It's a Good News, Bad News Thing

SUCH IS THE consistently, maddeningly schizophrenic nature of the Canadian Television racket that good news and bad news can spring from the same event.

First the good. You're looking at the front page of the Globe & Mail's Review Section today. That's two of the Trailer Park Boys, posing with Conservative Minister Stockwell Day at a reception put on by the CTF on Parliament Hill.

John Doyle paints an entertaining portrait of Day deliberately seeking out the Boys -- how, in fact they created excitement in the room. This is great, because it replicates exactly what I've seen with my own eyes across Canada -- only it's not regular folk swarming to see these guys; it's the jaded, stuffy political intelligentsia. I guess some things do translate.

From Doyle's article:

I've no idea what usually happens in Room 200 of the West Block on Parliament Hill. Something serious, I'm sure. It's a gorgeous room, with high ceilings, silk wallpaper and chandeliers. It's a room built for power to reside there.

On Monday night, the Boys were the most popular people in the room. Ricky (Robb Wells) and Julian (John Paul Tremblay) were like a magnetic force. At one point, there were more than 300 people in the room - MPs and senators, TV execs and reporters, TV actors - but the Boys were the central figures and the lineup to talk to them and have a photo taken with them was endless. I saw New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton arrive and, of course, head straight for the Boys to have his photo taken with them. Along with his wife, MP Olivia Chow, Layton looked immensely pleased to bask in the glow of proximity to those stoner-losers from Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

It was a testament to the power of television, and Canadian-made TV at that.

The event was called TV Stars on Parliament Hill, organized by the Canadian Television Fund to coincide with this week's Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearings on the future of the fund. The idea was to make politicians and the other powerful people in Ottawa aware that Canadian TV exists, that it is going from strength to strength and that some of its stars are Canadian icons.

As far as I could tell, it worked. If the vibe from the commissioners was hostile about the CTF and its shows, the vibe at the party on the Hill was all positive. I was told that 82 MPs or senators had said that they would come and many did.

What it also puts the lie to, of course, is Jim Shaw's many statements slamming Trailer Park Boys as exactly the kind of programming that points to the failure of the CTF.

You call something that's clearly a success a failure cause you don't like it, proving you're out of touch with the tastes of Canadians. And this is the guy who wants control of funding money because he'd be better at 'picking hits' than the CTF.

A guy who can't even recognize a hit that's on the air.

Now, you'd think that a tantrum throwing millionaire monopolist crybaby who witholds money he's legally obligated to contribute to the fund would be, oh, I don't know...not taken seriously.

But that's not the way things go in Gatineau. In fact, if you're a guy who won the baby lottery by being born into a family that got lucky in the cable business, well, then the CRTC will move mountains to accommodate you -- even when you stamp your feet and claim you're not going to show up.

From Doyle's column yesterday, relating his impression of the same CRTC hearings I wrote about on Monday:

GATINEAU, QUE. -- This is the setting: a windowless, airless room in a bland building in Gatineau, a few minutes drive from Parliament Hill. This is the situation: The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is holding public hearings on the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) task-force report. These are the issues: Is the money from government and cable and satellite levies being spent wisely on the creation of Canadian TV programs; should the money be spent on hit TV shows or on culturally significant TV; and, who gets to say where the money goes and, anyway, who knows a hit show from a failure?

These are the players - TV executives, civil servants, administrators, lawyers, and the unions and guilds that represent the creators of Canadian TV storytelling. This is where what you refer to as the cable company is called a "broadcasting distribution undertaking" (or simply a " BDU") and where everybody uses such phrases as "a benchmark for moving forward."

I hope you get the picture. This is where the vigour and charm of television storytelling disappears. This is where the glamour of making television drama or comedy evaporates.

Nothing is really moving forward here. I can smell it in the airless, windowless room. The smell of people who work for the CRTC wanting to move backward, to retreat from as much Canadian TV storytelling as possible to submit to the whining of cable-company executives. This is where the culture is killed off.

So there it goes. Bureaucrats with the power to shank the system, just as they did in 1999 where a Broadcaster-led rule change led to the demise of sixty percent of Canadian drama and comedy shows within a year.

Voices of regular Canadians ignored. Hits called flops. Successes called failures, and most of all -- creative people held hostage to a system that's always about everything else first, but the work.

There are several Canadian writers right now prepping for their chance to appear in that windowless room in Gatineau on Friday. One of them is Karen Walton. Karen's a prolific feature and TV writer (Queer as Folk, Ginger Snaps, The Many Trials of One Jane Doe) who probably should be working on a script instead of a speech. But it's a speech she's been reworking, time and time again, because she has to go justify herself, and me, and all people trying to make TV in this country before the bureaucrats in Gatineau -- again, because the boy with the pipe stamped his foot, snapped his fingers, and triggered a laughably disastrous report that would make the complicated process of getting shit made in Canada even more complicated. Yet does Walton sound bitter? Well, here's how she described the process on Facebook, when someone thanked her for "stepping up."

This isn't stepping up - it's part of minding my/our store, part of doing business in Canada. Because it's a public + private investment system, we all have the privilege - and responsibility - of participating in its fate. It's a mixed blessing true -- but it beats being completely at the mercy of multinational corporations, to me.

I wish I could be as upbeat about it as Karen. Having dipped in and out of the hearings all week, it just reinforces for me that the ostensible goal of all this -- making decent tv programs -- is a concept that's so far from the Commission's comfort zone that we might as well be talking about how to end the zebra mussel infestation of Lake Ontario.

And Canada's cozy business community, never one to actually make waves when it's, say, the banking system or cable monopolies that are protected or supported, gets to spew their own smug bile. Take Peter Foster in the Financial Post. Seriously. Take him. Writing for his paper, part of the huge Canwest Global chain that, by the way, has gotten rich off being protected through things like foreign ownership laws and simultaneous substitution...(guess so long as its his job that benefits, he's fine with it, eh?) He gets to repeat the usual, perennially unchallenged canards -- "cultural" equals no one wants to watch...if you have a good idea, you go to the USA -- because why would you stay here?

Apparently we need public funding to remind us that we are a country of foul-mouthed, trailer-park-dwelling losers, cop killers, adulterous hockey wives and sanitized religious sects.

Oh, yes. Canadian self loathing, nicely dressed up as cynicism. What a fucktard. Roll over and poke Jim Shaw, Pete. He's late for the hearing he caused.

That's why, it's nice that at least there's that picture. Some evidence that somehow, somewhere, there might be someone who thinks that maybe it's a better idea to stop talking BDU's and start talking outlines. That the time of creatives is better spent working out acts, rather than three sets of forms. That the joy of the Trailer Park and that Gas Station in the middle of nowhere and the denizens of the Mercy mosque and that Cafe in Little Italy with all the Goalies, and Jimmy Reardon and Dominic DaVinci and Mike Kessler and the residents of a run down apartment block called Robson Arms might be worth something.

By the way, the answer to the mussel thing is: dump reruns of The Trouble With Tracey and The Starlost into the Lake.

You heard that here first.