The As It Happens Files (9 page)

The Russian space programme was an important symbol, but it was also more than a symbol. Obviously, he hoped the programme could be saved. For Sergei Krikalev, at least, the ride was not over. He continued to go into space and was involved in a number of missions with the Americans, including, in 1994, the first joint U.S.-Russian Space Shuttle Mission. The much-decorated (did I mention also charming and handsome?) cosmonaut has spent more time in space than any other person—803 days to date—and is slated to fly again in 2009, although his appointment as Vice-President of the
Energiya Corporation, which now runs the Russian space fleet, may preclude that.

Listening to Chris Hadfield and Julie Payette and Sergei Krikalev talk about their experiences made me realize I was still very much caught up in the romance of space travel after all, but my love affair with the shuttle took another bashing when
Columbia
burned up somewhere over Texas. Texas, George W. Bush’s home state, and just before the invasion of Iraq … the symbolism was haunting. Once again it looked as though the gods were angry and the brave space pilots were somehow being punished for the sins of their commanders on the ground. That’s not just superstition, by the way: dollars spent fighting wars are often dollars that don’t get spent somewhere else, like maybe making space travel safer.

The immediate cause of the disaster had to do with
Columbia
’s heat shield, which had sustained some damage on take-off. One might have imagined that this would set off alarm bells at NASA, but as Roberta Bondar reminded us, such things had happened before without consequences. This might explain why no one thought it necessary to try to find out exactly how much damage the shuttle had sustained. Tragically, it was too much.

Bondar also told us it wasn’t the first re-entry that had gone badly wrong. It had happened to the Russians, she told us—only they had managed to hush it up at the time. In that episode, the cosmonauts knew well in advance that they weren’t going to make it back alive. They radioed their families and said their goodbyes and awaited their awful fate.

Would anyone at NASA have known that
Columbia
wasn’t going to come back in one piece?
I wondered. Roberta Bondar didn’t think so.

Bittersweet radio

This is what the first page of script looks like for a typical
As It Happens
show. We say hello; we play our opening theme (Moe Koffman’s “Curried Soul”); and we read “the bills.” Barbara always gets the last word, and it includes “the tie-off line,” which always includes the word
radio
and refers to one of the lighter stories in our lineup. I’ve no idea how long we’ve been using “radio that …” tie-off lines, but it’s now as much a part of the show’s signature as the theme music, as venerable a tradition as Reading.

But the point I’m making here is that we hosts don’t just make it up as we go along, not when we’re introducing things anyway. We have scripts, scripts need writers—and
As It Happens
has had some of the best writers in the business. Occasionally, they have a bad day. Many of us remember Al Maitland announcing one night in apparent exasperation, “I would like to inform listeners that, although I read this stuff, I do not write it.”

But even that line, I have learned, was written for Al by the show’s writer at the time, George Jamieson. When I joined
As It Happens,
George was the senior producer. He was responsible for writing the bills and tie-off lines, which he did between bouts of consulting with the chase producers, briefing me on dead blues musicians, listening to interviews being taped, keeping tabs on developing stories, making popcorn and watching the webcam located at the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Peter in New Orleans. Except for the webcam part, George had been doing this for as long as anyone could remember; he made it seem easy. In fact, the only time I remember seeing George break into a
sweat was the night we lost Dalet about five minutes before air time.

Dalet was the name of the digital recording and editing system that replaced the old quarter-inch audiotape we’d used since around the time of Alexander Graham Bell, or slightly after. What I found disconcerting about digital recording was that, in my view, it didn’t actually
exist.
There was no nice solid little reel of acetate that you could hold in your hand, cut up, splice back together, carry to a machine and
play.
A digital recording was just a computer file—and we all
know
what happens to computer files.

True to their form, all the radio news computers would occasionally get clogged up or crash or threaten to crash, and everyone would scramble to save what they were working on, but nothing really disastrous happened to us … until the night we lost the whole show just as we were about to go live to the east coast. Happily, I wasn’t the only techno-skeptic on the floor. When we’d switched to digital, Linda Groen, the show’s executive producer at the time, had decreed that until further notice every interview would continue to be recorded on our old tape machines, as well as on the computer. So when Dalet crashed, we had hard versions of all the material we’d collected for the show that day, but none of it was cleaned up or edited or timed or in any way ready for broadcast. And by the way, was there anyone in the room who still knew how to cut tape with a razor?

At times like this, I would just go and sit down in the studio with Barbara; we’d cast a hopeful glance at each other, cross our fingers … and trust in our colleagues “out there” to get us through. The night we lost Dalet, there
were
a couple of people left who knew how to edit tape. Someone threw the first reel on—the interview was perhaps a tad too long—and while it was running, someone
else was cleaning up the next bit, and so we got through it. If memory serves, our digital files were recovered before we hit central Canada, so the show was clean for the rest of the country.

Later, George and Kent Hoffman, our technician at the time, rigged up some sort of back-up system with guitar cables and duct tape to ensure that if the computer in the studio crashed again, they could still play back the show from another computer at the Main Desk. It worked like a charm.

When George decided it was time to move on, the rest of us were dismayed. Not only did he have the writing and journalistic and people skills that made him an ideal senior producer, he was also the show’s memory. When there’s a turnover of producers and hosts, as there often is, it’s important that someone remain who can say, “We did that story last May.” Or when a Big Name dies, “Liz Gray did an interview with her in 1987. Ask Archives to find the tape.” Or in some cases, “Whatever you do, don’t book
him
for an interview. No one can understand a thing he says.”

George had the memory, because his days with
As It Happens
dated back to when the show came out of an old mouse-infested former girls’ school on Jarvis Street in Toronto, where they’d had to gallop up and down stairs to hustle scripts and tapes from the production office to the studio.

Those were the days when you had to enlist the help of a Bell operator to find the number for the newspaper editor you were trying to reach in Katmandu or the FARC spokesman in Colombia. Some operators were very good at it. They probably thought of themselves as part of the production team—and so did the radio people. George recalls that one day when he called Bell to ask for a line to Africa, the operator came
back with, “Isn’t it Mr. Somerwill who usually calls Africa? I hope he’s not ill.”

In the event, the show didn’t crash when George Jamieson left, but it did require two people to take his place. Leith Bishop took on all the responsibilities of senior producer except the writing; that task we entrusted to a skinny, pony-tailed guy called Bob Coates. Bob was in his 30s and had been loping about the place for several years at that point, though so quietly you hardly knew he was there some days, until he started serving up his little gems. Like all good producers, Bob could turn his hand to almost any kind of assignment, but his preference was for music and art and quirky marijuana stories, and he had a talent for finding something amusing in almost any situation. It was when he moved into the writer’s chair at
As It Happens,
however, that Bob really found his stride.

I don’t know where or how Bob learned to write the way he did, but maybe his early exposure to Harlequin romances had something to do with his literary development. Harlequin was where he met fellow producer Greg Kelly in 1989; Bob worked nights and Greg worked the day shift. As Greg recalls …

His sense of humour and his sense of style. Not that Bob found it easy to write the show. No one does; it can be a terrible grind. The writer’s responsible not only for the bills and tie-off lines, but also for all the other scripts in the show, including the introductions. The individual story producers submit drafts, but they often need a lot of rewriting. Former
As It Happens
producer Neil Morrison remembers what it was like to have Bob Coates as a mentor:

Neil was one of the people who filed his scripts early enough for Bob to polish them. There were others who didn’t quite manage to file sometimes until just minutes before the
intros
were due to be read on air by Barbara. So … it’s ten minutes to showtime, the writer’s scrambling to finish the bills and the tie-off line and to make sure the first scripts, at least, have been delivered to the hosts—and maybe the topics aren’t so inspiring that night.

“I need your
intro,
Laurie. Now!”

“You try writing a fresh lead to your 32nd story on mad cow!” Laurie wails.

“DOES ANYONE HAVE A TIE-OFF LINE FOR THE GUY WHO DID THE NOSE JOB ON THE DUCK?”

“Who burnt the popcorn?”

“Has anyone seen Barbara and Mary Lou?”

“Have you checked the smoking room?”

There is no longer a smoking room at the CBC, of course, and Barbara and I have both quit, in spite of our convictions that inspiration—to paraphrase American writer Fran Lebowitz—is coded into the inside of the cigarette paper. Bob found his elsewhere—from staring at a blank computer screen. When he started chuckling quietly to himself, you knew he’d nailed it.

When he wasn’t wrestling with scripts, Bob was still chasing the stories he loved: feature interviews with the glass artist Dale Chihuly when he came to town to open a new exhibit, or with architect Frank Gehry when he agreed to design a winery in the Niagara region. For some reason, these interviews always seemed to be scheduled for a day off, but it was never an issue with me. Bob’s enthusiasm was too persuasive.