CBC Bobbles Its Legacy

Legacy is a funny thing.

Especially when it comes to something like broadcasting, which in one way has always been sort of ephemeral. Legacy can kind of be like obscenity. It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

A couple of years ago, the CBC showed a special that culled all the color footage they had of WWII. It was a real eyeopener. For those of us -- most of us -- who weren't alive on D-Day or VE Day or the day the Germans marched into Poland, that era is consigned to a history place in our minds partly by the nature of the images we've always processed from it: images that have always been in Black & White. Seeing some of the new, color technology marshalled to take images of everyday life, preparation, and battle -- well, it really reshuffled the deck for me. It made me think differently about something I hadn't really thought about before.

(I'd love to embed a clip here, but the CBC is too wise to use the technology that, you know, users use.)

That special is a perfect example of an organization understanding the value of its legacy. Knowing that that footage was valuable and set apart -- that's a TV understanding of the world. The CBC did a couple of interesting projects in other ways, too, like cutting together old cultural footage into a weird little program called Jimmy MacDonald's Canada. That show, through sheer creativity, took something that you wouldn't think could work -- hilariously square CBC reportage of the time, and made it fresh and PoMo. You know who can do things like that? Creative people.

These are hard times for the CBC. It's an organization beset on all sides. Firebrand wingnuts from Alberta fulminate regularly on the waste of their tax dollars; the organization is asked to do more and more with less and less. Yes, as a Crown corporation there is considerable waste at CBC -- too many managers. Too little accountability. I have a friend who recently left a job at CBC Radio somewhere in the country. She'd regularly describe the machinations and bureaucratic puffery that engulfed the office -- and in describing the show she worked on, I was always struck by the sense of just how incredibly overmanaged she was. There seemed to be three or four people doing one job. It sounded like a nightmare. And none of the machinations made content any better.

When the pressure comes to fix bureaucratic organizations, the people at the top never, ever seem to trim the bureaucracy. I saw this on a much smaller scale when I was at the start of my career at the Province of Ontario's educational broadcaster, TVOntario. Very often there, you'd see decisions made that just were not in the interest of making television, which was nominally the product we were selling. In fact, the tail wagged the dog: television needs were constantly subverted and sublimated to the needs of the bureaucracy. Shortly before I left, climbing up the next rung in the career ladder, I found myself in a huge meeting of about forty people discussing the then-revolutionary topic of what we were going to do about the internet. I looked around, and saw that I was easily the youngest, least experienced person there -- but damn, the things coming out of people's mouths were embarrassing. (A few of these people are still in Canadian broadcasting. And some are in great positions of responsibility.)

Of those forty people, there were about six or eight of us that had anything to do with TV. I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, went back to my office and started phoning around for other jobs.

What does this have to do with legacy?

Bureaucratic organizations just cannot be trusted to make decisions that have to do with history or legacy when it comes to broadcasting. TV and cultural product is simply different. It's not just a product, it's a reflection of a society. And as the notion of "reality" becomes ever faker thanks to TV, preserving that which helps us really define our industry grows ever more important.

Here's the kind of thinking that I'm talking about. To many fans, it's inconceivable to think this, but great swaths of early TV shows were once erased by organizations like the BBC and NBC because they needed space. That's why many early seasons of Doctor Who are missing. It's why we have very little of the early Tonight Shows with Johnny Carson. Now, the United States has the Museum of TV and Radio, and the BBC has become much more rigorous with preserving its history.

But right now, even as other organizations start to realize what they have, and recognize legacy, the CBC is looking to do something monumentally stupid.

Yes, CBC recently did something great for Canadian TV history. But they're about to undo that good work, through a bureaucratic, widget-minded decision that will seriously impact the legacy of broadcasting in this country for years to come.

They're going to close their design department.

Even more than firing all the publicists, as they did in 2005 (a move that everybody but CBC Management and Media Profile now know was an utter disaster -- outsourcing having proven more expensive and less effective than what they had before) this move is a true case of ignoring legacy in favor of expediency.

In this case, kids...brace yourself for the big ha ha. They want to get rid of these floors on the huge Broadcast Centre in Toronto -- the one we all paid for to be built in the 1980's -- so they can rent them out for real estate.

Meanwhile, the costs have already started to come back about life in the post-CBC Design Department era, and lo and behold, it looks like it's not going to be cheaper to outsource! Wow! Who'dathunkit? Doesn't matter, though, because by the time that really filters out, the decision makers will have rolled over! yayyy!

As you watch this video, I want you to marvel at the fact that CBC -- who are supposed to be making TV -- are getting rid of the people who make stuff for TV. It's hard to believe that it even made it this long, but it did...and there's no organization in place that's going to preserve ANY OF THIS.

Whatever your argument about outsourcing - I want you to pay close attention to those pans over old phone booths, lamps, period washers -- all this stuff that the CBC has right there, ready to be used -- all of that was built up, paid for by years of the tax dollars you use to fund the CBC. This is the CBC's legacy, but it's yours too. But now it's going to be sold off piece by piece. And anybody who wants to do something with this stuff in the future won't be able to go to one place. That's right. We're going to do something to make it harder to make TV in this country.

Of course, in the new bureaucratic world of CBC, that might actually be the point. Sell the store, then no one can complain when you can't open up for business. It's already done. No use crying over spilt milk.

They'll probably find a way to lose money on the real estate lease, too.

It doesn't matter that in years to come, everyone will say this decision was a stupid, say, as wiping all that early Carson. By then it's going to be too late.

Your tax dollars, not at work. What a colossal goddamn shame.