Out of Ideas

There are moments when I realize that I’ve lived a charmed work life.

In my final week of journalism school, I was offered a job with CBC Radio’s Ideas - helping produce hour-long radio documentaries for the national broadcaster. I had been told that if you wanted to get into CBC, you’d have to start by getting coffee for the midnight shift in Iqaluit, and spend a few years working your way south (which I was prepared to do.) But I got lucky.

The real charm, however, came when I arrived at Ideas, and met a real charmer: host Lister Sinclair, a broadcasting legend, program host and truly excellent human being. Lister Sinclair died this morning at age 85.

At Ideas, I was the youngest (by far) and Lister was the oldest (by farther) - but only chronologically. Lister was in his 70s, and as full of life as anyone I’d met. By that point he’d already written hundreds of plays, hosted a dozen shows, and served as vice president of CBC. He was an actor in the golden age of radio, an executive in tough times, a recipient of the Order of Canada.

Me? Well, I knew a little bit of HTML.

Still, Lister made time for anyone. I recall sitting in producer Max Allen’s office and watching Wimbledon, just Lister and me. I don’t follow tennis, but I’d have stayed even if it had been Scrabble in Spanish. There was Lister, Diet Coke in hand, tossing off stories about the origins of the tennis, the physics of grass courts, the length of tennis skirts. And I was just soaking in it.

And that couldn’t compare with the experience of directing Lister in the studio, something I did a few months later for the World of Ideas series I helped produce.

It’s not an easy thing to interrupt a man with 50 years more experience, and tell him that his voice is “sticky” (which it frequently was.) But he took it with good grace, as he did when I got him to introduce the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen (for the 1978 anniversary show), or when I helped teach him how to pronounce a website address (”It’s ‘www / dot CBC / dot ca,’ Lister, not ‘www dot / cbc dot / ca’. The dots come at the start of the syllables.”)

Lister’s razor-sharp mind was much heralded, but also struck me as a little tragic. It’s like he never forgot an interesting anecdote, a scientific explanation or a joke. By the time he was 70, there was no subject upon which he didn’t already have more interesting things to say than time to say them.

Locked out of his office, he told the story of Richard Feynman picking locks at the Manhattan Project. Asked if Feynman was a genius, he told me the story of his son figuring out how to wash windows. (”Vertical strokes on the outside, horizontal on the inside. Then you’ll know where the streaks are. That’s genius.”)

Ideas cultivated that sense of omniscience, and listeners were in awe. They also made it a point of pride to correct the tiniest detail. I had to answer e-mails along these lines:

Dear Mr. Sinclair,
How on earth do you find time to research, write and produce five hours of documentary by yourself each week? Hats off to you!

Dear Ideas,
September 5th will always disturb:
Lister Sinclair used “access” as a verb.

Dear Mr. Sinclair, Why is it that you only introduce yourself as “Mister Sinclair” when all your colleagues grace us with their first names? Is such formality really necessary?

There are a lot of words bandied about to describe Lister - Renaissance man, polymath, prodigy, genius. But they don’t really describe what it was like to work with him. Lister was like a walking Wikipedia - a constantly-updated, wide-ranging and slightly questionable source of knowledge on all things, ever. Except Lister would skip straight to what he called the “‘Ah ha’ moment”, when the real meaning and relevance of something became clear. In the days before Google, Lister had his own “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

I’m feeling lucky to have known Lister Sinclair, even as I mourn him. I’ve recently been put in the awkward but proud position of writing his obit for the CBC Digital Archives and for the Inside the CBC blog.

Which reminds me that my charmed work life continues (of all the world’s bloggers, how many people get paid to do it?) There are times when I wonder why I continue to work for CBC, but a small part of the answer is meeting people like Lister Sinclair on your first day on the job.

Rest well, Mr. Sinclair. We miss you.

(Ideas staff, late 1990s. That’s Lister in the suit, me in the football jacket.)

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-16-2006 | 02:10 PM
Posted in: CBC