Lister Sinclair, host of CBC's Ideas, dead at 85

Posted:
Oct 16, 2006

Lister Sinclair, a longtime Canadian Broadcasting Corporation personality famed for hosting the radio program Ideas for 16 years, died Monday morning in a Toronto hospital. He was 85.

Sinclair joined the CBC in 1944, retiring from the government broadcaster in 1999.

He narrated several National Film Board of Canada cartoons: A Thousand Million Yearsand Riches of the Earth(both 1954), Riches of the Earth (Revised)(1966), and The Phoenix (1990).

The author of hundreds of radio and TV plays during his career, Sinclair served as the CBC's vice-president. Canadian theater critic Nathan Cohen once called him "easily the foremost in Canada's array of post-war playwrights."

He helped organize the Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, now known as the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA). However, he soon became frustrated as an executive and returned to producing.

A host of CBC Television's The Nature of Things, he guested on a wide variety of radio and TV programs, including Front Page Challenge, Telescope, Horizon, Festival, Court of Opinion, Wayne and Shuster, and Morningside. He also narrated the live-action Programme X, a live-action TV series whose directors included the young David Cronenberg.

Ideas executive producer Bernie Lucht, a longtime friend of Sinclair, said that he was honored to have worked with him. "My lasting memory is the enormous privilege it was to have been able to touch a compassionate genius."

Lucht remembered Sinclair as a mischievous yet gentle person with a vast intellect.

"He was simply a remarkable man. He was brilliant, compassionate, had a wide-ranging mind with an expertise in everything from poetry, to mathematics, to music, to literature, to culture," Lucht told the CBC. "He felt that the job of humanity was to find out what it was about, what we were about and what our surroundings, the universe into which we had been born, were about."

Born to Scottish parents in Mumbai, India (then known as Bombay) in 1921, Sinclair was raised in England. He was educated in India and London before receiving a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia in math and physics and a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto.

He was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1985.

Four years ago, the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable organization dedicated to preserving Canada's film, TV, radio and music/sound recording heritage, honored Sinclair for his play Hilda Morgan and his body of work. Hilda Morgan raised a stir in Canada's Parliament in 1949 because the play broke social taboos: the heroine was pregnant though unmarried, and she was contemplating ending her pregnancy.

Former Canadian governor-general Adrienne Clarkson remembered shared a working space with Sinclair when she joined the CBC as a broadcaster in 1965.

"You were the beneficiary of Lister knowing a lot. He was not only a polymath; he was a prodigy," she said.

Lucht recalled Sinclair once saying that he wanted to die learning. "He was the kind of person, I think, who wanted to die in his boots. He did not want to stop work at all."

Ideas will broadcast a three-hour tribute to Sinclair, starting on Monday
night at 9 p.m. local time (9:30 p.m. in Newfoundland), on CBC Radio One. It will continue Tuesday and Wednesday.