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Shortly
after Peter Herrndorf was appointed head of current affairs
for CBC television, he developed a blueprint for a program with a working
title of "The Current Affairs Magazine." Working with executive
producer Glen Sarty, the goal was to produce a showcase current affairs
show "whose journalism is distinguished, professional, aggressive,
candid and iconoclastic." The show's content was not going
to be driven by the headlines, like most TV newsmagazines of the era,
and would be devoted to investigative journalism. To this end, a team
of the top investigative journalists in the country were hired, among
them Brian McKenna and John Zaritsky.
One of the most original aspects
of the show, introduced by a producer named Bill Cran, turned the camera
on the host and crew as they pursued the story. This pioneering approach
provided visually dramatic storytelling and was adopted by documentary
television producers around the world and has become a convention in
broadcast journalism. Another innovation, not commonly done on television
at the time, was frequently devoting the entire hour-long show to a
full-length documentary, which resulted in many memorable shows, among
them Zaritsky's Academy Award winning Just Another Missing
Kid.
"There was a wild rush to get the show done," recalls Adrienne Clarkson, who along with Warner Troyer and Peter Reilly were the program's first hosts. "Until about three weeks before we went to air we didn't even have a name. We were all canvassing each other as to what the thing should be called." Today, several people believe they came up with the title, the fifth estate. Historically the first three estates were the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. In the 19th century, the press became known as the fourth estate. An English writer is credited with first referring to radio as "the fifth estate," a term that was later expanded to include television. Today it commonly refers to the electronic media, but in the mid-1970s most Canadians wouldn't have known what it meant. Aside from feeling as though they were popularizing a term, Herrndorf points out that an unfamiliar title had its own advantages. "We thought, if people didn't understand what 'the fifth estate' meant, that was okay," says Herrndorf. "If the program was going to be as successful as we thought it would be, the title would come to mean the kind of quality programming they saw on the show."
"I think those first two years were the most demanding of my professional life," says Clarkson, who remembers barely having time to get her laundry done before she'd be on the road again. Describing a typical schedule, she says: "I once spent ten days interviewing the Shah in Iran, then rushed back to Europe to finish another piece before coming back to Toronto to package the show."