Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
The As It Happens Files (10 page)
Bob never said so to me, but it must have been painful for him at times to watch me struggle through an interview with an artist whose work he loved—and which I admired
but didn’t really understand. I was more comfortable with politics and science than with the arts stories. Like the other producers, he did his best to brief me, but there’s only so much you can do with me as raw material. I’ve seen Barbara wince at some gaucherie I committed when chatting with an actor or musician. I’m so un-hip that my “secret Santa” one year—Laurie Allan—presented me with her own Idiot’s Guide to Pop Culture. It listed critical facts about such pop icons as Lindsay Lohan, Fantasia, Dr. Phil and Prince—along with their photos.
One day Laurie also provided us with a perfect example of why it’s always good to have people of different vintages on the production team: when the name
Tito
came up in a story, she didn’t connect it with the former President of Yugoslavia, while I had no idea it could also be referring to one of the Jackson Five singers.
Bob, on the other hand, was very hip. His finger was on the pulse of everything that was happening in music and art and design—especially music. He loved blues and bluegrass and jazz and rock, and according to those who might know, he had a finely tuned ear for the best. When he had time to pick music tracks for the show, as well as to produce stories and write, the product sounded very good indeed. With all that talent, he might have been an arrogant shmuck—but he wasn’t. The truly amazing thing about Bob—the reason we all loved him—was that he was invariably patient with us lesser mortals. The only time I saw him angry was when a senior producer was being too hard on a young recruit, but even then he didn’t have it in him to be rude.
We were lucky to have Bob with us, and we knew it. And then our luck ran out.
“I had to go for a biopsy,” he told me one day when we were standing together at the photocopier. “There was a spot on my ear … and I have a swollen gland.” My blood ran cold. Bob looked really worried, and I could understand why. I think I knew at that instant that this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. Still, it was a shock when he called us a week later to tell us that his doctor had just confirmed the bad news: it was a malignant melanoma. A few days after that, Bob’s partner, Karen, was told she had breast cancer.
This can’t be happening,
we thought.
How could this be happening?
And how could we carry on at work as if nothing were happening?
We did carry on, but the programme wasn’t at its peak in those days and no wonder. Everyone’s mind was elsewhere a lot of the time. Everyone wanted to be with Bob and Karen as much as possible, for as much time as Bob and Karen could put up with us. They were very generous with their time, the two of them. They shared almost all the time they had left together with many other people—with Bob’s family and Karen’s family; with Bob’s friends from the CBC and Karen’s friends from Nelvana, where she worked as an animation editor; with other friends from other parts of their lives. They did it as much to make us feel better as for their own distraction, I know. And all the while, Karen was getting radiation and chemo, and Bob was getting radiation and chemo, and both of them were generally feeling pretty damn awful.
Karen, I’m happy to report, recovered from her cancer. Bob died at home on Saturday, November 30, 2002.
Monday morning at
As It Happens,
we turned our attention to the tribute we would air that night. Producer Brooke Forbes offered to go around the building and record goodbyes from
all the people who had worked with Bob. (The memory of this became especially poignant to us not long afterwards when Brooke also died of cancer.) Mark Ulster wrote a script; Barbara and I set down a few thoughts of our own; others resurrected some of Bob’s productions from the archives and selected the music. Actually, Karen picked the music, a song she and Bob both loved: “Rugged Roses,” by a Texas band called the Gourds. It starts like this:
Tell me with yer eyes
In silence let them ring
The precious humming of our hearts
In silence let them sing
May our phantoms find their places
Where ever that may be
Let only the sound of love dear echo endlessly.
The
As It Happens
tribute to a favourite son lasted half an hour. We could have done more but—grieving though we were—we didn’t want to embarrass Bob’s memory by appearing too self-indulgent on the air. The audience reaction told us we’d got it about right. There were no complaints, and many people called and wrote to tell us how moved they had been by the tribute and how grateful they were to have been given an insight into the people behind the scenes—and how much they wished they could have known Bob Coates, since he was obviously a very special person.
Bob Coates set high standards, but I think he’d be pleased to know how hard people have worked to maintain them. Chris Howden and Adam Killick and Robin Smythe all occupied his writer boots when I was there and proved they were as
devoted to words and language and laughter as Bob. Mark Ulster wrote the show for a while, then became its senior producer—an excellent one, by the way. I don’t know which one of them wrote the opening bills I reproduced at the beginning of this chapter, but I love the tie-off line—and I thought you might like to know how that whole philosophy joke thing turned out.
The interview, in June 2005, was with a woman named Christine Tappolet, professor of meta-ethics at the University of Montreal, who had organized a contest for the magazine of the Canadian Philosophical Association. The aim was to find the funniest philosophy joke. She had selected four winners and—just to give you an idea—this was her favourite: QUESTION—
What’s brown and sticky?
ANSWER—A
stick.
“What was the joke?” I asked her.
“That’s it,” she said.
To be fair, the pickings were slim. Dr. Tappolet said that only 18 of the 700 members of the association had responded to her request. The problem was, she told us, “No one reads the bulletin; one of the goals [of the contest] was to beef up the readership.”
But Talkback didn’t let us down. Here are my Top Ten listeners’ submissions for consideration as Best Philosophy Joke:
Q: What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.
—Bob McLeod, Stittsville, Ontario
“Nietzche is dead.”—God.
—on a T-shirt spotted by Linda from Georgetown, Ontario
Q: What’s the difference between a Stoic and a Cynic?
A: A Stoic is what brings the baby, and a Cynic is what you wash him in.
—a Ms. McQuarry from Calgary, Alberta
The funniest philosophy joke in the world? I think it is simply this: “Define your terms” as the response to any philosophical question.
—Tom Norris, Vancouver, British Columbia
Q: How do you get a philosopher off your porch?
A: Pay for the pizza.
—Dave from Ottawa, Ontario
René Descartes is sitting in a bar, and the bartender says, “Last call, René. You want another one?” Descartes says, “I think not”—and disappears.
—David Gearlock, Frankfurt, Kentucky
Q: What do you get when you cross a dyslexic agnostic with an insomniac?
A: Somebody who stays up all night wondering if there is a dog.
—Stewart Dudley, North Gower, Ontario
Did you hear the one about the philosophy student who declined an invitation to a brothel in order to study for his finals? He wanted to put Descartes before the whores.
—Ian Bowater, Los Angeles, California
Did you hear about the student who left a note on the kitchen table? “Gone to philosophy class; your dinner doesn’t exist.”
—Jill McCabe
“If a tree falls in the forest”—shit, I screwed it up. The joke goes, “If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?”
—this version called in by Duncan Thompson from McLean, Virginia
I think I hear Bob laughing.
The Man in the Bear Suit
Radio with all the grizzly details
I’m not sure just when or why Troy Hurtubise decided to dedicate his life to making a bear-proof suit, but he’s been at it for quite a while and has acquired an international reputation for eccentricity. He’s also acquired an Ig Nobel prize at Harvard and attracted a fair amount of investment capital over the years. When I first spoke to him in November 2001, he was about to test the Ursus Mark VI bear-proof suit, i.e., a suit that he could wear for a date with a very large bear—a grizzly, say, or even a Kodiak, which is a brown bear the size of a polar bear.
ML: Mr. Hurtubise, you have your suit all pressed and polished and ready to go, have you?
TH: Suit’s all prepped and everything, yes.
ML: Now, how are you going to meet your challenger? Are you just going to pour honey over it and stand in the woods or what?
TH: No, I’ll basically just stand there and the handler will say, “Go at the suit,” and the bear will go at the suit.
ML: What handler? Where are you going?
TH: I’ll be going to British Columbia, and the attack itself will be a controlled attack.
ML: Oh, it will.
TH: Oh, absolutely. Getting in close to grizzly bears in the wild, doing research alone, is hard enough, never mind counting on the bear attacking to see if, in fact, the suit would work if things went awry.
ML: So you’re going to be attacked by a
tame
bear?
TH: Yes. A
1,300
-pound Kodiak.
ML: And what kind of a test is that?
TH: It’s a test that could kill you if it doesn’t work.
ML: Okay.
TH: You’ve got
1,300
pounds,
10
feet, real claws, real teeth—real power. So basically, the suit’s a toy to the bear.
ML: Okay.
TH: And when he’s told to go at the suit, it will rip apart the suit. I’ve no illusions that the outside skeleton will [not] be ripped apart, which is the rubber base that holds the electronics in place. That’ll be completely ripped apart.
ML: What are you saying? You think it will be ripped apart?
TH: Oh, the outside of the suit—absolutely. He’ll make his way to the titanium and then that’s, of course, what’ll stop him. I’m not so much worried about the claws and the teeth as I am about the power. Basically, what I wanted for
15
years is [to see]: could the suit withstand that kind of force? I mean, I’ve tried against trucks and everything imaginable to man, but never against the power.
ML: The weight and power.
TH: No, not so much the weight. I mean, we’ve done
3
-ton pick-up trucks at
35
kilometres an hour, and that’s not a problem.
…
ML: What did it feel like—getting hit by the truck?
TH: Oh, I guess the equivalent of being in an inner tube. You know, rolling-down-the-hill type of thing, maybe hit a tree.… You know you were hit only because you hit the ground, because you left the ground and flew back 50,
6O
feet.…
ML: So how will you signal if you’re in some distress?
TH: Well, that’s basically a voice command. And if he’s knocked the wind out of me, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do about that. I mean if I can’t talk, there’s no way the handler’s going to be able to know. He can’t get face signals, because I’m enclosed in a titanium shield.
ML: Yes.… Do you not think the bear might just be scared out of his wits and run in the other direction … when he has a look at you?
TH: You’ve hit it on the head. In all the research that I’ve done with grizzly bears—you know, winter den studies and testing the deterrent sprays and that—you’re right: a wild bear might, possibly, nine out of ten times, look and say,
That’s a formidable thing in front of me, and I don’t like what I’m looking at
—and actually take off.
ML: Of course, it
works
that way. I mean, if that’s what happens, if that’s how you protect yourself, it works—right?
TH: Yeah. So when you’re talking about a controlled attack, where you have a handler, the bear will do what the handler says, so I don’t have to worry about the Kodiak looking at me and saying,
I don’t want to play with you.
ML: Now, Mr. Hurtubise, I sort of forget why you started this. I mean, why would a can of Mace not do the trick if you’re trying to protect yourself against a bear?
TH: Well, that’s why I originally built the suit. I tested deterrent sprays under actual field conditions. I’m the only one able to do it in the world for companies that market it to the public … who are told that, if you’re in the backcountry and things go awry, just simply spray the bear and it goes away. Well, that’s a fallacy, of course … But to test that, you’d actually have to do it against a grizzly bear. Well, nobody could do it, because if it doesn’t work, you’re going to get killed.
ML: Yeah.
TH: So they come to me and I have this suit. And I start out with black bears—I don’t wear a suit with black bears. You don’t need it. It’s a totally different species. And then you move your way up to grizzly bears. And I’m able to say whether it works or not, and of course, it wouldn’t stop a dog, let alone an enraged grizzly.
ML: So it’s not as though your life will be totally without purpose if you meet the bear challenge coming up.
TH: Oh no. We’re already into the next suit. My whole point is, after all these years, I would like to know—though I tested it against everything man can throw at me—would it have survived what a grizzly can do? And now I have the chance, a safety-controlled chance, and I’m more than happy to do it.
