By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – On Family Day Monday in Ontario, Carol Off (above) was in her CBC office boxing up books and other tangible memories of her time as host of CBC Radio One’s As It Happens (AIH).
On Friday, her CBC family, with help from some past AIH guests – including Margaret Atwood and Romeo Dallaire – will pay tribute to Off on her final day after spending nearly 16 years at the helm of the public broadcaster’s must-listen-to weeknight current events radio program.
She will miss accumulating more intangible memories from interviews with people who touched or angered her, or made her laugh, but who almost always fascinated the onetime CBC’s The National international documentary reporter with their stories and situations.
“I’m not going to miss having to push that boulder up the hill every single day and have it roll down again. It’s a Sisyphean task,” said Off in an interview with Cartt.ca on Monday. “I find it a grind and I think fresh horses need to be pulling that weight now.”
As of next Monday, when Winnipeg-born Off celebrates her 67th birthday, AIH will feature guests hosts until a permanent replacement is found for Off, who will return to CBC Radio this summer with a series on books.
It will seem strange for her not to cover news as it happens, and for listeners not to hear Off’s interviews, which have helped put events into context.
Off’s friendly voice and gentle approach made for interesting conversations with guests. But they were not quite that, as she told Cartt.ca.
“It sounds like a conversation. But it’s not. It’s an interview,” said Off.
“In order to talk to people, you have to make them feel as though you’re in a conversation so that people feel comfortable and trust you, and that they’re going to be able to get their point across and tell their story. But at the same time, I have time limits. I need to guide them toward the story that I know the listeners want.”
Off explained most would-be guests have been willing to go on air to tell their stories, save some folks involved in the recent trucker protests in Ottawa who first agreed to be interviewed but backed down after they were “told that they shouldn’t trust the media.”
When she became AIH host in 2006, Off had to shift her journalistic skills from the field to the studio.
“In the field, you’re interviewing for [a] clip. In the studio for a radio interview, the person you’re talking to is your whole story. There has to be a beginning, middle and end – a narrative shape – and everything you’re going to put on the air is going to come from that person,” she explained.
“You can’t go back to the studio and cut it up and put it together with sounds and other imagery and script. It has to be self-contained.”
Her transition from TV to radio was somewhat seamless.
“I thought it would be far more fraught than it was,” said Off. “I had many friends and associates saying it was a big mistake to leave working in the field doing international stories. They said, ‘You’re not a housecat, you’re an alley cat. You’re never going to be able to sit in the studio and not be out in the field.’ I was very worried that it was going to bore the snot out of me to not be out there in the world.”
“And then the opposite happened,” she explained. “Everything I’d been trying to do in the field just suddenly became so much easier. It just opened up every possibility for me that I didn’t have as a reporter with a crew going into a place with a camera and trying to get the story.”
Off said that at AIH, it is left to the “astonishingly competent producers who just reach into the middle of whatever was going on in the world and find someone with a phone that was working and who could speak English. The world just opened to me.”
She explained that through AIH, CBC has been able to cover Syria’s protracted civil war, which would have been “off limits and prohibitively expensive” for a TV crew inside the war zone.
“We did so many phone calls into Syria,” said Off, who recalled interviewing a doctor who was trying to care for patients amid shelling. “You could hear the shells get closer until they got so close he said ‘I have to go,’ and that was the end of the interview.”
She explained that similarly, following last year’s military coup in Burma, AIH was able to reach a man hiding in his apartment in the country at night, “whispering as he described in the dark as the police were going door to door looking for people” – and capture moments that Off said she “could never do in television.”
Telling stories of tragedy has not prevented recognition of the human element involved in them, she underscored.
“We always check back afterwards to see if the person is okay,” said Off who with her co-host Chris Howden, has gone live from CBC’s Toronto studio throughout the pandemic. Interviews have remained pre-packaged to account for guests in different time zones. But the 10:30 a.m. weekday production meetings to plan the 90-minute program’s content have been conducted remotely.
“Every single show has had to have an emotional range where you’d laugh and cry and get angry and learn something and get carried away,” explained Off who also noted AIH’s penchant for telling animal stories.
There was the woman who knits sweaters for her chickens (one of Off’s favourites); another woman who “makes earrings out of deer poop; and so many stories of sheep: sheep being found, sheep being lost, sheep trained to talk, sheep who took over a town because of Covid and no one was living there anymore,” as Off recited.
One of her earliest animal offerings – in 2007 – involved Dallas attorney Gregory Shamoun who brought his donkey, Buddy, to court to defend himself against donkey-related complaints. “Can you describe your ass for us, please?” Off asked Shamoun, who replied, “My ass is kind of furry.”
The U.S. lawyer “was saying ass over and over again, and I knew the Americans who buy the show go nuts if you have any swear words.”
Having begun her CBC career in radio as a freelancer in the late 1980s, Off hopes the medium receives proper attention when Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez provides an update to the public broadcaster’s mandate, which is happening separately from Bill C-11.
“I think that radio is something that gets forgotten so often, and the discussion is so much about TV,” she said. “Most senior management, who would be part of the mandate talks, sometime forget that we exist.”
“The connection with the Canadian public is hugely through the radio service. We have an incredibly loyal following for radio,” Off added.
“I hope that whatever concludes in the mandate discussion there is a strong recognition of the role that radio plays, not just in the CBC, but in the Canadian psyche.”
Image supplied by CBC.
