These two books – both written by dedicated insiders – present two opposite versions of the ever-beleaguered and long-suffering Canadian Broadcasting Company.

From Knowlton Nash comes the “warm-fuzzies” book, a compendium of wonderful anecdotes about memorable CBC personalities and characters from the past 60 years. Intended as a mate to his 1994 CBC history, The Microphone Wars, Cue the Elephant! takes the reader on a light-hearted romp from the golden years of CBC radio to the retirement of Mr. Dressup and the ego-centred conflict on the set of the hit series The Road to Avonlea, which finished its seven-year run earlier this year.

The broadcaster’s introduction describes Cue the Elephant! as “a book of joy with a bit of prattle and tattle,” rather than a “book of woe.” His title derives from the live-performance days of Canadian television: during a show from the 1952 Canadian National Exhibition, a truculent elephant’s response to director Harry Rasky’s demands was to drop “a very large load of waste material” before lumbering off the set.

Nash interviewed 120 people about their CBC memories, many of which focus on happier – or at least more reckless – times at the Corp. For instance, there was the “literate lunacy” resulting from the incomparable verbal daring of Max Ferguson in his “Rawhide” character, a persona born out of the announcer’s soul-deep loathing of country-and-western music. And many baby boomers dedicated to the CBC will remember the inspired nuttiness of “Eclectic Circus” MC Allan McFee, who was wont to describe staffers he disliked as “pieces of excrement” and once tried to asphyxiate producer Drew Crossan by running a hose from his jalopy’s exhaust pipe into the radio building’s air intake vent.

Anthony Manera might have preferred the threat of wafting carbon monoxide during his eventful 16 months as CBC president from November 1993 to March 1995. Instead, he had to cope with the fiscal strangulation of the corporation he loved and had served for 10 years. Manera, now a consultant in Nepean, Ontario, was assured of the Liberal government’s fiscal and political support when he replaced Gerard Veilleux. Just a year later, it was clear that the public broadcaster’s parliamentary appropriation would be slashed by $270-million by 1997.

Written more in sorrow than in anger, A Dream Betrayed provides the inside dope on the events leading to Manera’s principled resignation last year. If Nash is a troubadour singing a paen to the creativity and exuberance at the heart of the CBC, Manera is the relentlessly honest piper of a dirge bemoaning cultural nationalism defeated by political expediency.

Manera is a measured and restrained writer, but he makes plain who the CBC’s enemies were during his tenure: The Globe and Mail’s editorial writers, who harped on a constant pro-privatization agenda even as Globe reporters were presenting a balanced picture of the CBC’s troubles; the inability of then-Heritage Minister Michel Dupuy to turn professed sympathy into concrete support among his cabinet colleagues; and the sometimes hostile manner of former CBC board chairman Patrick Watson.

Manera, who came to Canada from Sicily as a boy, clearly sees the CBC as an integral vehicle of understanding among Canadians. “To dismantle the CBC would erode our country’s very reason for being, our belief that we as Canadians created something different on the northern half of this continent,” Manera writes. “Why would we allow our television screens, the most powerful mass-communication medium in history, to be dominated by the American dream? Is there no longer a Canadian dream?”

Reading Cue the Elephant! and A Dream Betrayed back to back may provide some sobering answers to that question.