Free Oliver's Twist by Craig Oliver Page A

creating the effect of film. At first everyone giggled, thinking this adaptation of flip-book art was a joke. When it became clear that the man was serious, we all fell into an embarrassed silence.
    Like it or not, however, Toronto was the centre of the country’s broadcasting industry, the centre of the known universe to those of us striving to get there. I believed it was where I belonged. On my first day at CBC Television, I made my way to the Corp’s national newsroom, located in a rundown wreck of a building on Jarvis Street in a neighbourhood that had seen better times. The day before, following a fatal accident, police had disabled the only elevator in the building. I walked up the five floors to my new office.
    Stepping into the reception area of the open working space, I was greeted by a tiny figure who sat not behind a desk, but on it. He was a sadly deformed character known as “Snarley,” because of his raspy voice. When I introduced myself, he burst into laughter and announced to the room that the “fucking hayseed” had arrived. Almost as one, the staff stood and walked out as if taking a group coffee break. I understood this to be a gesture by members of the union. I had made the switch to management, and that made me their natural enemy.
    My professional home for the next two years was known as the “Boneyard.” It was, like the newsroom in Evelyn Waugh’ssatiric novel Scoop , a graveyard of broken dreams. Up until then I had imagined that such a collection of eccentric, self-destructive, and absurd characters could exist only in a work of pulp fiction. Never before or since have I experienced such a poisoned workplace. Years of incompetent bosses and bull-headed unionists had undermined any sense of common purpose. The mandate handed to me was to clean out the Augean stables. I would be joined in the effort by another newcomer, Tim Kotcheff, who had been brought over from the Public Affairs Department, where he had produced numerous award-winning shows. Together we would act as producer-managers of the news department.
    The unit employed roughly a hundred individuals, mostly men, as reporters, editors, writers, and assorted hangers-on, all of whom wallowed in rumour, complaint, and power struggles. A few were known for treachery and corruption, and some were on the take from organizations and private companies, accepting favours in exchange for positive coverage. Drugs of all kinds were consumed, and fights were not uncommon. I learned that many staffers routinely padded their time cards, adding thousands to their paycheques. One reporter often claimed more than twenty-four hours a day and got away with it. When I refused to sign off on fraudulent cards, one of the news editors took me aside and warned me that I might soon find myself in a dark alley with a knife in my ribs.
    Down at one end of the large floor were the offices of my predecessors, men cast aside but not let go in past reorganizations. They came and went silently, morning and night, waiting resolutely, if bitterly, for their pensions. The walking dead cast me a piteous glance as they shuffled by my desk. One advised meto choose my cabal carefully lest I be caught on the losing side in the next management shakeup. Another had been officially dismissed but was so distraught that he refused to leave his office. The old friends who had engineered his demise felt too guilty to have him forcibly removed, so for a time he lived in his office, cooking on a hot plate. When I passed him in a hallway late one evening, he told me with a lopsided grin that he was going to change the sheets on his desk.
    A few individuals in the newsroom had been my colleagues as reporters and I thought of them as friends. One in particular sought me out socially, and for a time we seemed on close terms. Then I learned that everything I told him was being passed to the news guild that had assigned him to spy on me. Such duplicity and