This Hour Has Seven Days was a CBC Television public affairs program that ran from 1964 to 1966, offering viewers in-depth analysis of the major social and political stories of the previous week.
[1][2] The show, inspired by the BBC and NBC-TV satire series That Was the Week That Was, was created by Patrick Watson and Douglas Leiterman as an avenue for a more stimulating and boundary-pushing brand of television journalism.
[3] Contributing personalities—known at various times as story editors, writers, directors, and producers—included Charles Backhouse, Donald Brittain, Cecily Burwash, Jim Carney, Roy Faibish, Beryl Fox, Allan King, Tom Koch, Heinz Kornagel, Sam Levene, Brian Nolan, Charles Oberdorf, Peter Pearson, Alexander Ross, Warner Troyer, Jack Webster, and Larry Zolf.
Following the first type, the show employed the direct-cinema techniques of contemporary documentary filmmaking to cover issues of public interest in depth through hour-long film essays.
Earlier, the creative team of Fox and Haig, along with cameramen Richard Leiterman, John Foster and Grahame Woods, had gone to Mississippi to cover Freedom Summer following the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in August 1964.
[8] Created by Patrick Watson and Douglas Leiterman, This Hour Has Seven Days debuted on October 4, 1964, with a studio audience, unheard of for a news show at the time.
[8] This resulted in a public outcry for weeks as viewers organized demonstrations, wrote letters and made angry phone calls, CBC staff threatened to resign,[8] newspaper editorials fulminated about political interference in the decision, and politicians demanded a parliamentary inquiry.
A parliamentary committee hearing was convened, and Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed Vancouver Sun publisher Stu Keate as a special investigator.
[10] Following two weeks of mediation, Keate said it was clear that there had been "mistakes made on both sides" and recommended that the CBC board of directors do a better job of explaining to the public its decision to fire Watson and LaPierre.
Shortly after it ended, the rival CTV Television Network launched a similar program called W5, which continues to air to this day (Watson contributed to this series on occasion).
[8] This episode featured the Ku Klux Klan segment noted above, as well as an invitation to political party leaders to appear on the show as part of the 1965 election campaign, a report on the shooting death of a policeman in Sudbury, an election "poll" of homeless men, interviews with Bob Guccione and Orson Welles, a feature profile on boxer George Chuvalo, and a comedic sketch mocking Prime Minister Lester Pearson and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's negotiations to have the Canadian government purchase military aircraft from the United Kingdom.