CBC Television Series, 1952-1982
by Blaine Allan
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CBC Series Index
R.C.M.P.
Wed 8:00-8:30 p.m., 28 Oct 1959-
Wed 8:30-9:00 p.m., 28 Sep-19 Oct 1960
Mon-Fri 4:00-4:30 p.m., 10 Aug-25 Sep 1964
Sun 6:30-7:00 p.m., 7 Feb-28 Mar 1965
Ottawa's Crawley Films turned out thirty-nine, half-hour episodes in this
contemporary adventure series about the national police force. Both CBC and
BBC television cooperated with Crawley- McConnell to fund the film productions,
which were shot on a new soundstage at Old Chelsea, near Crawley's base in
Ottawa and on location. Aylmer, Quebec and Outlook, Saskatchewan stood in for
the fictional western town of Shamattawa, the centre of the action.
In a period when cops and private eyes purveyed their respective brands of law
and order on U.S. television, the tales of an R.C.M.P. detachment in rural
northern Saskatchewan were considerably more low-key. The situation and
stories that the program concerned did not hinge exclusively on crimes and
their solution. They used the characters' rural isolation, the relations of
the populace to the police and to each other, cultural differences between
whites and natives, and the changing moods of nature to shape their stories.
As continuing focal points for frontier narratives, the R.C.M.P. resembled the
lawmen of the old west who also rode herd over the U.S. airwaves.
The officers in the detachment were Corporal Jacques Gagnier, played by Gilles
Pelletier, Constable Frank Scott, played by John Perkins, and Constable Bill
Mitchell, who was portrayed by Don Francks. A wide selection of character
actors played supporting roles from week to week: Hugh Webster, Jane Mallett,
Murray Westgate, Ed McGibbon, Robert Christie, James Doohan, John Drainie,
Katherine Blake, Michael Kane, and Alfie Scopp. Angus Baptiste, an Algonquin,
and Frances Hyland both appeared on a semi-regular basis.
In some stories, the R.C.M.P. officers served their conventional function as
law officers and investigators of crime. In a segment called The Smiling
People, Gagnier attended a trial of a native woman in the arctic accused of
killing her husband, and in another Mitchell disguised himself as a beatnik (a
part obviously tailored for then-hipster/sometimes jazz singer Don Francks) to
investigate narcotic dealing to teenagers. In others they were implicated in
the story itself. For example, in a segment titled The Accused, written by
George Salverson, Scott faced evidence that he had assaulted a leading citizen
of the town. In another, Gagnier travels to Ottawa for a refresher training
course.
Besides the prolific George Salverson, the writers for the series included
Munroe Scott, Raymond Bowers, and Vincent Tilsey, who had been brought from the
BBC to act as script editor for the series. The music was composed by Bill
McCauley, the musical director for Crawley Films. Episodes were produced and
directed by Bernard Girard, Harry Horner, and George Gorman. The executive
producer was F.R. "Budge" Crawley.
The CBC originally aired the series at a cost of $8,000 per episode, and the
BBC paid $l0,000. The program also appeared on U.S. television on a syndicated
basis, and in the February 1962 issue of Canadian Business, it was touted to
have returned more than a million dollars in foreign sales, to rank as the
country's highest earning television show in the export market.
Sat 4:30-5:00 p.m., Sep 20-
Sat 2:00-2:30 p.m., 29 Nov 1980-11 Jul 1981
Sat 7:00-7:30 p.m., 9 Feb-4 May 1957
Sat 7:00-7:30 p.m., 2 Nov 1957-25 Jan 1958
The first major dramatic series produced on film in Canada, Radisson attracted
inevitable comparisons with Walt Disney's Davy Crockett films, phenomenally
popular in the U.S.A. and Canada when they were first broadcast in 1955. In
fact, the serialized adventures of explorer Pierre Esprit Radisson were
generally thought a response to the Disney series, with all the attendant
merchandising and publicity.
The idea for the series belonged to Monica Clare, the CBC's national organizer
of children's programming. It had arisen in 1954, but waited until the
completion of the national television network two years later. The adventures
of Radisson had also arisen as a prospect in the French language division of
the CBC, and plans went ahead to produce a series with one cast in both French
and English, as the network was doing with the live, studio production, The
Plouffe Family.
The British born John Lucarotti, who had written CBC radio series on Robin Hood
and Marco Polo, was contracted to write the series at a price of three hundred
dollars per half-hour script for the right to run the shows once on each
station in the CBC network. (Rene Normand wrote the French translation.)
Early on, Jacques Godin, a twenty-six year old actor with the Theatre du Nouveau
Monde, was cast as Radisson. Subsequently Rene' Caron signed to play
Groseilliers, Radisson's sidekick, the Buddy Ebsen to Godin's Fess Parker.
Pierre Gauvreau, producer of the Montreal children's program Pinot et
Capucine, agreed to direct the series, which was shot in Montreal studios and
at Ile Perrot, on the St. Lawrence River southwest of Montreal. The series
producer was Yves Bigras, and the director of photography was Denis Mason, for
Omega Productions, a Montreal company responsible for the technical production
of the show.
Shooting started on 20 August 1956, with a scheduled television premiere two
months later. The budget was originally set at $7,000 per episode, but shortly
had to be raised to $l5,000, and the targeted premiere had to be pushed back to
December. The production was plagued with problems: swarms of mosquitoes, St.
Lawrence river traffic that upset the already unsteady birchbark canoes,
airplanes from Dorval airport and trains that regularly disrupted the
authenticity of the seventeenth century period piece, and especially weather,
which stalled production for twenty-three days out of the first month and a
half. As time wore on and winter approached, the costs escalated to an
estimated $25,000 per episode.
When the series finally appeared on television sets in French on 3 February
l957 and in English the following Friday, the 8th, the CBC hoped that the
adventures of Radisson would capture Canadians' attention and imagination, and
advertisers, merchandisers, and John Lucarotti, who licensed the television
character, hoped that those viewers would snap up Radisson gear the way they
had swallowed the Davy Crockett image. Wally Koster, star of Cross Canada Hit
Parade, had recorded the ballad of Radisson on the Spiral label:
Radisson, Radisson,
Canada's courageous pioneer!
Radisson, Radisson,
Lord of the Wilderness,
The man who knew no fear.
With lyrics by the scriptwriter Lucarotti and melody by Johnny Cowell, the song
never caught fire. Toy manufacturers issued a Radisson doll, a Radisson rifle,
a Radisson belt, a Radisson music box, a Radisson buckskin suit, a Radisson
t-shirt, a Radisson board game, and Radisson fur hats, which were actually
leftover Davy Crockett coonskin caps, with the tail pulled off and a white
feather added.
Although the series ran for the full thirty-nine episodes, over two seasons, it
was generally considered incompetent and a flop. Nevertheless the show was
sold to Australian and English television, and to stations in the U.S.A., where
it was retitled Tomahawk.
Fri 9:00-10:00 p.m., 30 Jun-25 Aug 1978
Tue 8:30-9:00 p.m., 11 Sep 1979-1 Apr 1980
The Raes were Cherill and Robbie, a husband and wife vocal duo who starred in
this half-hour of musical variety from the disco period of the 1970s. First a
summer replacement, it returned a year later for a run in the regular season.
The show was taped in front of a studio audience, although it stressed
technical glitz as much as live performance. Jackson Davies and Lally Cadeau
regularly appeared in comedy spots, as the show's studio director and wardrobe
person. The orchestra was led by Tommy Banks, and Jeff Hyslop was the
choreographer for the show, which also featured the James Hibbard Dancers. Ken
Gibson directed the program in Vancouver.
Wed 7:30-8:00 p.m., 12 Jul-30 Aug 1978
Tue 8:30-9:00 p.m., 29 May-3 Jun 1979
Tue 10:30-11:00 p.m., 3 Jun-24 Jun 1980
The Rare Breed, a half-hour show broadcast over three summers, concerned the
modern farmer and other people involved in today's food production. These
profiles stressed the elements of business and economics and up-to-date
scientific practices as well as traditional activities involved in agriculture
and the food industries.
Three of the first five shows concerned cattle and beef. Michael Barnes
produced a segment on Ontario beef producer Ross Procter, and another on
British born Tom Ellison and Roger Saunders and their cattle operation in
Manitoba, and Ray Burley contributed a profile of Jim Burns, owner of the
Anchor X ranch in Cochrane, Alberta. Les Harris produced a film on the threat
to a domestic tomato operation, Don Walker's Canada Choice Tomatoes, and
Michael Barnes produced a third film for the series, a profile of Donald
Ziraldo, the young president of Ontario's Inniskillin Wines.
The second season started with a program on grain production and the failure of
the transportation system to keep up with increased production, and
concentrated on the case of Alberta farmer Ken Beswick. Later programs
profiled the mixed farming of Lyle Vanclief of Belleville, Ontario; the
management skills of Tom Gilchrist, an Alberta rancher; Don James and Ewan
Ferguson, two veterinarians from Campbellford, Ontario; and the Boisjoli Ltee
livestock operation of Drummondville, Quebec.
The Rare Breed was produced by the same unit responsible for Country Canada,
headed by executive producer Neil Andrews. Sandy Cushon hosted both series.
Mon-Fri 5:00-5:30 p.m., 2 Oct 1961-29 Jun 1962
Mon-Fri 5:00-5:30 p.m., 15 Oct 1962-28 Jun 1963
Mon-Fri 5:00-5:30 p.m., 14 Oct 1963-26 Jun 1964
Mon-Fri 4:30-5:00 p.m., 26 Oct 1964-11 Jun 1965
Mon-Fri 4:30-5:00 p.m., 18 Oct 1965-1 Jul 1966
Razzle Dazzle: Howard Presents The Olympics
Mon-Fri 4:30-5:00 p.m., 12-23 Oct 1964
Razzle Dazzle Presents Movie Matinee
Mon-Fri 5:00-5:30 p.m., 1-12 Oct 1962
Razzle Dazzle Presents The Magic Boomerang
Mon-Fri 4:30-5:00 p.m., 28 Sep-9 Oct 1964
Mon-Fri 4:30-5:00 p.m., 14 Jun-25 Jun 1965
Mon-Fri 4:30-5:00 p.m., 27 Sep-15 Oct 1965
Razzle Dazzle With The Forest Rangers
Mon-Fri 5:00-5:30 p.m., 30 Sep-6 Dec 1963
The most esteemed inhabitant of the alley was Howard the Turtle, who sat (if
that's what turtles do) on a pedestal. Sometimes wide-eyed and childlike,
sometimes clownish, sometimes irreverent, often Buddha-like in his serenity,
Howard the Turtle was an icon of Canadian television in the first half of the
l960s. It wasn't that he moved slowly; his shell and his feet, in fact, did
not move at all. However, his neck, his head, his mouth, and his mind were all
very animated. He had a penchant for the worst jokes and puns, called
"groaners" on the show. A performer of remarkable versatility, he changed
characters as easily as changing what he wore on his head or around his neck
(which is basically how he did change character). He was Howard Mellotone,
with the Pick of the Pops from radio station COW, he was Jimmy Fiddle Faddle
with the latest gossip from Hollywood, he reported news of real importance for
the Razzle Dazzle Daily, he was poet Howard I. Threadneedle, he hosted
Howard Handsome's Dance Party with the Razzle Dazzle Dancers, and he was the
impresario of Turtleshell Theatre.
Howard's human companions, the hosts for the first few years of the show's run,
were Al Hamel and Michele Finney. Al, the kiddies' pal, had a healthy wardrobe
of sweaters and slacks, closely cropped hair, and a lot of teeth. A CBC staff
announcer, Hamel was a charter cast member of the leering, late night comedy
show Nightcap, where he was billed as "our smiling Razzle Dazzle reject." He
appeared on both shows in 1963 and 1964, when he finally vacated Razzle Dazzle
Alley. Michele, eleven years old when the show started, just about dared you
to call her perky. Dark haired, always earnest, bright, cheerful, and (yes)
sexy, her resourcefulness seemed to suggest her ambition and independence.
After all, she already had a career on television, and appeared to live among
friends, not in constant reference to her parents. (She even interviewed the
Beatles for the Toronto Daily Star [8 September 1964], p. l8.) She
seemed not to defer to the authority of adults. Although Al was her elder and,
perhaps just because he was male appeared to control the show's agenda, Michele
remained very much his equal. Although still very young and a model with whom
to identify, she was herself a figure of authority in relation to the children
on the set, as well as the kids in the viewing audience. Al was the older
brother whose personality had set, and whose wide Razzle Dazzle smile seemed to
conceal his Nightcap libido. Michele, however, was growing to become a modern
woman. Where Al resembled Eddie Haskell, the adolescent toady of Leave It
to Beaver, then Michele would have grown up to be Mary Richards, the career
woman played by Mary Tyler Moore in the 1970s.
The same relationship held for their successors. In 1964, Ray Bellew, a
younger, oilier man with wavy, dark hair replaced Al, and Trudy Young, a blonde
suburban high school student, as bright and charming as Michele, took over as
co-host. (Trudy later shared the small and big screens with other
anthropomorphized animals, including Arbuckle the Alligator in Alphabet Soup
(q.v.), Art Hindle in Face Off, and Burton Cummings in Melanie.)
Sandy Pollock also worked periodically as a host.
There was also a supporting cast of characters--friendly and not so
friendly--who showed up frequently in the Alley. The most notorious was Percy
Q. Kidpester, played by Ed McNamara. A black-cloaked misanthrope who stepped
out of a Victorian melodrama, his appearances guaranteed boos and hisses from
the kids in the gallery. Only slightly less welcome was Mr. Sharpy, a con man
played by Paul Kligman. In an eternal quest for the riches of "a knuckleful of
nickles," his foolproof scams backfired every time. Joe Murphy played Mr.
Igotit, the local shopkeeper, Don "Ace" Baker appeared regularly to demonstrate
exercises and physical activities for kids (who presumably were watching Razzle
Dazzle instead of playing outside), and dancer Joey Hollingsworth appeared
frequently. The most prolific supporting player, though, was Michael Roth, who
appeared as eight characters in the show, among them the oriental mystic
Mandarin Tee Hee, Bimbo the clown, the English gentleman Lord Faversham, and
the magician Sheik Ali Ben Roth. Other supporting characters included Mendel
Meek, Boomer Foghorn, Hiram Corntassel, the "uncountrified farmer" from
Cucumber Corners, the German inventor Herr Doktor Professor Vee Gates, and
Sherlock House, "the defective detective," and the mailman Johann Sebastian
Bagstrap.
Another important contributor to the show was the cartoonist George Feyer. His
drawings comprised the comic strip adventures of Percy Kidpester, Terwilleger
Topsoil, Daniel the Spaniel, and J. Tipton Teabag.
Viewers participated by mail and telephone in a number of the features on
Razzle Dazzle. They contributed a daily news item or capsule commentary to be
reported on the air. In 1963, the show instituted the Razzle Dazzle Genius
Department, for which kids were encouraged to contribute original plays to be
performed on the show. Fridays meant the Telequiz, a long distance telephone
contest. Most important, however, was the Razzle Dazzle Club, which paid off
with a button and a decoder with which initiates were able to read secret
messages.
A regular feature of the show was the serial, a filmed story told in segments
about five minutes long. One was The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten,
an Australian production about a group of children who started and ran their
own self-sufficient community in a log fort. The Magic Boomerang, another
Australian serial, traced the adventures of Tom, a boy who lived on a sheep
ranch in the outback and who discovered an old boomerang with mystical
properties. Razzle Dazzle also ran the stories of The Forest Rangers (q.v.),
about boys and girls in northern Ontario, in serialized form, prior to the
show's run in half-hour episodes as a series. One year, when the 1962 World
Series threatened to pre-empt the opening shows of the season, Howard, Al, and
Michele introduced a number of silent comedies by Mack Sennett, with such stars
as Ben Turpin and Harry Langdon in a series called Razzle Dazzle Presents Movie
Matinee. Similarly, at the start of the 1964 season, in a series called Howard
Presents The Olympics, Howard and Ray introduced videotaped highlights from the
l964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, with reports from CBC commentators Bob McDevitt,
Steve Douglas, Ted Reynolds, Dave Cruikshank, and Lloyd Robertson, and sports
coverage produced by Don MacPherson.
Sometimes the CBC is guilty of patronizing and condescending to its child
viewers. Among popular CBC programs for children, such shows as The Friendly
Giant and Mr. Dressup, which are amiable and reassuring, have a nurturing
quality. Razzle Dazzle, made for an older, school-age audience, stressed
imagination, inventiveness, and above all fun. It had a level of irony and
self-awareness that made the show watchable by adults. Howard the Turtle--like
his contemporary, Jim Henson's Muppet Kermit the Frog--knew what was what.
The executive producer of Razzle Dazzle was William Davidson. The show's
producers were Neil Andrews (l96l-64), Madrienne McKeown (l96l-63), Sandy
Stewart (l963-64), Brian O'Leary (l963- 64), Ed Mercel (l963-66), and Bill
Glenn (l965-66), and the writers included Ron Krantz, Cliff Braggins, and Don
Baker. The puppets were operated by Linda and John Keogh, who played Howard.
Photo (courtesy of CBC) shows Al Hamel, Michele Finney.
Sat 10:45-11:00 p.m., 16 Oct 1954-30 Apr 1955
This program, with the unlikely pun for a title, featured writers Trent Frayne
and June (Callwood) Frayne, who interviewed sports figures in a set designed to
represent the couple's recreation room. The show followed the Saturday night
hockey broadcast. Starting 26 February 1955 until the end of the season, the
show was known simply as The Fraynes.
Mon 6:00-6:30 p.m., 4 Oct 1965-
Reach For The Top, a half-hour quiz for high school students, was a mainstay of
Canadian television for nearly twenty years. Each week, two teams of four
students squared off in a tournament of knock-down, drag-'em-out battle of team
questions, assigned questions, and the dreaded free-for-all "Snappers" that
ended the round.
The quizmaster reeled off factual questions, drawn from encyclopaedias, on many
areas of study, from the classics to popular culture, from history to
mathematics. Players signalled to the quizmaster that they wished to answer a
question by pressing a button that caused a rude buzzer to sound. Reach For
The Top tested quick reflexes (the trick was to keep your button pressed
halfway down), quick recall (when all else failed, the answer was "Geoffrey
Chaucer"), and grace under pressure (measured by whether or not you vomited
when the red light went on).
In the tradition of CBC game shows, material rewards to the participant
remained pretty slim. Although the home school might receive a set of
encyclopaedias or a $l000 scholarship if the team won a regional championship,
the most the student could hope for was a bronze, silver, or gold lapel pin
that depicted a flame borne by two upturned hands, the likeness of the Reach
For The Top trophy designed by Dora de Pedery Hunt. The program's host each
week instructed viewers to watch for these pins, as they were "the mark of an
outstanding student."
Reach For The Top started as a local broadcast in Vancouver in 196l, and the
format was picked up in 1965 for a local show in Toronto. A year later, it
expanded into a national competition, carried on all CBC regional centres.
Regional tournaments unfolded over the school year, and the program culminated
in national tournaments held each summer in a different city.
The executive producer of Reach For The Top was Sandy Stewart. Toronto
quizmasters included Warren Davis (l965-66), Alex Trebek (l966-73), Jan Tennant
(l973-83), Bob Karstens (l983-84), and Sharon Dunn (l984). The announcer and
host for many years was Bill Paul, and the adjudicator was Dr. Charles Booth,
former Deputy Minister of Education for Ontario. Other quizmasters included
Terry Garner of Vancouver and Bill Guest of Winnipeg, who typically presided
over the national championships.
The program gained considerable popularity, and expanded in form and ambition.
The series included an annual "Battle of the Beaver," which pitted Anglophone
champions against the Francophone winners of the Radio-Canada equivalent, Genie
en herbes. (The quizmaster, Andre Hebert, alternated French and English
questions.) In 1968, Reach For The Top and the BBC's Top Of The Form
collaborated to present an international competition called Trans-World Top
Team (q.v.), which pitted students from Canada and the U.K. against each other.
As the children of the baby boom grew older, so the pool of participants and
their parents, who formed the main part of the show's audience, waned. By the
early 1980s, CBC research determined that the total audience had declined over
a three year period and, furthermore, that the show was not reaching the
audience for which it was intended, with only twelve per cent of the audience
in the eighteen-and-under age bracket and fully fifty-seven per cent fifty-five
years and older.
Ostensibly, the reason for the show's existence was to elevate academics
through competition to a level usually reserved on the secondary school level
for athletics. In other words, it gave the brains and the nerds something to
shoot for and a modicum of respect commanded by the jocks. However, as a
Maclean's reviewer noted in February 1973, the show turned students into "brain
jocks." Furthermore it opened up and exacerbated distinctions and "rivalries
between 'smart' schools and 'dumb' schools which are based on class
distinctions." In the late 1960s, the Montreal Canadiens of Reach For The Top
were the teams from Toronto's Neil McNeil and, to my mind, Ricky Courneyea, an
intensely serious looking, though roly-poly and moon-faced, fellow with a brush
cut, was their Rocket Richard. Despite his blazing recall from the left wing
of the two-tiered set, Courneyea and his teammates, Peter Cassidy, Morris
Power, and Mike Macina yielded the 1968 Toronto championship to Northern
Secondary, probably irreparably shaken by the sight of identical twins Des and
Pat Glynn, as well as their fellows, John Boyce and Wayne Daniels.
I was on Reach For The Top, and somewhere among my memorabilia hides my bronze
lapel pin, my "mark of an outstanding student." My high school, a public
school secreted in the wilds of Etobicoke, barely within the boundaries of
Metropolitan Toronto, was rarely invited to participate, even though Trudy
Young, host of Razzle Dazzle (q.v.) had been an alumna. Disoriented in the
legendary studios of the CBC on an afternoon in early November, we were even
more dizzied to find that we were taping a Christmas broadcast, and that the
set was decked out with plastic holly. We knew that the CBC ignored us, but we
knew that they hated us when we saw that our adversaries were a team from
Associated Hebrew Schools, a private school. We all knew that private schools
invested their students with more pure knowledge, with better knowledge
than we ever got from our teachers. We redoubled our resolve, however. We
quickly learned the trick about the buttons. We cheated (or tried to; we got
caught). We fought like crazy. We were delirious throughout the Snappers,
aware only that the score was close and we were still in the game, despite the
disparities and our own lack of real confidence, both of which we knew to be
absolute, unaware that the contest would end and we would--be tied. No.
Anything but a tiebreaker. I'm having a heart attack. Let Dr. Charles Booth
discover the score is wrong, that they won. Peering over the fake holly,
quizmaster Alex Trebek winds up to pitch the final question. My finger holds
the button a fraction of a micrometer from the point where electrical contact
will cause my name in front of me to light up and my buzzer to fart. They do.
My name. My buzzer. I croak an answer. I am a hero.
We lost the next match. Actually, what happened is that we disputed an answer
and caused such a fuss--nowadays we might say that we raised such a creditable
argument--that, when the game ended with us losing by only five points, the
producer agreed to stage another match. Then we really lost.
The tiebreaking question, by the way, was, "Who wrote The Canterbury
Tales?"
Mon-Fri 1:30-2:00 p.m., 22 May-14 Sep 1973
Actor, comic, and horseracing commentator Michael Magee and his wife Duddie
were the hosts of this weekday, half-hour talk show. Over the summer run of
the series, they chatted informally with non-celebrities, such as a cab driver,
an ambulance driver, and a nightclub bouncer. Bob Weinstein produced the
series in Montreal for Screen Gems and the CBC.
Sun 2:00-4:30 p.m., 31 Jul-8 Aug 1982
To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Canadian television, the CBC
inaugurated a semi-regular series of rebroadcasts from the archives. Host Alex
Barris, whose history as a freelance writer and performer at the CBC stretched
back almost to its beginnings, presided over a curious studio set furnished with
automobile seats. He welcomed and interviewed guests such as actors Frances
Hyland, Tony Van Bridge, Murray Westgate, and Araby Lockhart, producers such as
Mario Prizek and Patrick Watson, and others to comment on their work at the
CBC. They introduced programs, which were shown in their entirety.
On special occasions, producer Athan Katsos combined shows on a single
theme--an Easter broadcast, for example, included Paul Almond's drama The Hill
and the documentary Holy Week in the Pacific. Even thematically coherent shows
reflected the breath of the shows: a Christmas Rear View Mirror included a
Cross Canada Hit Parade, the documentary Christmas on Ile-Aux-Greves from
Telescope, the First Person drama A Matter Of Some Importance, an adaptation of
Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas In Wales, and a full broadcast of This Hour
Has Seven Days, which included a feature on war toys.
Broadcasts included some of the CBC's most renowned and successful
dramas--Flight Into Danger, Galileo, Ivanov--beloved variety, quiz, and
children's programs, such as Don Messer's Jubilee, Front Page Challenge and
Fighting Words, and Razzle Dazzle and Junior Magazine, as well as public
affairs shows and documentaries, such as One More River, Mills Of The Gods, and
Mr. Pearson, Richard Ballentine's profile of the Prime Minister, which was
suppressed from broadcast for several years.
A sustaining broadcast, usually two to three hours in length, after its initial
celebratory run, Rear View Mirror appeared on an irregular basis depending on
the claims of CBC Sports on the Sunday afternoon time slot.
Return to CBC Series Index
REAR VIEW MIRROR
R.C.M.P.
A high-powered, fast-moving half-hour, Razzle Dazzle is still fondly remembered
as required after school viewing for children of the baby boom. Its title
sequence was a rapid montage of images cut to a raucous version of "Tiger Rag,"
and the action took place in Razzle Dazzle Alley, which was populated each day
by a gallery of children bused in daily from Toronto area elementary schools.
