Front Page Challenge

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Front Page Challenge

Program promotional slide for the CBC television show Front Page Challenge, on display at the CBC Museum, Toronto.
Format Quiz show
Created by John Aylesworth
Starring Win Barron (summer 1957)
Alex Barris (fill-in host, 1957)
Fred Davis (host 1957-1995)
Pierre Berton
Allan Fotheringham
Betty Kennedy
Toby Robins
Gordon Sinclair
Jack Webster
Country of origin  Canada
Language(s) English
Production
Running time 60 min.
Broadcast
Original channel CBC
Original run 24 June 1957 – 1 February 1995
This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (January 2008)

Front Page Challenge was a long-running Canadian current events-cum-history program disguised as a game show. Created by comedy writer/performer John Aylesworth (of the comedy team of Frank Peppiatt and John Aylesworth) and produced and aired by CBC Television, the series ran from 1957 to 1995.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

The series featured notable journalists attempting to guess the recent or old news story with which a hidden guest challenger was linked by asking him or her questions, in much the same manner as the American game shows, What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth. Each round of the game started with news footage that introduced the news story in question to the studio audience and home viewers out of earshot of the panelists. After the guest was identified and/or the news story determined, the journalists then interviewed the guest about the story or about achievements or experiences for which he or she was known. Unlike American quiz shows that steered clear of controversy in the 1950s and 1960s, Front Page Challenge seems to have been affected by just one censorship practice, that of avoiding four-letter words.[citation needed]

Guests came from all walks of life, including politicians like Pierre Trudeau and Indira Gandhi, crusaders like Malcolm X, sports figures like Gordie Howe, entertainers like Boris Karloff and Ed Sullivan, and writers like Upton Sinclair. From 1957 to 1979, the show featured many non-Canadians whose trips to Toronto, where the show usually originated then, were paid by the CBC. (Gandhi was even flown from India to Toronto in the 1960s at the CBC's expense.)[citation needed] Occasionally, guests were featured for their involvement in stories that had nothing to do with their celebrity status. For example, Karloff was featured because he served as a rescue worker following a devastating 1912 tornado in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he was appearing in a play many years before horror films made him famous.[citation needed] Jayne Mansfield appeared in late 1961 to represent the recent victory of British prime minister Harold Macmillan's Conservative Party in parliamentary elections.[citation needed] The American actress, whose high IQ was well-publicized,[citation needed] was filming a movie in the U.K. at the time of the decisive votes. Occasionally, the challenger was one of the panelists themselves, unbeknownst to the other three panelists. After the game, the relevant person simply moved to the guest seat for the interview.

The show ran for nearly forty years and featured a remarkably stable cast of panelists, including journalist-historian Pierre Berton, Betty Kennedy (who later become a Canadian senator), Toby Robins (who later became a movie actress) and columnist Gordon Sinclair. Columnist Allan Fotheringham joined the panel after Sinclair's death. A guest panelist, usually another Canadian journalist, politician or other celebrity, was also part of each episode. In 1990, journalist and radio/TV personality Jack Webster joined the show as its permanent fourth panelist.[1]

For its initial summer 1957 run, the show was hosted by Win Barron, best-known for his voice-over narration of Paramount Canada newsreels. However, Barron proved ill at ease in the moderator's seat, so both Fred Davis and panelist Alex Barris rotated as guest hosts in the early part of the fall before Davis was chosen to take over as host full-time (a position he retained for the rest of the show's run), though Barris continued to appear as a guest panelist occasionally. Years later, Barris published a history of the program (titled Front Page Challenge: The 25th Anniversary, CBC Books, 1981). After the show's cancellation, Barris published an updated version of the book in 1999.

In his book, Barris says that at the height of the show's popularity in the late 1950s, the individual panelists became major celebrities in Canada. He relates how Toby Robins, a beautiful brunette, donned a blonde wig for a few episodes as an experiment, attracting hate mail including a death threat over the change of appearance. The books also include journalist Barbara Frum's remarks about how influential Robins was for 1950s-era female equality through her decision to appear on the program while pregnant.

Unfortunately, the show's stability proved to be its undoing, as the producers did not see fit to add younger panelists while the regulars aged and the audience demographics became less desirable.[citation needed] Always videotaped in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s, the show later started going on the road, being videotaped in cities across Canada. The oldest regular, Gordon Sinclair, continued travelling with his fellow panelists to taping locations until he was well into his 80s.[citation needed] Although the location of the studio was not always noticeable to home viewers, they[who?] did notice the lack of guest challengers from foreign countries after 1979. The program no longer featured internationally known controversial figures to match the likes of Timothy Leary, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and William F. Buckley who had held viewers' attention in the 1960s. Alex Barris says in his second book that the absence of non-Canadian guests after 1979 resulted from budget cuts for CBC Television that ruled out travel expenses.[citation needed]

Barris also claims that the advent of multiple cable channels in the early 1990s (in Canada and the United States) presented another challenge to the staff of Front Page Challenge and contributed to its demise.[citation needed] During the earlier days when there were no 24-hour news channels competing with the program, each round of the game began with silent black and white newsreel footage of the news story in question while a narrator, not heard by the panelists, summarized it. As soundbites became commonplace in the 1990s, Front Page Challenge kept up with them by lengthening the introductions and adding other voices besides the narrator's, which made the show look too similar to other fare glimpsed by a home viewer with a remote control.

When Front Page Challenge left the air in 1995, it was the longest continually running non-news program in Canadian television history.[citation needed] Among the contestants on the final show was then emerging country music superstar Shania Twain.

[edit] Episode status

Reruns of the program were broadcast by Canadian cable channel History Television in the late 1990s. At least a few of the episodes from the 1950s and 1960s were not saved.[citation needed]

[edit] Guests

This section requires expansion.

[edit] References in pop culture

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Front Page Challenge". Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/frontpagech/frontpagech.htm. Retrieved on 05-07-2009. 

[edit] Further reading

  • Barris, Alex. Front Page Challenge: The 25th Anniversary (Toronto: CBC Books, 1981).

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Page_Challenge"
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