John Doyle returned from Buenos Aires in the spirit of a soccer hooligan, taking a swipe at the biggest fans of Canadian television: Canadian TV writers (TV Writers - Study The Leamington Big Tomato - Review, June 11). Mr. Doyle cuts a wide swath for sins of snobbery he admits apply only "to a few."
I've never met anyone interested in making TV that no one wants to watch. Mr. Doyle knows this - he was in that airless CRTC room last year when the Writers Guild of Canada and four screenwriters fought against the proposal to split the Canadian Television Fund into commercial and cultural streams. It was Canadian TV writers who argued that the two can't be separated.
What we should be worried about isn't snobbish Canadian writers, it's a push with the new funding model - in which U.S. networks bulk up their prime-time skeds with programs bought cheaply in Canada - to spend CTF money on stories written for generic Anytown-USA productions. The CTF is a limited fund and meant to support stories written by Canadians aimed at Canadians. "Canadian and commercial" are as synonymous as "American and commercial," and every Canadian screenwriter knows it.
What I'm wondering is this: Where are the Canadian cultural warriors ready, willing and able to articulate why we need Canadian-made television?...Perhaps those who actually make Canadian TV are cowering in fear. Perhaps they are afraid of the cable companies. If so, they should be ashamed of themselves. Soon, it will be too late and the question will be this: Who speaks for the dead?John Doyle, Globe & Mail, Feb 15, 2007.
While I was away - I came back grumpy, obviously - an issue blew up. Chris Haddock, creator of Da Vinci's Inquest and Intelligence, complained - during an interview with a reporter - about CBC's lack of promotion for Intelligence. He had a point. In a response, a CBC spokeschappy took this condescending view: "We have not yet made a decision as to whether we'll continue with the show; when we do, Chris will be the first to know...Spokeschappy also tut-tutted about Haddock's "attempts to negotiate through the media his relationship with the CBC."
Worse, the normally sensible Denis McGrath, a TV screenwriter of some note, tut-tutted in his blog, "I'm with the CBC on one thing on this: This is not something that should be playing out in the media."
What utter nonsense. The Canadian TV racket suffers from enough don't-quote-me wussiness as it is. There is so much fear of angering some self-aggrandizing TV exec that hardly anyone speaks the truth, out loud, to the press... Another TV writer going all meek and mousy on the subject is disheartening. I really hate that.
John Doyle, Globe & Mail, December 18, 2007.
It's part of the national character, I think. We're not abusive, as American complainers sometimes are. And we don't believe in organizing a mass-action complaint, as Americans do. We get indignant. Then the person receiving the complaint gets really indignant in response.
John Doyle, Globe & Mail, Nov 25, 2003
Do I contradict myself?Very well then, I contradict myself.I am large, I contain multitudes.Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
4 rumbles:
Maybe Mr. Doyle did have a bad vacation while everyone else with any interest in Canadian TV was in Banff learning.
Who knows?
I don't think we should hold too him close to the fire though.
Instead, I urge sympathy. I suspect that our journalist brother is just victim of bad notes. I have this gut feeling that someone told him to be more "edgy" in his column so people will actually read it instead of using it to line their bird cage.
There are a lot of cuts at the papers these days... just sayin'.
The whole thing smells like a floundering attention grab.
He took a gamble - cashed in the respect that t.v. writers had for him and bet it on causing a big ruckus to get recognition.
And he lost.
Hardly a comment on his article at the Globe. A few passing comments on the net. Even-keeled responses from the specific people who Doyle is calling out.
I've seen bigger flame wars on Pokemon fan sites and those weren't started in a national newspaper.
Meanwhile, Doyle's twittering away, trawling for vitriol... but no one seems to care.
It's all kinds of sad.
Perhaps Doyle's just one of those Canadian writers who takes themselves too seriously.
I hear there are a lot of those. Read about it in the paper just the other day while I was lining my bird cage.
What amazing to me is that you had all those Doyle quotes handy... going back to 2003. Either that, or you have way, way too much time on your hands for a guy writing a TV series. That said, it was a terrific, highly entertaining post.
Lee, there's a guy in my story room, who may or may not be the first poster on this sucker, who has Google-fu that would make you weep.
But it's not hard to source Doyle. He's basically the premier TV columnist/reviewer in the country. I managed to pull that together while waiting for my team to assemble.
Then we went through the white and figured out the route to pink. (which comes before blue here, no I don't know why)
not hard.
Hmmm -- what does it say about Canadian television when a blog post about writers gets double the reaction of that for the country's top television critic writing in the supposed National newspaper?
Do I feel a tide turning?
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