In 1948 radio was in its golden age in North America. But even as the medium experienced unparalleled success, plans for CBC Television were already underway.
The programs and specials represented in the schedule below are drawn from CBC weekend broadcasts — Saturdays and Sundays — in 1948. CBC program guides of that year published in Ontario and British Columbia are the basis for the following grid. Most of the programs listed below were heard on all stations in the CBC Trans-Canada Network or the CBC Dominion Network; Hockey Interview was broadcast on CBM, Montreal's English-language CBC station.
CBC Classics are those CBC programs that have remained in the Canadian memory due to their popularity, quality and sheer longevity.
The CBC in 1948
With the deprivations of the Depression and the Second World War over, Canadians were starting to live the good life again in the late 1940s. New CBC programming kept them listening as transmitters popped up across the country.
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The CBC was producing about 80 per cent of the material it broadcast on its two networks in 1948; 17 per cent came from the United States and Britain, and three per cent from private stations. Programming was becoming more innovative, too, such as CBC Wednesday Night, a weekly three-hour block of highbrow culture: theatre, literature and classical music. CBC chairman A. Davidson Dunton recognized its appeal may have been limited, saying, "More people seem interested in listening to the country music of Holiday Ranch than La Bohème, but we feel that people who like La Bohème should also have the freedom to hear opera, too."
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Even more exciting was the gradual process of bringing television to Canada — a plan championed by Dunton and put into place in 1948 despite a lack of support from the federal government. In March 1949, a new government under Louis St. Laurent appointed a royal commission to inquire into broadcasting: the Massey Commission.
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Topic from Les Archives de Radio-Canada on the same subject
CBC Classics are those CBC programs that have remained in the Canadian memory due to their popularity, quality and sheer longevity.
