What a find! From CBC's archives for the show Fighting Words. Its initial run was from 1953 till 1962. It had a 'talking heads' format -- the guests would discuss and debate a series of topics fielded by the host, Nathan Cohen. I've put below a clip from a 1960 episode featuring Max Black, Canadian philosopher George Grant, actress Tony Robins, and newspaper editor Michael Barkway. The show is pretty neat -- I haven't seen video footage of Black and Grant apart from this clip -- but it illustrates a weakness of most TV intellectual talk shows in that people can seldom finish a thought before being cut off. Cohen, Barkway, and Black smoke throughout. The show's focus was on issues in what we would now call 'applied ethics'. The conversation about espionage (in the latter half of the clip) occasions some remarks on the state by Black and Grant. Max Black: at 14.19 'To apply moral terms to a state is to commit a mistake in logic'.
Other episodes of this show featured Robertson Davies, Brendan Behan, J. B. Priestley, Morley Callaghan, and Norman Mailer.