The CBC in 1959
The novelty of TV may have worn off, but Canadians are still glued to the tube. By 1959, seven years after television came to Canada, 90 per cent of Canadians can get TV at home.
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At the beginning of the year, the CBC Television network broadcasts for almost nine hours daily on weekdays and Saturdays, and longer on Sundays. A lot of programming fills those hours: the CBC Times magazine of June 13-19, 1959, reports that the network expects to produce about 10,000 TV programs totalling 5,000 hours this year. Radio numbers are even bigger: 50,000 programs across the CBC total 13,000 hours.
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Radio may have given way to TV in most of the nation's living rooms, but it has its defenders. CBC Times of Dec. 27, 1958 to Jan. 2, 1959, notes: "Radio appears now to be more strongly entrenched than ever, occupying other rooms in the house, to say nothing of the radio sets one can find in barns, factories, offices, stores, restaurants, (and) automobiles." Radio is in over 96 per cent of homes in Canada.
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CBC Classics are those CBC programs that have remained in the Canadian memory due to their popularity, quality and sheer longevity.
