Legendary broadcaster Patrick Watson brought a bold vision to the CBC

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Patrick Watson was perhaps the most famous Canadian broadcaster of the 1960s. He starred in This Hour Has Seven Days, a program so popular that it had a bigger audience than Hockey Night in Canada.

The show explored such topics as the wrongful murder conviction of Steven Truscott and at one point called the minority government of Lester Pearson “scandal ridden.” It proved to be far too edgy for the grey suits of the CBC, who cancelled it a little less than two years after it began.

A quarter of a century later, Mr. Watson was a supersuit himself, named chair of the CBC. It was an appointment celebrated by the creative class at the network, which was ecstatic that one of their own was in charge. But their initial excitement ended in disappointment; by his own admission, Mr. Watson did not achieve what he set out to do and left the job before the end of his tenure.

This Hour Has Seven Days was the brainchild of Mr. Watson and others, such as executive producer Douglas Leiterman. Before it went on the air, they auditioned a Montreal law professor named Pierre Trudeau, but he didn’t work out, so they went with another francophone professor, Laurier LaPierre. It began in 1964.

The show dealt with current events in both a serious and lighthearted way. It was very much a child of the 1960s and had a point of view. There were documentaries and interviews that went on for more than five minutes. Along with The Journal, which went on the air in the 1980s, it was widely considered one the most original public affairs shows ever produced by the CBC.

“Seven Days was one of the great television programs in CBC television history; it was innovative, live and had an extraordinary sense of urgency on Sunday night. It was skillfully anti-establishment. It really shaped my desire to get involved in great television,” said Peter Herrndorf, who watched the show as a young viewer and later became head of Current Affairs and then executive vice-president at the CBC.

Controversy in a conservative country did the program in. One documentary on topless go-go bars in San Francisco shocked prudes in Parliament and writers in newspapers. There was outrage when Mr. LaPierre shed a tear on air after his interview with Mr. Truscott’s mother.

Alphonse Ouimet, an engineer who knew the physical complexities of broadcasting, was president of the CBC at the time. He led the group that decided to cancel the program. Mr. Ouimet said the CBC should report on issues, not try to lead public opinion.

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“The CBC and the men who run it are deeply and persistently afraid of success,” wrote a bitter Mr. Watson in the Star Weekly in November of 1966, just after the program had been cancelled. “Ouimet simply does not understand the nature of public opinion or what it means to Canada.”

Patrick Watson was born in Toronto two days before Christmas in 1929. His mother, Lucy Bates, was a school teacher, and his father, Stanley, a school principal. Young Patrick went to Oakwood Collegiate, then to the University of Toronto, where he earned an MA in English. He was working on a Doctorate at the University of Michigan when he was lured back to Toronto to work for the CBC. He was 26 years old.

It wasn’t his first kick at the can. Mr. Watson was a teenage radio actor in 1943 on a children’s dramatic series on the CBC called The Kootenay Kid.

Mr. Watson was a natural broadcaster, with a voice that put him in demand. At Expo 67, he did the voiceover for a film in the Man and the Oceans Pavilion as part of his collaboration with the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Later he produced, directed and wrote programs for Mr. Cousteau. Mr. Watson produced and hosted thousands of television programs over a career that spanned more than 75 years.

“He had this terrific voice, and he was relaxed, witty and eloquent as a host, but the biggest thing that Patrick had going was that he was completely comfortable in front of the camera,” Mr. Herrndorf said. “The audience understood that instinctively and felt good about sharing this time and space with him. That combination of voice, comfort in front of a camera and being comfortable in his own skin, it just made him an absolutely irresistible television performer.”

The Mulroney government appointed Mr. Watson chair of the CBC in 1989. Until then, the president of the CBC also had the title of chairman of the board. The president of the CBC then was Gérard Veilleux, who had moved over from being deputy minister of the Treasury Board. Mr. Veilleux may not have known much about radio and television production, but he was a master bureaucrat. Mr. Watson was an actor, journalist, novelist, freelance producer and a charismatic on-air personality, but he was out of his depth in the world of Ottawa mandarins.

Almost right away, Mr. Watson and Mr. Veilleux had to implement the orders from the government to cut back the CBC budget. In his autobiography, This Hour has Seven Decades, he describes how he started, by wandering around the CBC’s Ottawa head office, a place that didn’t produce a minute of radio or television.

“We had found a corporate bureaucracy that was grievously obese. During my initial walk-around of the head office at 1500 Bronson in the fall of 1989, I went into one department of fifty people, not one of them could give me a clear description of what role he or she or the department played in the Corporation,” Mr. Watson wrote.

Soon that department was closed. The budget cuts then spread to the production side of the CBC. It was then that the employees who had welcomed Mr. Watson’s appointment turned on him.

“When Patrick Watson came in, he was known as a tough advocate, that was his on-air persona,” says Lise Lareau, who worked at CBC News at the time and later became president of the Media Guild. “But that persona didn’t show itself when the CBC cut local news in 1991. That really stung.”

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It stung him too. “It hasn’t been an entirely happy time,” he told the Globe’s Christopher Harris in 1994, shortly after leaving as CBC Chair. “Because of my prominence as a media person … I think some of my colleagues expected me to reverse the laws of gravity.” He said some people were pretty direct in telling him they were disappointed. “And that was a bit tough to take,” Mr. Watson said.

Away from work, he had a happy family life. His family members said he enjoyed the Canadian wilderness. “He was happiest in the bush,” his son, Chris, said. “My father would say the greatest success he had was the relationship with his wife, Caroline, the love of his life.”

When he was 30 years old, Mr. Watson fell off a ladder and injured his leg. It became infected, and it had to be amputated from above the knee. He said he was depressed by phantom limb pain in the first year and even considered suicide. But he snapped out of it and learned to live with what he referred to as his wooden leg. True to his television instincts, he preferred tight and honest language, so he shunned the word “prosthesis,” a term he felt softened the seriousness of his condition.

Mr. Watson drove a Volvo P-1800 sports car with a stick shift and found a way to adapt to doing things with one leg. Same for flying. At first, he was told he couldn’t get a pilot’s licence, but he changed flight schools and got a private pilot’s licence. With a special leg, he windsurfed at the family cottage on Go Home Lake in Georgian Bay.

Mr. Watson was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and was promoted to a Companion – the highest level – in 2002. He had often assisted the Canadian disabled community, including serving as honorary chair of the Canadian Amputee Sports Association and chairman emeritus of the Canadian Abilities Foundation. He had honorary doctorates from Memorial University in Newfoundland, Mount Alison University and the University of Toronto.

Mr. Watson died at age 92 in Toronto on July 4, 2022. He leaves his wife, the Irish writer and scholar Caroline Bamford, whom he met during a documentary production in Belfast in 1977; his sister, Mary Green, his son Chris, daughter Boo, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He is predeceased by his son, Greg.

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