Lloyd Robertson 1995 Interview: “We Lost It For the Rest of the Newscast”

In this 1995 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Lloyd Robertson comes out from behind the desk. He is nineteen years into anchoring CTV National News — a job he would hold for thirty-five years in total — and he is sitting across from Dini Petty on the same network that carried him into the country’s living rooms every night. Petty’s introduction gets it exactly right: after nineteen years of watching him read the news, she says, this might be the first time most Canadians find out he has legs and can walk.

What follows is Robertson off duty. The centrepiece is the night his co-anchor Harvey Kirck read something off the teleprompter that was never meant to be said out loud, and neither man could hold the newscast together afterwards. He tells it as a broadcaster tells a story on a colleague — with the timing intact and no interest in protecting either of them. He also explains where the voice came from, and how his first on-air job arrived in Grade 7.

He was 61 here, sixteen years from his final sign-off, and he had just come back from his first trip to Hong Kong — two years before the handover, asking the city’s billionaires what they planned to do after 1997. Their answers, and the Canadian passports several of them were quietly carrying, land very differently now. There is a pink Rolls-Royce in it, and a gold one.

Lloyd Robertson died on August 4, 2026, at 92. Footage of him laughing at himself, doing voices, and telling stories on his own colleagues is rare. Unseen since its original 1995 broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.