| Genre | Newsmaker interviews |
|---|---|
| Running time | 90 min. weekdays, 6:30-8:00 P.M. |
| Country | Canada |
| Home station | CBC Radio One |
| Hosts | Carol Off and Jeff Douglas |
| Air dates | 1968 to present |
| Website | www.cbc.ca/asithappens |
| Podcast | www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/asithappens.xml |
As It Happens is a long-running interview show on CBC Radio One in Canada. Its 40th anniversary was celebrated on-air on 18 November 2008. It has been one of the most popular and acclaimed shows on CBC Radio; it is also distributed in the United States by Public Radio International.
The bulk of the program consists of one of the co-hosts, currently Carol Off, conducting telephone interviews with newsmakers and other persons of interest. The other co-host, currently Jeff Douglas, introduces the interviews and other segments, such as "For the Record" recordings of speeches or press conferences, and musical interludes (or as former co-host Barbara Budd often referred to them, "the dance portion of the program").
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The show is broadcast each weekday from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. (half an hour later in Newfoundland) throughout Canada. It used to be widely accessible to much of the northern United States, but as the CBC switched its CBC Radio One from powerful AM signals in Eastern Canadian urban centres to FM stations, it became harder to receive CBC content further away from the border.
As It Happens can be heard on CBC Radio One's channel 159 on Sirius Satellite Radio (in both Canada and the U.S.), on an increasing number of American public radio stations, and on the Internet via streaming audio at the CBC's website.[1] Older broadcasts are available as a stream from the CBC's website, but without the music.
As It Happens is heard on a delayed-broadcast basis in the United States; American stations that carry As It Happens do not air the final half hour (7:30 to 8:00 p.m.) of the program.
During the summer, the program ends at 7:30 and is followed by a half-hour program from the network's schedule of short-run summer series. In the fall of 2009, the show also added a repeat airing at midnight Tuesday morning to Friday morning.
The show was introduced in 1968 as a reverse call-in show: rather than having the public call in, the reporters at As It Happens called newsmakers and pundits for their opinions.
During the 1970s, the program produced 54-minute long segments called "As It Happened, (insert year)", covering the major events of years past, particularly the 1930s and 1940s. During the CBC technicians strike in 1981, after a few weeks of music, the As It Happened segments were played each weeknight in chronological order as repeat filler material until the strike was resolved.
The show has had many notable interviews, including:
The show has also interviewed a wide array of presidents, prime ministers, terrorists, inventors, and authors.
Despite the gravity of many of its stories, As It Happens is also known for being lighthearted and carrying news of the obscure and bizarre. For instance, during the early 1990s there were updates for several years on the battle over a large fibreglass fish that annoyed a neighbour in England. The show opens with humorous synopses of the day's stories, which are followed by a pun based on one of the same. An example is "radio that reads between the Linuses," following a story about baseball stats in the Peanuts comic strip.[2]
Former host Barbara Frum once interviewed Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. Another well-remembered interview was with a hard-of-hearing but imperturbable British farmer who had grown a prize winning giant cabbage. The 1976 interview was conducted by an increasingly frustrated Frum, who could not get the farmer to give any kind of coherent replies to her straightforward questions. It is still occasionally played as an amusing interlude on the show.
After Lloyd Robertson left CBC Television in 1976, the program conducted its own on-air auditions for his replacement as anchor of The National, eventually choosing Robert Stanfield as its nominee.
Barbara Budd and Mary Lou Finlay maintained a recurring debate over whether ABBA's "Dancing Queen" was an appropriate choice of bumper music between interviews, and more recently Budd and Carol Off solicited listener feedback to determine the world's most annoying song. On one occasion when Budd was away on a sick leave that coincided with April Fools' Day, she and Finlay arranged a prank in which Budd gave an interview explaining that she had been given a Canada Council grant to tour the world visiting all the cities whose names she had ever mispronounced on the air.[3]
A frequently cited example of the show's sometimes whimsical sense of humour relates to its frequent references to the UK town of Reading, Berkshire. After almost any lighter news story or interview that emanates from any location in the UK, the As It Happens host will conclude the piece by straight-facedly noting how far the UK location is from Reading, frequently giving the distance in both miles and some other form of strange, non-standard measurement (e.g., 733,000 garden gnomes, lined up hat to hat).
This long-standing tradition on the show dates from the mid-1970s, when English-born segment producer George Somerwill once concluded a program script with a note that a small village mentioned in the preceding segment was located 'nine miles from Reading'.[4] This note, intended as a serious clarification, was totally baffling to most Canadian listeners...and even to the rest of the show's staff. It quickly became a running joke on the show to identify all places in the UK (even major centres like London) in relation to their proximity to the comparatively obscure borough of Reading.
In her book The As It Happens Files, former show host Mary Lou Finlay notes that As It Happens has given a boost not just to Reading's profile, but also to its economy, as in recent years a number of Canadian fans of the show have made a point of visiting Reading when they are visiting the UK.
During the holiday season the show also airs one or more Christmas and Hanukkah themed stories narrated by past or present announcers. Alan Maitland's reading of Frederick Forsyth's The Shepherd is always played on the last show before Christmas Day, and Maitland's reading of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" remains a popular staple of the program, as do Barbara Budd's narrations of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and Aubrey Davis' Bone Button Borscht.
The opening and closing themes — Curried Soul and Koff Drops, respectively — are played by Moe Koffman.
In 2005, the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada honoured Barbara Frum for her time with As It Happens.[5]
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