Overview
The show debuted on October 4, 1964 (replacing Cliff Solway-produced series Background) with hosts John Drainie, Laurier LaPierre and Carole Simpson (not to be confused with the now-retired ABC weekend news anchor of the same name). Simpson was soon replaced by Dinah Christie, and Watson himself replaced Drainie in the show's second season when Drainie (who died in 1966) was too ill to continue with the series.
The show used a one-hour newsmagazine format which combined satirical songs (performed by Simpson or Christie) and sketches with hard news interviews, reports and documentaries. Personalities associated with the show as reporters, interviewers or documentarians included Beryl Fox, Donald Brittain, Allan King, Warner Troyer, Jack Webster, Larry Zolf and future Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
One documentary commissioned by This Hour, Fox's Vietnam War film The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam, became one of the most famous Canadian documentary films ever produced, with editing by Don Haig.
One of the most dramatic techniques was to ambush politicians and other figures at their homes or on their way to work and ask them difficult questions. Many leading figures were very poor at these unrehearsed interviews.
The show was also instrumental in news coverage of the Munsinger Affair, a 1966 sex scandal involving former federal Minister of Defence Pierre Sévigny. When Zolf showed up on Sévigny's doorstep in pursuit of the story, Sévigny whacked Zolf on the head with his cane.
Among other controversies inspired by the show, LaPierre was once shown wiping away tears on the air after a filmed interview pertaining to the Steven Truscott case, a report on the Miss Canada pageant was criticized as journalistic "poaching" because the rival CTV Television Network had exclusive coverage rights to the event, and an interview with members of the Ku Klux Klan was deliberately engineered to provoke an on-air reaction when a black civil rights activist was brought in, unannounced, to join the interview partway through.
Read more about this topic: This Hour Has Seven Days