CBC-TV is celebrating its 75th anniversary on the air with many a blurb and promotion about its glorious past. You should know that I was part of that past — although my share of glory was on the thin side.

It was 38 years ago that the CBC came calling with the promise that I could be a star. I would host a 90-minute, daily supper-hour news on Montreal TV. No experience necessary. Of course, I agreed instantly and threw off my steady magazine job.

I got a haircut, bought a suit and met the sizable CBC editorial crew — all of them talented. But I should have sensed trouble ahead when our first rehearsal crashed and burned after half an hour and we never had another.

Instead, we opened the season cold, and it soon got colder. That which could go wrong did go wrong. The first newspaper’s TV reviewer wrote that I looked like a surly bear. (Yes, I did. And I still do. I thought it was part of my charm. I was wrong.) Tapes vanished, microphones wouldn’t work, telephone lines went down, guests sometimes couldn’t talk, film ran out of sync.

Many TV people might have trouble picking their worst moments in the medium, but I have many to choose from. There was the time we lost a nine-minute film and I had to talk to the news-hungry audience as if this was a normal part of the show. The time a 22-minute tape oxidized. The time the sports guy came on after an afternoon at the pub and laughed for four-and-a-half minutes. The time the phone was unplugged as I did a live interview on Watergate…

But the day that lives in infamy — and is still spoken of with awe when old TV types gather — is known as the Drapeau Phone-In Show. I was the host and Jean Drapeau, then mayor of Montreal, was the guest. It was an election year and he was keen to talk to the English-speaking audience. And the audience was keen to phone in. Except in 90 minutes live on camera, the phones never worked. Sometimes, we opened a line and got only a busy signal. Sometimes, the audience couldn’t hear the caller. Usually, the mayor couldn’t hear the caller. There was chaos in the studio, and I was starting to babble. At one point, realizing I could hear the caller through my earpiece, I pulled it from my left ear, turned to Drapeau and said, “Stick this in your ear, Mr. Mayor.” Alas, it didn’t work, and things got even worse and also unprintable.

Amazingly, out of the smoking ruin of this 90-minute show came a job offer. I was hired to co-host a Sunday-night national public affairs show. Co-host, write, voice and package. Even more amazingly, some of it seemed to work, although, in the first show, we set out with one premise and ended up with something entirely different.

Compared with the Montreal supper-hour show, everything went smoothly and our executive producer was pleased with the product. Indeed, at the end of the season, he told me about his big plans for next year and the key role I had. For instance, he said, we’ll do a show on oil and we’ll open with you in Saudi Arabia. “Keep in touch,” he said. “Stay by your phone. I’ll be calling.”

I’m still waiting for that call.

 

Footnote: About five years after I left CBC TV and it left me, I received a call from some woman functionary at the CBC, who said she had been looking through the records and I hadn’t done much lately.

“True,” I replied.

“Would I like some TV work?” she asked.

Someone else seems to be doing the national news, I told her, but if she came up with something, I would give it a try.

And shortly thereafter, I found myself sitting in the mock-up of a 1930s German night club with a substantial blonde woman on my lap. I wore a tuxedo and she wore a revealing dress. We were part of the background in a scene from a TV movie that, I think, was called Charlie Grant’s War.

She was heavy. The shoot took four hours. I made $110. That was the end of my TV career.  IE