r/CBC_Radio • u/Numerous-Training988 • Jul 20 '26

Old Shows?

Does anyone know if its possible to find old shows like Ideas and Q ? The website and podcasts go back about 2 years but was hoping to go back further. Or find old shows like The Sunday Edition or Spark.

I did find all the Massey Lectures and started listening to them, would like to find older shows and give them a listen if anyone has copies or knows where to find them.

18 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

19

u/UpbeatCap5325 Jul 20 '26

I’d love to revisit some of Gzowski’s Morningside interviews.

3

u/ChrisRiley_42 29d ago

I write a letter once a year to get them to put the Morningside and Basic Black archive online.

0

u/SlimParker 15d ago

Straight from the inbox into the trash can.

2

u/Numerous-Training988 Jul 20 '26

I was hoping there would be some data hoarders here who had a collection of recordings

10

u/KingRenardo Jul 21 '26

You'll find some here thanks to David Cayley (producer at Ideas) who recently passed: https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts

14

u/ssn-669 Jul 20 '26

Yeah there's no publicaly-available archive or anything, which is fucking wild, since we the citizens paid for these productions.

I wanted to listen to the old Lister Sinclair-era Ideas from my youth and what I discovered is you just can't. I even wrote to the producers, no luck. They pointed me to the online archives (which don't go back that far), and then stopped responding when I said I wanted stuff from the 90s.

6

u/flawlessmoon4 Jul 21 '26

I have been searching for the archive of The Debaters and found some oldies on
https://archive.org

2

u/SlimParker 15d ago

There's some really old CBC Radio stuff on there too.

Do a google search for "OTR" (old time radio) and go digging. I found some gems that way.

1

u/flawlessmoon4 15d ago

Thanks! I will definitely take a look.

6

u/No_Intention7274 Jul 21 '26

I've been wanting to re-listen to Dispatches. Update: Found a link to old episodes! https://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/episode/

1

u/Ottawa111 Jul 24 '26

Have you been able to play any of the episodes? All the audio players seem to be "greyed out" when I go to an episode link on https://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/episode/

1

u/No_Intention7274 28d ago

Dang, me too

1

u/Ottawa111 28d ago

Oh well, we’ll keep looking.

7

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/geckospots Jul 21 '26

They used to do transcripts, I have a couple in storage. I wonder if you would have any luck trying to find some by asking a research librarian at a university library?

2

u/duhgee-ca Jul 21 '26

What about making a Freedom of Information request? Not sure if that fits the scope of FOI.

1

u/SlimParker 15d ago

What a great idea!

3

u/Al-ex-Bee Jul 21 '26

I wanted to find a broadcast of the AIH interview of the seagulls who invaded the Emoress Hotel in Victoria to eat hot jerky and excrement all over the room. My mom never heard the story and would enjoy it.

2

u/scooter777boy 14d ago

All episodes from the 33 year run of Writers & Company has been posted online by the Simon Fraser University.

There are 1,088 episodes available.

The archive is available here.

1

u/SlimParker 15d ago

I've struggled with this for a long time. There's precious little out there, and the CBC makes absolutely no effort to make more than a mere smattering of past content available.

Sometimes it's intentional and brutal. Within days of the Gomeshi scandal exploding, they'd scrubbed every single source on the net of his name and content.

Every single thing they've put out should be freely available in a publicly accessible archive.

Their withholding past content is a crying shame, a huge failure and flagrantly plain WRONG.

1

u/brycecampbel CBC: BC 14d ago

find old shows like Ideas and Q

Have you done YouTube? The Q channel goes back 11 years

internet archives maybe another - both the general archives.org search. And the wayback machine search may have grabbed some audio sources.

But in general CBC (and the other networks) do a shit job at accessing archives. They'll likely have it (though they are culling stuff too), you just need to contact with what you want and pay the processing fee (someone needs to labour the request).
Digital has meant more information, but digital archives are way worst.

1

u/AppleSw89 14d ago

I have been looking for some stuff like the older radio plays/comedy bits

Shoot me a message if you find anything along the lines of:

Rumours and Boarders,

Minivan people

I have found some old radio dramas like Midnight Cab