The series featured notable journalists attempting to guess the recent or old news story with which a hidden guest challenger was linked by asking him or her questions, in much the same manner as the American quiz shows, What's My Line?
[citation needed] Jayne Mansfield appeared on the Tuesday night telecast of 12 December 1961 representing the victories two years earlier of British prime minister Harold Macmillan and his Conservative Party in the 1959 United Kingdom general election.
The CBC archive has two photographs of Mansfield during her 1961 visit to the Toronto television studio where Front Page Challenge always originated during that era, but the videotape of her episode was lost due to wiping.
[citation needed] The show ran for nearly 40 years and featured a remarkably stable cast of panellists, including journalist-historian Pierre Berton, Betty Kennedy (who later become a Canadian senator), Toby Robins (who later became a movie actress) and radio commentator Gordon Sinclair.
[6] Several weeks after its debut, Ottawa Citizen television columnist Bob Blackburn deemed the programme to be noticeably improved and predicted that if that trend continued "and if the program doesn't run dry on its slightly limited subject matter, Front Page Challenge might well become an institution on Canadian TV".
He relates how Toby Robins, a beautiful brunette, donned a blonde wig for a few episodes as an experiment, attracting hate mail including a death threat over the change of appearance.
The program no longer featured internationally known controversial figures to match the likes of Timothy Leary, Indira Gandhi, Menachem Begin (when he was a Knesset member) and William F. Buckley who had held viewers' attention in the 1960s and most of the 1970s.
[citation needed] Producers continued to use the same off-screen narrator,[10] which made the Front Page Challenge footage less appealing to young people than the multiple sound bites featured by CBC Newsworld,[11] which began 24-hour newscasts throughout Canada on 31 July 1989.
Young viewers using remote controls stuck with the multiple sound bites and ignored the Front Page Challenge narrator's summaries of the news stories, according to the book by Alex Barris published in 1999.
[12] As the pace of 1980s news quickened, even before the launch of CBC Newsworld, Fred Davis, Betty Kennedy and Pierre Berton obviously remained mentally sharp enough to follow all of it, but they had not witnessed 99 percent of the events about which they were so curious.
[citation needed] In his second book about the program, Alex Barris tells an anecdote about what guest panellist Bennett Cerf said to challenger Jesse Owens about Adolf Hitler during a 1958 episode.