She was one of the first women to produce variety shows on CBC, and for 18 years, she was the program coordinator for Front Page Challenge.
Although she studied several types of dance, she soon began to concentrate on ballet under Boris Volkoff, Betty Oliphant and Gweneth Lloyd; she also took summer classes in New York City.
In 1951, while in New York, she successfully auditioned for the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes and the touring company of Kiss Me Kate, but decided to return to Toronto, where she married her first husband, danced for various open-air productions, and taught ballet for Gweneth Lloyd at the Canadian School of Ballet.
She also met or worked with both established stars such as Duke Ellington—who told her "I'm going to tickle the ivories, then I'm going to tickle you"—as well as then-unknowns like Norman Jewison — at the time the studio director on The Big Revue — singer Robert Goulet, and a young folksinger named Gordon Lightfoot, who told everyone in the CBC cafeteria that he was going to be a star.
Many of the guests provided special challenges backstage: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau playfully tried to pull Thomson on-camera with him during a live show in 1974.
In 1973, this resulted in V.I.P., a nationally televised program hosted by Thomson, where she re-interviewed the special guests from Front Page Challenge at length.
[6] Her guests included Lord Thomson of Fleet, Martha Mitchell—who insisted Thomson search her hotel room for spies, since Mitchell was convinced she was being followed[3] -- Harrison Salisbury, Clare Booth Luce, Sir Edward Heath, Ken Read, Chief Dan George, Buzz Aldrin, Clement Freud, Butterfly McQueen, Anna Russell, June Havoc and Lorne Greene.
In addition to discussion by experts, the four-part program illustrated those issues with excerpts from famous plays performed by well-known Canadian actors.