Pierre Berton is one of Canada’s best-known personalities and arguably Canada’s best-known living writer. He has also been an important television presence since the earliest days of Canadian television. For more than 30 years, he was rarely absent from the nation’s television screens, and by the 1970s he was correctly described as “clearly Canada’s best-known and most respected TV public affairs personality” by Warner Troyer in The Sound and the Fury: An Anecdotal History of Canadian Broadcasting. Berton was also one of most highly paid personalities. During his career as a columnist and commentator, he has been a tireless defender of public broadcasting and the importance of Canadian content. In all of his many public roles, he has been a prodigious popularizer of the Canadian experience. He may be remembered most for his many books, mostly popular histories, but he has long had an arresting television presence.

Berton’s first TV appearance was probably in 1952, as a panelist on Court of Opinion, soon after he arrived in Toronto from Vancouver, where he got his start as a student newspaper editor (The Ubyssey) and daily newspaper writer. Always well informed and opinionated, he provided a strong journalistic thrust to various CBC public affairs programs. In 1957 he became the host of the interview show Close-Up and joined the panel of Front Page Challenge, a long-running program that featured “mystery guests.” The guests were connected with stories in the news, and the task of the panel was to identify them by asking questions and then to conduct a brief interview with the guest. After many years on the air, the program was finally canceled in 1995. In 1963, on the newly formed private network CTV, Berton premiered The Pierre Berton Show (also known as the Pierre Berton Hour), another talk show, which ran until 1973.

Berton’s commitment to popular history led in 1974 to My Canada on a new, private television service, Global. The program made use of his formidable talents as a storyteller in order to present Canadian history to viewers. The program had few props and relied on Berton’s ability to hold an audience with the story. Later, from 1986 to 1987, he was host of CBC Television’s Heritage Theatre, a series of dramatizations of true Canadian stories.

Among Berton’s major television triumphs was the 1974 CBC production of The National Dream. Based on his books, The National Dream and The Last Spike, the drama-documentary series consisted of eight hour-long programs on the opening of the Canadian west and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Berton wrote the series outline and served as on-air guide to the documentary and drama segments. The series premiered at 9:00 P.M., Sunday, March 3, 1974, and had 3.6 million viewers, a very large audience in English-speaking Canada, where, at that time, the average audience was 3.1 million. More recently, Berton’s popular histories were an important resource for the monumental TV series Canada: A People’s History, broadcast by the CBC (2000–2002). Two of Berton’s titles, The Invasion of Canada, 1812–13 and Flames Across the Border, 1813–14, are cited on the website for the series.

Over the course of his career, Berton has made a major contribution to Canadian television. Not surprisingly, he has been an ardent champion of public broadcasting and the CBC. Closely involved with the Canadian Radio and Television League, he helped found a successor organization, the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, which has been a critical supporter of the CBC and Canadian production. As a Canadian cultural nationalist, Berton has played a most notable role in the development of a distinctly Canadian approach to television.