Potemkin Culture
by Farrell Childe, licensed television critic
Reviewed, eventually, in this article:Canadians hate welfare bums. Unless the welfare bum is Ted Rogers. Or anyone else in the English-Canadian television business.The first episode of The Tournament, CBC Television, Mondays from January 3 to February 7, 2005, 8:30 pm
English-Canadian television – one of those "cultural industries" the government is so keen to protect – could not exist without massive government support of one kind or another. Which it gets, as we will see, regardless of whether it's produced by public or private corporations. The irony is that massive government support has produced Canadian cultural institutions which are completely out of touch with Canadian culture.
Obviously the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a creature of government, but the other forms of English-Canadian television are as well. First of all, private broadcasters (as opposed to cable channels) are allowed by the government to maintain their profits by developing a bare minimum of original programming, and that at cut rates which often result in poor production values and under-rehearsed performance.
Private broadcasters, then, perform their role as Canadian cultural institutions by filling up their schedules with cheap American programs, and the government lets them get away with it. And nobody watches the few Canadian shows they do produce, either. Headlines are produced when the rare Canadian show appears among the top 20 English programs, usually closer to twentieth place than to first (the most recent BBM ratings show two Canadian shows in the top 20, Cold Squad in tenth place and Corner Gas in thirteenth).
As for cable channels, if our memories are long enough we know that Canadian cable channels would not exist without the government forcing people to subscribe to them. Services like MuchMusic and TSN were started as pay services not included in the regular cable package. You wanted MuchMusic, you paid extra for it. These services were started with much hype about how they were going to make money hand over fist by filling gaps in programming, and then a couple of months later they were begging to be included in the basic cable package so that people would be forced to subscribe to them. Which of course the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission agreed to. We wouldn't want capitalists missing their suppers at Hy's, eh?
TSN, by the way, ended up as an outlet for ESPN – so much for Canadian culture. And Sportsnet, created to provide competition in what the CRTC apparently considered to be the vast field of Canadian sport, ended up as an outlet for Fox Sports.
Anyway, we have ended up with a raft of Canadian cable channels which must be purchased in packages so that we can get the American channels we really want to watch. English-Canadian cable channels do provide Canadian programming. However, at the end of each of their Canadian programs appears a list of the federal and provincial government grants the producers received. They have to have grants, because a peculiar characteristic of Canadian television which appears to disturb Canadians not at all is that nobody watches it. So you can't charge much for advertising, and so the cable channels can't afford to subsidize production themselves.
What's a capitalist to do, eh? You can't make a buck, so the taxpayer is just going to have to give you one. Or two. Or billions.
All to produce TV that no one watches. I realize that people these days have different, inclusive ways of looking at things than do we old fogeys, but really, how can something be a cultural industry when it doesn't appeal to the culture? If Canadian TV was a cultural industry, wouldn't it actually appear to be a part of Canadian culture?
Why doesn't Canadian television appeal to the people who constitute Canadian culture? One reason is that the people at CRTC who monitor Canadian content are definitely not hard to please. If you have trouble satisfying the Canadian content requirements, they've even been known to look the other way, which explains how crap like Train 48 is allowed to pass as a valid expression of Canadian culture.
The chief reason, though, that Canadian TV plays little role in Canadian culture has been discussed in another article here. Briefly, the reason is that Canadian TV is produced by members of one subculture (a rather privileged one) for the edification of members of another subculture (the rest of us) which the members of the first subculture know nothing about. That is why, for example, Train 48 was promoted with its prole character reciting limericks – the upscale types who produce Canadian television aren't aware that only members of their subculture like limericks, and that the probability of finding a single working class person who knows a single limerick is approximately zero.
Anyway, Canadian TV is intended to uplift the lower orders. Because the people who produce it have serious doubts about the lower orders' intelligence, they make sure that you're never in any doubt about what lesson you should be taking from the program. In comedies actors smile on their punchlines, while in dramas they over-emote outrageously to make sure that the proles understand what their characters are supposed to be feeling. Over-emoting is even common on news broadcasts, which seem to assume that viewers are incapable of appreciating the horror of, for example, a plane crashing into a mountain without the newsreader presenting the information that one has indeed crashed into a mountain as if he or she had witnessed the crash personally.
Well, that pretty well clarifies the beliefs I brought to my viewing of the first episode of The Tournament, a six-part series which started on CBC on January 3. Unlike other CBC shows, it's about an actual Canadian topic – a minor hockey team going to a tournament. How it got on the CBC among all those imitations of foreign shows – CBC's fall flagship show was The Greatest Canadian, a franchised version of a British program idea, and the winter's flagship show is Canadian Antiques Roadshow – is anybody's guess
I had misgivings at the start of the first episode when I saw that it was produced by Howard Busgang. Whenever I've seen Mr. Busgang on TV he has seemed to be a thoroughly nice man, but his previous contribution to the CBC schedule was the godawful An American in Canada. However, I was pleasantly surprised by The Tournament.
Of course, as a CBC production The Tournament has to be unprofessional to some extent. Its professional failing is its titles, which are used to establish scenes. Like other titles on the CBC, these ones are misspelt. They even misspell one of the character's names! And doesn't anyone at the CBC know how to write a plural possessive, something which the titles repeatedly botched? I realize the show wasn't produced by CBC employees, but presumably they looked at it before taking delivery.
But – the acting was good, the direction was good, the camerawork and lighting were good (none of that artsy-fartsy melange of extreme close-ups, underlighting, and vertiginous pans which characterizes so many Canadian shows). Al Goulem's interpretation of Barry McConnell, the show's lead male character, at first put me off as too similar to the usual Canadian TV overacting, but the script soon revealed that for once there was a legitimate dramatic reason for this approach. Paula Boudreau was also successful at interpreting a complex character, Barry's wife Janice, and in fact everyone was good.
(By the way, the CBC website doesn't bother to list the actors, and the CBC didn't reply to my inquiry about obtaining a list of the cast, so I'll note that Martin Huisman plays the McConnells' son Robbie, Kate Greenhouse portrays Janice's friend Deb, Tracy Hoyt and Richard Jutras are the team's sponsors, Annie Bovard plays their foul-mouthed daughter Denim, Cas Anvar plays the team's trainer, and Christian Potenza successfully brings his familiar doofus character from commercials for Listerine and Hall's into series television as Barry's friend Doug.)
Like many Canadian comedy presentations, the first episode of The Tournament kept up a slower flow of comic ideas than most American or British comedies, but as usual once I had adjusted to the difference I found the slower pace quite agreeable and conducive to better character development. Some of the comic ideas (for example, Barry's "longhouse" extension to his home which is intended to qualify his son for competition in another county) could have been presented more effectively, but then even I am not perfect.
It is only fair to warn you that The Tournament is, or, at least, its first episode was, a black comedy. In particular, the characters are utterly contemptible. They have no redeeming qualities. Even the long-suffering Paula rejoices when Barry harasses the team's coach into a stroke during an important game and then leads the team to success in qualifying for the tournament.
I found all that off-putting myself until I realized that the script was actually raising serious questions about the way we behave, and that one of the ways the writers may have intended to do that was by offending people. Trying to offend people is better than trying to instruct them. It's less condescending for a start, and more honest. Also it's what we try to do at NEW IMPROVED HEAD all the time, and we're okay.
Anyway, I can't guarantee that you also will like The Tournament. I can't even guarantee that I will like the second episode. But it's worth finding out if you or I like it. It wouldn't hurt you to take a look, eh? I suggest giving it fifteen minutes. It's not like there's a hell of a lot on at 8:30 pm on Monday.
And it's worth taking a closer look at English-Canadian television in general. We all believe that we get what we pay for, and we're paying through the nose for "our" television. If English-Canadian culture consists largely of slavish imitation of American and British examples and of conformity to the moral and ethical standards of Rosedale, then we have the English television we deserve.
January 5, 2005
Potemkin Culture © Coolth, 2005
