Popular oral histories of the Great Depression, such as Studs Terkel's Hard Times and Barry Broadfoot's Ten Lost Years, provided a context for this series of documentaries on the 1930s in Canada. The programs, produced and directed by David Rabinovitch, were originally broadcast in eight parts on Take 30 in the 1974-75 season. They combined interviews of people who went through the years of the Depression with newsreel footage and archival photographs and documents. The material was presented in prime time in four half-hours over the summer of 1975.