once every four or five years, election night broadcasts offer news departments the opportunity to show their stuff. It is the only time a network’s entire news team is pulled together for a single broadcast, a test of on-air talent as well as production and technical skills. The competition between the networks is fierce. That year we were determined to top the CBC in the ratings. Lloyd Robertson was the Corp’s anchor, and we relished the idea of beating our old friend, not to mention challenging the CBC’s standing as the accepted broadcaster of record for major national events like elections.

  CTV invested a small fortune in a massive set at CFTO, then one of the largest television studios in the world. For this high-profile event—the second electoral test of the Trudeau government—Tom Gould hired a computer company to create a state-of-the-art election returns reporting system capable of sifting through millions of pieces of information quickly and accurately. No more waiting for dry returns from Elections Canada. We would have the fastest riding-by-riding results, earlier computer-generated projections of winners and losers, stunning on-air graphics, and even instantaneous candidate profiles. Computer programming was still in its infancy then, and words like gigabyte and download were hardly part of our vocabulary, but the new computer experts assured us the machinery would work.

  Come election night the results poured in smoothly from polling stations in Newfoundland, and we were confidently declaring winners well before the competition. If this kept up, the CBC would be humiliated. But when heavier returns from the Atlantic provinces were received, the system began to falter. The combined returns from Quebec and Ontario swamped it completely and the apparatus crashed before our eyes.

  It was still early in the evening; more than a million people were watching. Even though the early results and projections on the big boards behind the anchor desk had frozen with the computer’s demise, signing off was out of the question. We fell back on the official results from the returning officers, but they dribbled in slowly. What to do? Expediency being the mother of invention, our only recourse was to steal results in the crucial races from the other guys. With CBC Radio coming through my headphones, I crawled under the set’s central desk. From this position out of camera range, I scribbled “elected” and “defeated” results on slips of paper and handed them up to our unflappable anchor, Harvey Kirck. He read the bulletins with great authority, all the while quite aware of the comic scene we made. We became giddy and soon began declaring winners and losers on educated guesswork, though the election itself was no easily predicted romp. Robert Stanfield’s Conservatives succeeded in reducing Trudeau’s Liberals to a minority government. In the contest of the networks, we beat the CBC with the speed of our results at least, but we did it with their own returns.

  There was a more visible public relations disaster not long after. The Toronto Star decided to profile both national newscasts by putting a reporter in each newsroom on the same evening to compare broadcasts. As luck would have it, the night they chose was a big one for political news out of Ottawa, with several stories slated for coverage. At the top of our newscast, the CTV video link out of the capital broke down just as the first item was introduced. It came back only sporadically and at the wrong moments. Each time Harvey introduced an Ottawa item, it failed to materialize. That night he signed off with a deep sigh, “My name is Harvey Kirck. I think.”

  These were pivotal years in the history of the country, and we struggled to build a modern news operation capable of keeping up. The charismatic René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois brought the possibility of Quebec’s separation to the forefront of the national agenda. Trudeau and the Liberals were returned with a majority in 1974, the better to confront Lévesque, but the PQ nonetheless took power in Quebec in 1976. The economy was threatened by rampant inflation, leading to the imposition of wage-and-price controls, and by an OPEC-led hike in oil prices that saw shortages at the gas pumps. At home we deepened our coverage by establishing a large bureau in Montreal and adding reporters in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa. We opened foreign bureaus in London and Washington and, most far-reaching of all, in Beijing and later the Middle East.

  Meantime, the CBC news department was finally turning itself around. The year after I left, they hired a hard-driving no-nonsense newspaperman, Denis Harvey, as chief news editor. He shook up the ranks and succeeded in restoring the Corp to its accustomed place at the top of the nightly TV news ratings. Although we had made significant progress on the editorial side of the ledger, we needed some bold initiative to keep us in the game in the eyes of viewers. Once again Don Cameron had the answer.

  In 1976, Cameron called me in the middle of the night to announce that he had decided to pluck the top news anchor in the country, Lloyd Robertson, out from under the complacent CBC brass. I told him he had been drinking too much, advised him to go back to bed, and hung up to do the same myself.

  Little did I know how unhappy Robertson was at the CBC, chafing under the restrictions imposed on him by myriad union contracts, especially those that governed on-air news readers. There is a famous, probably apocryphal, story that captures the situation. One writer on the news desk was a terrible typist, constantly hitting the wrong keys. He handed a script to a staff announcer in which the words Soviet Union were typed as Soviet Onion. The announcer went on the air and dutifully reported the actions of a Communist vegetable. Viewers complained and the supervisor accosted the reader, incredulous that he should flub the name of a country that was in the news every day. The announcer replied that his job description required him to read the copy exactly as written. The rest was a problem for someone else.

  Not only did the contracts prevent Robertson from writing a word of his own copy, he was not allowed to suggest items for coverage or change the lineup of the stories he presented. Although he knew the country and its leaders better than any of the editors he worked with, his views were not solicited or seriously regarded. Cameron shrewdly offered a deal that would give Robertson a free hand in editorial matters.

  Nonetheless, Robertson was reluctant to walk away from his career at the CBC. It was, he said, like a nun forsaking the convent. He pleaded with his bosses and finally delivered an ultimatum: Change the contracts so journalists and announcers could write as well as read the news, or he would leave. The feckless managers who were then in charge at the corporation made desultory efforts, but the unions were unwilling to relinquish an inch of their jurisdiction. In the face of union resistance, management threw up its hands. No other broadcasting organization would have allowed its top personality to jump ship for an increase in salary that amounted to peanuts in network budget terms.

  The axis of Canadian television tilted with Robertson’s defection from what was then the pre-eminent national news organization to its upstart rival. Robertson brought instant credibility and gravitas to CTV News and everything it produced, enhancing the work of other CBC heavyweights already hired by Cameron, such as senior correspondents Bill Cunningham and Michael Maclear. The editorial product had been greatly improved, but it took Lloyd Robertson’s arrival to draw public attention to our television news service. For the first time, Canadians had a serious alternative to the old grey mare on Jarvis Street.

  Robertson shared the anchoring duties with Harvey Kirck, the face of CTV’s late-night news since 1963. Harvey was a strong anchor with a great gift for copywriting, and a gentle giant who graciously accepted his new sidekick,
even though he must have understood that Robertson was destined to replace him as chief network anchor. To Robertson’s credit, he insisted that Kirck be given a pay raise to his own level. The two worked together in an atmosphere of mutual admiration.

  The duo’s popularity was such that audience share began to slip away from CBC News, a trend that continued for the next thirty-five years. It happened in spite of the fact that CTV often did not have the resources to compete with the CBC’s news service. Then as now, CTV was a commercial broadcaster obliged to show a profit and could not hope to match the publicly funded CBC in the number of its editorial staff or crews. Whereas we typically covered important events with a crew of three, the CBC sent more than a dozen from various branches of their English and French news services.

  Yet we could compete in the personalities we chose to put on-camera. The CBC was notoriously uncomfortable with reporters who might appear to have strong opinions or even forceful personalities of their own. Against their competent but somewhat grey reporters, we put up a cast of interesting and colourful correspondents. One of the best for editorial skill and on-air presence was Henry Champ. He was CTV’s first reporter in Quebec in the mid-sixties and later its bureau chief in Washington and London. Champ spent fifteen years with CTV before moving to NBC News in the United States; most recently, he was Washington correspondent for CBC Newsworld.

  A talented and gutsy reporter, Champ had the good looks of an Errol Flynn with the larger-than-life panache to match. Once, after a northern canoe trip, I was returning home aboard a cruise ship sailing south from Alaska. Out on deck one night I saw a lovely young woman alone at the railing, blonde hair blowing in the breeze. I hastened to introduce myself to the lady, who was an American. When I told her I was a Canadian, she had only one question: “Do you know Henry Champ?”

  In 1972, when the Soviets and the West were still in the grip of the Cold War, we sent Champ to Moscow for the famous Canada-Russia hockey series. After his return, I received a call from a member of the RCMP security service who was eager to interrogate Champ about a relationship he had struck up with a Russian woman. It seemed his companion was a KGB spy. Using such agents to compromise and later blackmail unwary Western men was a common KGB trick. “Hell,” Champ declared, “I was just screwing her—not revealing any of the nation’s secrets.”