Oliver's Twist (10 page)

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 whenever 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.”

Champ was a famously hard worker, but he had a habit of disappearing on assignments, which always worried the news management. After one AWOL episode, Cameron ordered me to fire Champ. Reluctant to do so, I summoned him to a meeting with Cameron and me, at which Champ offered an unexpected alibi: He had never left the office. He was at the table of a week-long poker game in the cavernous basement of the CTV headquarters at CFTO and had been available to the assignment desk at a moment's notice. Cameron docked Champ a week's pay and told him he did not want to see him in his office again. “At these prices, I can't afford to be here,” Champ declared, sweeping out the door.

We were far more seriously concerned, however, when we lost touch with Champ in the chaos surrounding the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Until a few days before North Vietnamese forces had overrun the city, Champ was filing regularly. His sudden silence was ominous; we knew many had died in the final American retreat. There was relief when Associated Press sent out a wire photo of a desperate crowd of Vietnamese trying to board a U.S. embassy bus to the airport. At the door of the bus, struggling to keep the mob at bay, were Henry Champ and a U.S. marine. Champ was fending off a crush of people attempting to climb aboard and likely topple the overloaded vehicle; the scene was frenzied and no doubt dangerous. We had every expectation that Champ had made it.