Broadcast 25 July 1967
From a tape in the CBC Radio Archives (reference no. 670725-12), transcribed by Monika Lee. Frye comments on Saturday Night as part of a profile of Sand-well, managing editor of the magazine, 1932–51. Broadcast on the CBC series Tuesday Night, 25 July 1967, on a program written by Allan Anderson and produced by James Anderson.
FRYE: Saturday Night projected itself as a kind of lighthouse of civilization in a world which is full either of howling Marxists or of howling fascists. It was an earnest, perspiring world which had a great sense of ideas as weapons, as things to be used in some kind of dialectical battle, and Sandwell projected the image of an economy and an attitude towards civilization which was clear of all this kind of thing. I think that that feeling really attracted a good deal of loyalty, which was not so much a personal loyalty to Sandwell as an enthusiasm for the kind of tone which his magazine seemed to symbolize. Saturday Night, in its Sandwell days, was a kind of manifestation of a cultural period, rather than a former of it. Saturday Night had this sense that it was for the reader, that it would put him in a kind of urbane and intimate relationship with the important cultural phenomena around him; that is, it had something, in its own way, of the Reader’s Digest tack of giving him a kind of cross-section of everything that he wanted to know about. At the same time, Saturday Night didn’t bother him. It didn’t make him feel like he ought to get out and join parades or sign petitions or get into demonstrations or bread lines or that kind of thing. I think that it did attain a certain relationship to the culture of its day, which it is very hard for any periodical to attain now. I think that this is a time when a periodical of any sort, the more serious the worse really, has a very hard struggle to survive.