Hold Your Nose and Pass The Smelling Salts

I'VE MANAGED TO pull up sick in the last forty-eight hours, just as we get into the meat of storybreaking. Bleah.

Of course, at least some of that queasiness should be reserved for the subject that never goes away and never gets better: the whingeing and moaning over Canadian TV.

Ten years since broadcasters were allowed to re-define "priority programming" to include crappy magazine shows nobody gives a shit about. Ten painful years trying to make inroads with creative dramas and comedies. Some successes. Some failures. But a drop in the bucket to the big tent show: Broadcasters vs. Cablers.

The latter are making all the money. The former are mad. Both, in their time, have complained about homegrown programming not "being competitive" in the midst of their very, very much-protected industries.

In the sideshow this week, Jim Henshaw comes out in an entertaining post for Team Shaw. I tend to feel more like one of his commenters, who compares consumers' role in this little fight as being Poland caught between Germany and the Soviet Union in WWII.

Except, of course, the Poles actually had a sense of their own culture.

Ooh. Low blow. I know. Cranky. I'm in a hotel for night nine. Gimme a break.

The display at the CRTC has been weird, with Cable co's offering interesting speculation about how to re-align the industry, as the conventional broadcasters continue their single-minded pursuit of Carriage Fees. Or, As Henshaw puts it,

Despite ample opportunities offered by Commission Chair Konrad von Finckenstein for input on how the broken conventional model of television could be fixed, Fecan offered nothing but “give us more money”.

Seemingly unable to articulate how that money could be spent, be it on local news or maybe even drama, to bring back both audience and advertisers, he raised the same question a lot of people have been asking about auto industry bailouts -- “If nobody’s buying the product, how does keeping the company afloat a while longer solve that problem?”

Even when von Finckenstein mentioned that it’s been a downhill slope for “ten years”, Fecan couldn’t come up with one idea on what might change things.

Anybody remember what happened ten years ago? 1999? The year the nets won a reprieve from doing expensive dramas in favor of cheaper to produce and mostly unwatchable pap?

And throwing more money at this guy, just like the CRTC did back then, is going to make it all better. Uh-huh.

So Jim Shaw made what he knew was a winning bet, and immediately further pissed on Fecan’s parade by stating that his Kenora station (another small market outfit) had managed to end up $200,000 in the black last year.

Huh?

You mean local TV can make money?

How come the CTV affiliated Globe & Mail never mentioned that? Is there some odd reason Canwest’s National and Financial Posts both missed it as well? Whatever could cause such a journalistic lapse?

Jim says $200,000 isn’t a lot of money. Maybe not to him. But it’s more than GM or Chrysler made last year. And suddenly a lot of people who pay Cable bills or work at the CRTC have begun wondering just how well those other stations could be doing if they weren’t saddled with a schedule of lame celebrity magazine shows and derivative reality offerings their viewers can already get elsewhere.

If you choose to read beyond Jim, please give a moment to consider that today is yet another wonderful Canwest D (for 'Debt') day. What will happen? You got me.

Meanwhile, on the public side, sometimes the CBC's Richard Stursberg is a tough guy to like. He can be high-handed. I'm not the guy's publicist. ( I also sure as hell wouldn't want his job.)

And though I know it's easy to point at me at this point as a guy who's worked on CBC shows now and for the past two seasons and declare me biased -- I don't deny it -- I wonder how someone could read this little article Stursberg wrote for the Star and not have a little pause. It articulates a point of view that makes quite a bit of sense, in context.

The CBC is the only television service in the country devoted specifically to Canadian programming. Our 8 p.m.-11 p.m. prime-time schedule is entirely Canadian; those of our competitors are overwhelmingly American. If this does not make us "distinctive," what would?

Ah, say our critics, we're not "distinctive" because CBC shows are made within the same narrative and format conventions as many U.S. television shows. They argue that the Canadian privates could make these shows.

Maybe. But they don't. CBC spends more on Canadian drama and comedy than all the privates combined.

But, say the critics, it's not "high quality" and a public broadcaster needs to focus on quality, not popularity.

Here is the root of the matter. Some people believe there is a mutually exclusive choice to be made between popularity and excellence. If a show is successful, it must necessarily be coarse or vulgar. For some, in fact, television itself is an unworthy medium.

This is patronizing, disrespectful and untrue. They are the views of those who haven't paid attention lately to shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, which has been inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in New York and sold to more than 60 countries around the world. Or Being Erica, cheered by critics here and abroad. Or other programs that Canadians love to watch, like The Tudors, The Border, Heartland, Rick Mercer Report, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Dragon's Den and The Week the Women Went.

In Lausanne this year, The Rose D'Or Awards are devoting an entire day to celebrating the CBC.

When the pundits describe what they want on TV, it's more "high brow," more "educational" and more "mandate." They want it to be a university lecture, a ballet, or a treatise on world hunger. While television can sometimes portray these, it is none of those but rather much more: the greatest popular art form in the world.

Every serious public broadcaster, including CBC, aspires to make great national television.

The BBC is packed with wonderful, popular soap operas, sitcoms, reality shows, game shows, police procedurals and comedies. They are all relentlessly British and relentlessly focused on attracting audiences. The BBC makes no apologies. It celebrates television for what it is.

In English Canada, it's sometimes argued that we've fallen away from CBC's Golden Age in the 1970s and 1980s. Not true. A typical prime time from 1982 was mostly American shows of little cultural distinction: Mork & Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati, Dallas or Joanie Loves Chachi.

Our Golden Age, arguably, is now. Our prime time is Canadian. It's also attracting more Canadians than Global, CITY, the A Channels or the E Channels. For the first time in history in English Canada, a Canadian schedule is beating an American one.

Yes, CBC is a rorschach test for everybody in the industry. No matter who you are, you tend to project your own concerns, biases, and needs onto it. Still, the defense that Stursberg makes needed to be said. And he said it pretty well.

Speaking of saying it pretty well, from the truth to power department, if you can tear yourself away from the "local TV is dying" kabuki sideshow going on at the CRTC, save a little energy to cheer on Team WGC as they present on Thursday -- along with Canadian showrunner Cal Coons. (Murdoch Mysteries.)

Michel Arpin may look on that presentation as the bleating of a self interested group. You may look at it a little differently. I certainly do. I think Thursday we'll get to see the only people at this whole hearing speaking out for a greater choice for consumers, and a greater voice for Canadians on the airwaves we all supposedly own.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go. That ColdFX has to be somewhere.