When to Watch

Fridays at 9 p.m.

9:30 p.m. in Newfoundland & Labrador (Repeat airtimes)

In their quest for stories, the hosts and crews of the fifth estate are constantly traveling, across Canada, the U.S. and around the world. It's an intense life, in which the logistics of scheduling meetings and setting up equipment is complicated by the perils of encountering uncooperative, occasionally menacing, individuals. Crews often find themselves in potentially dangerous fixes. Escaping safely can mean relying on a combination of wits, charm and good luck.

In 1993, host Linden MacIntyre and his crew were driving from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, to Peshawar, a frontier town near the Pakistan border. Along the way they picked up a hitchhiker and by the end of the trip they'd become friendly, sharing cigarettes and snacks with him. As they were dropping him off, though, he drew a gun and began threatening them as a crowd of his friends gathered.

"We've had it," MacIntyre thought, recalling that several western aid workers had been murdered in the same area a month earlier. The hitchhiker knew there was valuable film equipment in the back of the truck and probably assumed that MacIntyre and the crew were carrying plenty of American dollars.

Trying not to panic, MacIntyre distributed Afghani currency as quickly as he could, hoping that would satisfy the mob. Just as he was running out of money, a man appeared and began vigorously arguing with the hitchhiker and his friends, shouting and gesticulating wildly. As he talked, he shoved MacIntyre into the van, slammed the door shut and pounded on it with his fist, a signal to get moving. "I'm not a war correspondent. I don't seek them out," says MacIntyre. "I have been shot at and shelled. But perhaps the most frightening escapade was that drive to Pakistan."

It's sometimes said that we can taste imminent danger. Once, when Adrienne Clarkson (host from 1975-82) and her crew were on assignment in Northern Ireland shooting footage out the window of rented car along Falls Road in Belfast, they were abruptly surrounded by British soldiers who mistakenly thought the camera was a weapon. Clarkson viscerally remembers that moment, an electric tension in the air and a gang of jumpy soldiers pointing guns at her head. "I had a kind of metallic taste in my mouth," Clarkson recalls, "which I think is just the body's reaction to total and utter fear."

Hana Gartner felt that kind of fear not only for her own safety but for that of her baby. She was seven months pregnant when she found herself on the Akwesasne Reserve at a time when there were stories of armed Mohawk Warriors involved in cigarette smuggling and illegal gambling, terrorizing the community.

Gartner and the crew were shooting near their van when a car filled with Mohawks pulled up. A menacing Warrior told Gartner that she should pack up the cameras and leave. As Gartner boldly asked the man some questions, another car filled with Warriors arrived, then a third blocked the van from behind. "My instinct was, excuse me, I have every right to be here," Gartner says with a laugh. "Then I looked at my pregnant belly, looked up these guys, and realized I was really scared."

It's not just the hosts who must deal with uncomfortable situations. Longtime fifth estate camera operator John Griffin points out that it's often the camera crew that's on the front line. "If you see someone throwing a grenade or something like that, it's the person taking the picture who's out there. Everyone else is behind him." Griffin trusts that the crews are seen as non-combatants, providing them some protection. He also thinks that camera operators like himself draw courage from the fact that the camera is between them and the action. (Watch Excerpt )

Many times, however, subjects have become antagonistic, pointed a finger at the camera, and ordered it be turned off. "You have two choices," Griffin explains. "If we're filming so-called "bad guys," and we usually come with the knowledge of who the people are beforehand, it's important to let viewers see their anger and hear what they say, so you don't stop the camera. However, when it's an emotionally charged situation, above and beyond what people are used to, we would turn the camera off. The question is, are they trying to avoid answering questions, and telling us to shut off the camera is their way of getting out of it, or are we intruding too far into someone's privacy?"

Despite their own discomfort on the road, fifth estate hosts and crews can, in the end, go home to the safety of Canada. In the early '90s, Anna Maria Tremonti, then a foreign correspondent with CBC, remembers trying to sleep while staying in a bombed-out hotel, in a room with bullet holes in the walls, in Sarajevo. All night there was the chilling sound of shells and gunfire. "But I had a ticket out," she remembers thinking. "The people I was there to cover didn't have that luxury. The story isn't about us; we have an obligation as journalists to continue to go into places like that and cover the people going through wars like that."

But it isn't all about danger and fear. There are also many funny, often absurd, circumstances that characterize life on the road. While working on a story about the connection between cattle on farms and E.coli contamination, Tremonti was doing a stand-up in a pasture.

Tremonti remembers she kept flubbing her lines, and the cows in the background kept moving around so they weren't always in the shot. As she concentrated on her lines, Tremonti noticed her producer and the crew staring at her wide-eyed. Glancing behind her, she jumped at the sight of a huge cow with its nose nudging against her.

Hana Gartner has been bitten by goats while trying to deliver a stand-up. And in the Falkland Islands, she was surrounded by a huge colony of giant King penguins, who seemed to be embracing her as one of their own.

For a story on the Ahiarmiut (the people of the deer), a nomadic tribe that are among the oldest communities on earth, Gartner flew to the far north, sleeping in a tent on permafrost with no electricity or other amenities.

It was a challenge for a self-confessed urban girl. "I am not a girl scout," Gartner says. "I don't do well in Algonquin Park. I had outfitted myself with a sleeping bag from Eddie Bauer and some equipment that was suitable for a fall sleepover in someone's backyard. The people we were going with met me at the airport, looked at what I'd brought, and just laughed. Someone was kind enough to give me their sleeping bag and some equipment."

Gartner, who admired and liked the extraordinary Ahiarmiut, went hunting with them. After a kill, the hunters would butcher the animal on the spot and carry the pieces back to camp. Gartner found herself carrying viscera with blood dripping down her Eddie Bauer jacket.

Laughing, Gartner says: "On most assignments, after a long day shooting, we end up in a hotel, having a nice dinner. Here I squatted around a fire eating a dead raw fish. It was very difficult for me. I lost a lot of weight on this shoot."