I remember my parents devotedly tuning in to CBC television on Monday nights to see who that week’s mystery challengers might be on Front Page Challenge and whether the panel would guess before their timer went off. Would Betty Kennedy be the successful panelist with the correct answer, as she often was? Would moderator Fred Davis need to intercept or intervene? Would Pierre Berton deviate from his bow tie? Would Gordon Sinclair say something crude and offensive like he almost always did? (My dad couldn’t stand the guy and, judging by the mail received by the show’s producers, Dad wasn’t alone. Sinclair’s insensitive antics were all part of the charm that kept viewers tuning in.)
Front Page Challenge premiered in 1957 and ran for 38 years, despite many predictions to the contrary. It began as a six-week summer fill-in show, created by John Aylesworth. The game’s premise was brilliant. Producers chose national or international stories that had appeared on the front page of a major newspaper. A panel of Canadian journalists (three regulars and one guest) would have a limited time to identify the story by asking yes-or-no questions of a mystery guest. When they succeeded, or when the timer buzzed, they had an additional amount of time to interview the guest, asking questions they hoped viewers would want to ask. Each show covered at least two stories unless the guest was famous enough to be deemed deserving of a whole show.
In its early days, when CBC still enjoyed an impressive budget, famous challengers were flown in from all over the world, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, Harold Wilson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Martin Luther King Jr., and Menachem Begin. Canadian headliners who came on as challengers included all the living prime ministers during those years, sports stars like Gordie Howe, and entertainment icons like Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot. In those early black-and-white videos, the panelists and guests are often seen with a cigarette in hand or smoke rising from the ashtrays on their desk. How sophisticated.
Why on earth am I researching this obsolete program? Well, the novel I’m currently writing, Even If I Perish, is about the sinking of the SS City of Benares—one of the ships that transported British children to Canada during World War II. In addition to its paying passengers and crew, the City of Benares carried 90 children, along with their escorts. On September 17, 1940, the ship was struck by a German torpedo. Only 13 children survived. I’m certain the story made the front pages.
I’m creating a fictional story involving one or more of the survivors. I’ve found no evidence that Front Page Challenge covered this story (even though they did sometimes choose headlines going further into the past), but it certainly would have been a good one—particularly if they brought one of the survivors onto the show as their challenger. If I decide to make this happen in my novel, the challenger will be Mary Cornish, the woman who survived eight days as the only female in Lifeboat Number 12, caring for six boys in a boat packed with more than twice the people it was built for. I can already imagine ol’ Gordon Sinclair asking Mary how much she got paid for escorting the children. In real life, Mary never made it to Canada. She did, however, receive the Medal of the Order of the British Empire and she appeared on a British television program in 1956. So it’s not that big of a stretch to think she might have been recruited for our Canadian show. If only they’d thought of it.
You can watch clips from Front Page Challenge on YouTube, including the time Stompin’ Tom Connors stumped the panel, and one from 1984 featuring Mary Simon, decades before she became Canada’s Governor General.
Do you recall a favorite Front Page Challenge story?
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| Pierre Burton, Fred Davis, Betty Kennedy, Gordon Sinclair (photo from Facebook) |
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