A Necessary Distance

George Salverson had written over a thousand radio plays for the CBC before he became the first television drama editor for the corporation. He wrote scripts for such beloved series as The Beachcombers and The Littlest Hobo, but he kept very little of his writing, being decidedly unsentimental about his work. So when his daughter Julie found a series of notebooks from a round-the-world trip he'd taken in 1963 to work on a documentary about world hunger, she knew she'd found something important. But the writer of these notebooks is not the father she thought she knew. From there Julie Salverson traces a fascinating web of personal and political history, of storytelling, of culture and it's shaping and of a man caught in a time of great change.