The As It Happens Files (3 page)

After Dame Barbara came Lord William Deedes, former Member of Parliament and an editor with the
Daily Telegraph,
who recounted a recent trip he’d taken with Diana to Bosnia to campaign against land mines. She listened to the most gruesome stories without flinching, he said, and she never hurried people. When the day’s work was done and she could relax a little, she’d tease him by pretending to offer him a G-and-T and then flourish a bottle of Evian water in front of his nose.

Diana’s brother Charles Spencer said later that the Press had blood on their hands in the matter of Diana’s death, but Lord Deedes said Diana had not been purely the victim of a pack of braying jackals; it was more complicated than that. She had friends among the paparazzi and the writers, and she knew how to use the media to further her own causes. A lot of people blamed the media for Diana’s death, Lord Deedes said, but it was the people themselves who made the market for pictures of Diana. Later in the show, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the
Guardian,
echoed Lord Deedes’s observations.

In that first programme, we also reviewed how the world Press were covering Diana’s death. We talked to two military men about the desirability and possibility of banning land mines, to an Egyptian writer about the potential fall-out from the Dodi Fayed connection and to Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell about Diana as a cultural icon. It felt like a good day’s work.

Needless to say, the Diana story didn’t disappear overnight. Indeed, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Diana’s tragic end will probably live on forever in conspiracy chat rooms. It will also stay in the mind of Dodi’s father, Mohammed al-Fayed, who cannot seem to accept that an employee of his, the chauffeur who’d been drinking that night, may have been responsible for the deaths of the Princess of Wales and his own son.

The weeks following Diana’s death were also the weeks when I was trying to shuck off the training wheels, so to speak. Getting used to the show, getting to know my co-host, Barbara Budd, and the rest. This wasn’t my first crack at hosting
As It Happens.
I’d filled in for my predecessor, Michael Enright, a few times and also for Barbara Frum in the 1970s. But in those days, I had just been dropping in for a brief spot of hosting; now I was in it for the long run—or so I hoped. How would I cope?

Alex Frame, the radio Vice-President who’d appointed me, had a good deal of experience in programming. He was the producer who made Peter Gzowski a star on the radio show
This Country in the Morning.
He then accompanied Peter to the TV talk show
Ninety Minutes Live,
which didn’t fare so well. It was a mistake to take radio Peter—sweet, smart, witty, folksy, funny,
rumpled
Peter—and put him into a button-down collar, Armani suit and hair gel and force him to banter with late-night TV guests who were not, by and large, the types of people who had populated his radio show. People who loved Peter on the radio watched with dismay as the debacle unfolded. The highlight of the year was when the eminent Canadian author Pierre Berton shared an appearance with a food blender and nearly chopped off the end of
his finger. And then there was the night the American writer Hunter S. Thompson, well soaked in scotch or rum and god-knows-what-other drugs, launched into a profane tirade about some corporate villain whose sins were about to be exposed on the CBC’s
fifth estate.

The question for me was, was I going to be one of Frame’s success stories?

“Have fun,” he told me. “Make the show yours.”

But what did that
mean?
And how was I to do that and still preserve the qualities that had attracted such a devoted following to the show over the years? Michael Enright has talked about how terrified he was the first time he was asked to fill in for Barbara Frum—and now I was set to follow Frum
and
Enright? What was I thinking?

At the same time, I felt that
As It Happens
didn’t really belong to me or them or to any one host; it belonged to all of us and also to the army of loyal listeners whose radios came on every evening to the music of Moe Koffman’s “Curried Soul.” So, yes, I would try to make the show mine, but I would also try very hard not to break it. On odd days, that’s what I worried about. On even days, I worried that I’d be too exhausted to make it through the week. But I sensed right from the start that this was going to be the best job I’d ever had. Over the next few months, I talked to Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa about his Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to Max Sisulu, whose father had been in prison with Nelson Mandela, about Mandela’s retiring as Prime Minister. I spoke with American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and scientist Richard Leakey about politics in Kenya and with Colombian President Ernesto Samper about his country’s struggle with drug lords and terrorists. We talked about the plight of women in Afghanistan and about U.N. arms inspectors getting kicked out of Iraq.
It’s interesting to recall that in 1997 Bill Clinton threatened to bomb Iraq if Saddam didn’t start to cooperate with the arms inspectors.

This was also the time of ethnic killings in Kosovo and school killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and then—Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. When I’m feeling smug, I remind myself of the day in early 1998 that a producer first raised the subject of another possible Clinton sex scandal at the morning story meeting.

“Just more unproven allegations,” I sniffed, or something of the like. “Not a story.”

A few days later, Monica’s taped phone conversations became public. President Clinton looked into a TV lens and declared, “I have never had sexual relations with that woman,” and the impeachment train pulled out of the station. To this day, I wonder why he didn’t look into the lens and say, “This is none of your damn business.” Would the story have gone away?

In the event, it didn’t go away, and we spent many hours over the next few years following the twists and turns of the “non-story” that made Bill Clinton the second president in U.S. history to be impeached. This is what we in the media were doing while the storm clouds of 9/11 were gathering; no wonder we didn’t see them coming.

In Canada in early 1998, we were also preoccupied with the ice storm that had toppled power lines and left millions of people freezing in the dark; with the Krever Report on Canada’s tainted blood supply; with the Somalia Inquiry into the treatment of Somalis by Canadian soldiers; with Robert Latimer, imprisoned for euthanizing his severely disabled daughter; with teachers’ strikes, land mines and global warming.
(Yes, we’d heard of it even before Al Gore made the movie.) At an APEC conference in Vancouver, the RCMP fended off protesters with pepper spray and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien made jokes about it.

All this material was leavened with the usual assortment of strange animals, big vegetables, eccentrics and music. Producers George Jamieson, Bob Coates and Brooke Forbes, in particular, were always on the alert for an opportunity to play some jazz, blues or gospel music—often at the passing of some lesser-known guitarist or drummer or singer or arranger. Barbara Budd liked to add her own accompaniment, but she wouldn’t let me sing along, claiming—somewhat cruelly, I thought—that my singing voice was unlistenable and I couldn’t carry a tune. But after being instructed in the art of using exploding paper bags for cannon crashes, we did both play along with Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra one night as they performed Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture.
It wasn’t my fault that my bag didn’t go off at the right moment; it was a defective bag.

The only time I ever got to sing on
As It Happens
was one Hallowe’en night when Barbara was away and we decided to mark the occasion—Hallowe’en, not Barbara’s absence—by playing the 1962 hit “Monster Mash” and talking to the artist, Bobby “Boris” Pickett. When he agreed to perform live on the radio and invited me to join in … well, it would have been rude to refuse, wouldn’t it? Oddly enough, the world did not come to an end.

Goldfish were very popular in my first season at
As It Happens,
especially the Old Goldfish, aged 42, and Sharky the Goldfish, the one who underwent an operation to have a brain tumour removed. Dr. Charles Coleman of Richmond, Washington, told us that when he first saw Sharky, the tumour had grown so big that the fish was swimming upside
down. For the surgery he knocked him out by putting anaesthetic in the water and probing him and monitoring his breathing until he was sure the fish was unconscious. Then he cut out the tumour, cauterized the exposed tissue and—Bob’s your uncle—Sharky was saved. There wasn’t any postop infection either; maybe our people hospitals could take some pointers from the vet.

The most amazing part of the story was that Dr. Coleman’s bill was only one hundred dollars. He was grateful to have had the experience, he said. But the PR didn’t hurt, I guess. When I talked to him again for this book, he told me that his practice was going great guns and he was in the midst of a major expansion, moving into new quarters in Richmond. He also said he was now heavily into holistic medicine for animals: acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy, animal chiropractic. Changing his diet had saved his own life, he claimed, and he was very keen to promote good nutrition for animals.

I asked Dr. Coleman if he’d done any more fish surgery. He said there’d been six more after Sharky, including an angel fish with a tumour.

Sharky himself is no longer with us, alas. He developed another growth on his head about three months after his surgery and died not long after that of a necrotic liver. And if your fish needs an operation, you should know that the price has now gone up to between five and six hundred dollars.

Speaking of animals, some of you may also remember a story from that time about Zippy Chippy the Losingest Racehorse (85 losses and no wins at the time of the interview) and Barney the Dinosaur suing the San Diego Chicken for copyright infringement—not, strictly speaking, an animal story, but so fitting, don’t you think, in that most litigious of countries to the south of us. Then there was the Memphis lawyer who was suing his partner for oinking in the office, or was it
the other way around? It may have been the oinking lawyer who was suing his former partner for unfair dismissal. Either way, it was rib-tickling fun.

And that, of course, reminds me of Bonnie and Clyde, the pigs on the lam.
(Real radio, not ham radio.)
It was the middle of January 1998 when two wild boar saved their bacon by escaping from an abattoir in Malmesbury, England (about 80 miles northwest of Reading). Jeremy Newman, the abattoir’s owner, told us how the pigs had made a break for it when they were being unloaded from a farmer’s truck. They went through a fence, across the road and, with several men in pursuit, piggy-paddled across a river and disappeared into the fields beyond. They were spotted a day or so later, hanging out in someone’s back yard, but by then, Mr. Newman had made up his mind that these pigs had earned their freedom. He wasn’t going after them and neither was the farmer, and that was the right sentiment for residents of the town where Thomas Hobbes was born.