Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Note from Julia: My first few years in radio were spent at an NPR affiliate in Iowa that regularly featured programs from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. That’s when I first got to hear the evening news magazine As It Happens. I was taken in by its warm voices and often irreverent humor.

Much later, I worked with a proud son of Ontario who would talk about how his family did not own a television but would listen to As It Happens religiously.

Although I have heard Canadian producers and listeners at times complain about their public broadcaster, as is their right, the CBC undeniably has something special going on when it comes to audio. There’s a reason why “host whisperers” would come down from the North to train Americans how to sound like human beings on air.

I didn’t know that these CBC Radio vibes owed much of their existence to one unlikely figure. Montreal-based producer Craig Desson brings us a post about the woman who shook up the staid dial of Canada — and beyond. Here’s Craig:

If you were to tune into CBC Radio in the middle of the previous century, you would have heard vaudeville variety shows, radio dramas and citizen forums where regular Canadians had a chance to address the rest of the country. 

The CBC was popular — but as the 1960s rolled around, the times were changing. TV had become the home for variety shows and dramas. The ratings for radio started to slip.  

To the staff of CBC Radio, it was clear what they had been doing wasn’t going to work anymore. According to Michael Enright, a long-time CBC host, the message from the CBC board to radio management was blunt: change or we will cancel radio. 

What followed were meetings with managers and staff, reports made, and then even more meetings. Out of this came a plan to totally overhaul the radio schedule.

The plan was so radical that it got dubbed the “radio revolution,” and it would give us the type of programs still heard today on CBC Radio One. Key to the plan was a pivot away from lighter entertainment to newsy current affairs shows. 

On top of that, advertisements would be taken off CBC Radio. The network would be funded totally by Canadian federal tax money.

Big new shows would have to be created from scratch. They would need a person who could develop and staff up new programs, as well as oversee their production every day. That person was Margaret Lyons.

Lyons recognized how the radio listening experience had changed. Most families were no longer gathering around their radios to listen together. Radio had become more of a private experience in the car. It was now an intimate experience, especially with the introduction of FM, so the theatrical style of the hosts and radio had to change. Hosts needed to sound more conversational. 

When I started working at CBC Radio in the 2010s, Lyons was spoken of like a legend who built programing culture at Radio One. She is all the more remarkable when you consider how different she was from other managers at CBC Radio back in the day.

Lyons was a woman manager at a time when women in management were rare. She was born in British Columbia in 1923, named Keiko Margaret Inouye.

Her parents were from Japan, and her family suffered through the wartime removal of Japanese Canadians after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Because they lived within 100 miles of the Pacific coast, Lyons’ parents had to give their family farm in Mission over to a “Custodian of Enemy Property” and move inland.

Lyons talked about this time in a 2010 oral history interview for the Sedai Project of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre.

Lyons went to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, because it was one of the few universities that accepted Japanese students then. She married a fellow student, Ed Lyons, and in 1949 and the couple moved to the UK. There she worked her way up to a producer job at the BBC after starting out as a typist.

The couple later moved back to Toronto from the UK, and Margaret got a job at CBC Radio after being turned down for a job at CBC Television, which was the cool place to work at CBC in the 1960s.  

Once in radio, she eventually became the head of radio and played a huge role in operationalizing the massive changes to the programming grid of what would become this radio revolution. 

Lyons was involved with launching programs that embraced her new approach: above all, the nightly current-affairs show As It Happens. According to then-producer Mark Starowicz, one of Lyons’ hires, the program was “adventurous, irreverent, timely, saucy, whimsical — a tabloid of the airwaves — but also serious and informative enough to win the respect of critics.” 

People say Margaret Lyons had an incredible talent for hiring trouble-makers. In fact, she had a reputation for hiring people who had been fired elsewhere. 

Peter Gzowski, who would become the legendary CBC Radio host of Morningside, had been pushed out as an editor at MacLeans’ Magazine. Barbara Frum, who would become one of the first hosts of As It Happens, had been recently given the boot at a suppertime current affairs slot. Michael Enright, another host of As It Happens, had recently lost a job in Calgary. Producer Mark Starowicz, who was hired by Lyons from a lefty alt-weekly in Montreal, said her boss kept a rolodex of troublemakers as potential hires. 

Canadian radio had, up to that point, been almost all scripted. Lyons enabled a new sound for radio that was “spontaneous.” Ironically, this was more possible because of technology: reel-to-reel and cassette recordings allowed unscripted conversations to be edited down into listenable packages. 

As It Happens was a “call out” show: the staff used telephones to reach regular people witnessing breaking news. They would do things like find out the number of a telephone booth near the site of a riot in Northern Ireland, and tape a conversation with whomever picked up.

Although dedicated to news, the show rejected any hint of stuffy formality. In one famous episode, the host Michael Enright was interviewing ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who would go on to be tried for war crimes. Enright started the interview by asking Karadžić, “How is the ethnic cleansing going?”

Back in the 1970s, the newly-emerging NPR took notice of the CBC’s new sound. Bill Siemering, NPR’s first director of programming, had worked for WBFO in Buffalo before moving to Washington, DC. 

In Buffalo, Canadian radio comes in loud and clear. Siemering says Canadian programming had an influence on his ideas about the sound and approach of NPR’s first news magazine, All Things Considered. (JB note: Siemering also says here that his format idea was different from the CBC’s, because ATC was a reported show, not “call-out.”)

CBC Radio to this day still pulls in huge audiences across Canada, and many of the programs of the radio revolution are still on the air, including As It Happens and the science show Quirks and Quarks. 

Growing up, I’d hear these and other programs on multiple radios around my home. The broadcaster left a huge impression on me. Hosts with smoky voices (you used to be able to smoke in radio studios) speaking with politicians, artists and everyday Canadians with the same warm and curious, witty tone. It definitely inspired me to want to become a CBC Radio producer when I grew up. And to think if it were not for Lyons and the radio revolution, CBC Radio might not exist today.

Lyons died in 2019 at the age of 95. Her alma mater paid tribute with this digital retrospective of her life and work, and her former colleagues published this video documentary about her life in 2020.

JB: Thanks so much to Craig Desson for his piece about this great lady of radio. Her sound revolution continues in the links he offers below to new work from Canada, including his own (with requisite Canadian apologies!)

On July 16th at 1PM ET, beehiiv is going live with a look at the future of publishing, audience growth, and digital business.

What started as a newsletter platform has evolved into something much bigger: a place where creators and brands can grow, monetize, and own their audiences without stitching together half the internet to make it work.

The next chapter starts live at the Summer Release Event. 

Join us to see what’s coming next.

RSVP now.