On Oct. 17, 1977, the CBC welcomed a new show to the TV schedule — a tale of political intrigue popularly known as The House on the Hill. Live broadcasting from inside Parliament began that day, and it was the talk of the network.
All the programs in the TV grid below were listed in TV Guide, Toronto-Lake Ontario edition for Oct. 17, 1977. The sole exception is 24 Hours, which was the supper-hour newscast in Regina. The radio grid was reconstructed using the CBC Radio Guide for October 1978; no radio program schedule for 1977 exists in the CBC libraries.
Time
Program
6:00-9:00 am
Information Morning
9:00-12:00 pm
Don Harron’s Morningside: Something's cooking in Parliament
CBC Classics are those CBC programs that have remained in the Canadian memory due to their popularity, quality and sheer longevity.
The CBC in 1977
The year 1977 marked CBC Television's 25th anniversary, and the Mother Corp toasted it with a two-hour special that looked back on a quarter-century of Canadian television. TV Guide was less than congratulatory, saying that CBC Television was doing exactly what it had done 25 years before. "The format of the news is still in the 1950s mould," it editorialized. "(The) variety department keeps trotting out the same old and stale formulas." On the whole, it said, the network was "failing to explore the far horizons of the medium."
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TV Guide wasn't the only critic the CBC faced in 1977. In January, Senator Jean Marchand, a former CBC employee, accused the French network of separatist sympathies. "If this country is ever destroyed, it will be in large measure because of one Crown corporation: Radio-Canada," he said. Cabinet ministers, particularly those from Quebec, agreed and said the French network aired programming that was biased in favour of the Parti Québécois. MPs demanded that CBC President Al Johnson fire separatist employees, but he refused.
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Unsatisfied, Pierre Trudeau called an inquiry to investigate separatist bias at the CBC. The inquiry concluded there were many kinds of bias at the CBC in both the English and French networks.
LINKS
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.
