Almost fifteen years ago, I was working one of my first jobs in television. I was a Researcher/Story editor on a ridiculous call in show on a small Public Educational TV Network here in Canada. (It was literally a phone in show. That's right. Radio on TV.)
Anyway, the host was this irascible old Newfie broadcaster named Harry Brown. Harry had been around forever. He had stories for everything and opinions to match. Sometimes Harry was a bit much, but he was our host and he'd been in the business forever, and I was all of twenty-one. So I listened.
One time we were on a remote in Ottawa. (It may have been radio on TV, but at least this time it was radio on TV on location.) We were driving from the University of Ottawa back to our hotel. On the drive we passed by the CBC Headquarters in Ottawa. Harry was an old CBC type from way back. He pointed at the building and turned to me and shook his head and said, "There it is. CBC Headquarters. One thousand people work in that building. And the place is completely innocent of camera or microphone."
I couldn't believe that such a huge building could house so many employees that had nothing to do with the actual work of broadcasting radio or TV. I was young, and obviously had a lot to learn about the CBC.
My thoughts returned to that day several times during the recent eight week lockout of creative employees by CBC Management. The incident made the CBC a joke around the world -- I mean, the national broadcaster basically shut down for two months.
The reverberations from that are ongoing, but one of the most depressing things to come out of the chicanery and bloviating that surrounded the "labor disruption" (to use the management weasel-phrase) was the sense that the CBC will probably never be fixed, because the very people charged to fix it are...um...the problem.
An excellent article in last Sunday's Toronto Star sketches the enormity of the problem, and offers a pretty provocative solution.
Which of course will never, ever, ever happen.
In some parts of the CBC, there is one manager for every 3 employees.
As a writer, I have never pitched a program to CBC. I don't even know who I'd pitch. I mean, I know names. There are six or seven of them. But who does what? Comedy doesn't seem to only do comedy. Some miniseries are done by the series department. There are TV series that didn't go through the drama series department.
Who do you call? Beats me.
Read the article here.
4 comments:
"the host was this irascible old Newfie broadcaster named Harry Brown. Harry had been around forever. He had stories for everything and opinions to match."
As the khoi-san like to say: *&%^%&, **xhw@, *KN&%. Which loosely translates to, "you are where you have been"!
I admit at the outset that I am almost entirely ignorant of canadian television outside of Degrassi, Rin Tin Tin K-9 Cop, or those old CBS latenight
"Crimetime" shows. But I do know a little of international television having been to several Mipcoms selling packages of movies for tv, and greek gameshows (don't ask).
I read the article (and signed up for Star.com!), and I got the feeling that the writer - when a) discussing the CBC's role in developing new drama, and b)ensuring that Canadians know that the CBC is a good source for drama (no pun intended) - didn't factor in the implications of the international television market.
I'm sure the whole "Canadian tv for Canadians" is good and all, but what about the exporting of those programs? What good is a homegrown product in today's market if you can't sell it elsewhere as well?
Shouldn't the CBC (or any net in any country for that matter) be letting the WORLD know that they are a good source for drama?
Am I entirely missing the point?
Well that's a really interesting point. There's probably another post bubbling somewhere on that very subject, but for the moment in short,
You have to understand that the Canadian TV market is not like any other in the world. The advantage of being so close to the USA means that when Canadian networks go down to the LA screenings, they scoop up the same shows and air them at the same times as the US nets do. They piggyback on their much larger marketing campaigns in magazines, and the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) allows cable channels to substitute the Canadian network feed over the US channel when they're simulcasting the same show. Canadian Channels make a TON of money doing this. It's a nice little protected racket, and for the most part Canadian TV viewers take for granted they can watch US networks or Canadian networks any time they want. If there's a show on F/X like the Shield, say, and it doesn't air at THE SAME TIME as it airs in the US, people grumble. Contrast that to the UK where it can be months.
The net result is that the Canadian networks don't really do a lot of drama at all. They do only what they're forced to do, pretty much. The CBC, being a national broadcaster with a different mandate, is supposed to be different. That's kind of what the guy is arguing.
The other interesting thing in international TV I gather is the fact that the international market has changed a lot. It used to be a lot of shows that were made in Canada were "industrials," ie: shows that were not discernably Canadian at all, and were designed specifically for export. Think Relic Hunter, Lost World, crap like that. They used to make loads of those but that market dried up, partly because most other countries actually found their viewers were willing and eager to watch their own locally produced cop, detective, medical shows. The spots that used to go to US Net fare and these Industrial exportable shows were now being filled by locally produced programming.
That leaves Canada seriously out of step with the way things are going in other countries.
There is a big international co-production bent in Canada -- and that model of selling to other countries, even to get the show off the ground initially, is done all the time with movies, and animation. There are usually some drama series that do it too. Charlie Jade was one example, and another that's being filmed right now in SA is a SA-Canada co pro - it's called JOZI H and it's basically ER in a hospital in Johannesburg.
The peculiarities of the Canadian market, and the peculiar place of the CBC in that firmament, was what was driving that author's file, I think.
It really does, in the end, come back to the hoary old cliche that living next door to the USA is like sleeping next to an elephant.
I think Trudeau said that. Though it might have been Don Cherry.
No one outside of Canada got that joke.
See, I can't play in either country. I'm screwed.
As we all go into co-productions and try to cram as much story into the five acts as possible, I'm thinking that we are all going to start adopting more and more stylistic conventions from other cultures - especially in our visual storytelling. This will make our shows not Canadian or American or South African so much as "international."
Were there any things you were required to put into CJ to appeal directly to either the SA or CAN audiences? I'm sure casting was an issue, but I'm thinking more along the lines of story elements, themes and the like...
Thanks for initiating the discussion - These things are of great importance to all of us.
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