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2000 Review: TV or not TV Daily Arts Alert ... by Cathleen Bond Wednesday Dec. 20 Over the next couple of weeks we're going to be looking back at some of the biggest stories in Canadian arts and culture from the year 2000. Today, some stories the small screen.
All this has been fabulous news for people in the independent production industry. Pamela Wallin burns all her bridges at CBC, and she moves on and sets up shop on a new CTV-owned channel called Talk TV. And there are dozens more of these odd channels, like the Canadian version of the Food Network, Prime, Vision and Outdoor Life. The History Channel spends millions on a show called Pioneer Quest, spends another small fortune on promotion, even has a gratis sex scandal thrown in to help it make the front pages -- and I don't know a single soul in this country who watched the darn thing.
Do we even have a uniquely Canadian culture on television anymore? The only must-see-TV I can think of -- the kind of show people book in their minds to watch every week -- is This Hour Has 22 Minutes. (Rick Mercer's brilliant spoof referendum to change Stockwell Day's name to Doris was, indeed, a turning point in the federal election.) Other than that, is there anything else you really want to see in this increasingly fragmented television industry? We can all take-or-leave most of what passes for Cancon these days ... Cold Squad leaves us cold, no amount of publicity can save P.R., and the Canadian edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire just doesn't count, in Cdn. currency. Other news from 2000:
What do you think would make good, culturally relevant, Canadian television? I know this is an age old debate, but nobody seems to have figured out the recipe. Got any ideas? What do you think about the multi-channeled digital universe?
Dive into our TV & Film forum
The exhibition, a discourse on the plague of disposability which is currently ravaging our planet, is the focus of the show. It's "the result of an artistic exchange between 12 Japanese and Canadian contemporary design artists and theorists, consists of gallery installations that propose alternatives to modern society's obsession with acquiring, consuming and disposing." The installations focus on objects and environments created out of recycled and recyclable materials.
E12: Canadian & Japanese Designs for Living Through December 27, 2000 Tuesday to Sunday
More from our year-end review:
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 Updated each weekday by Cathleen Bond ... bookmark this page and come back for the latest news, reviews and gossip on the Canadian arts scene. RECENT FEATURES: >> Kid Stuff: Toy displays for Christmas at Canada's museums >> Bruce Mau: Big designs in LifeStyle >> Robert Service: Musical tribute to a Canadian hero >> Circle of Trees: Art and nature come full circle >> Atwood: The critics and The Blind Assassin >> Public Art: Who decides what art will fill our civic spaces and expand our imagination? >> Public Art: Who decides what art will fill our civic spaces and expand our imagination? >> Mags & Zines: A review of the best in Canadian arts publications. >> Digital Art: Clickable Cancon, a quick tour of the latest in digital art. >>
Cancon Quiz >> Iron Road: The Arts & Culture forum follows the creation of a new Canadian opera >> Interview: Carole McDowell tells us how she and artist Helen Lucas made the transition from gallery walls to the www gallery. >> Public Library in Peril How should libraries be transformed to meet future needs of Canadians? >> Culture
at the Crossroads >> Web
Wizard
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For me the big story for TV 2000 was so many channels, so little content. Especially distinctly Canadian content. Every time I open up TV Guide, I find some new channel I'd never heard of before. And now we have digital channels not even listed in TV Guide (that some Canadians receive via satellite), and 21 more digital specialty channels are coming down the pipe next fall.
If these indie producers can't get a TV channel, the producers just set up shop on the Internet. Alliance-Atlantis is doing this with a new show called U8TV. Adapting to new technology is all fine and good, if you're happy watching streaming media in a 2-inch window on your computer screen, but what does it mean for viewers who wants to watch some quality tube? When I want quality, I find a Canadian channel like Bravo and Showcase that's managed to purchase some programming from HBO in the US or Granada in Britain. Queer as Folk, Sex and the City, Beggars and Choosers and even West Wing on NBC makes for better TV than most of the shows currently being turned out by Canadian broadcasters.
CBC claimed it was able to get 2 million viewers per week for its Canada: A People's History, but those were combined numbers from four different airings on the main English net, the French-language arm and a couple of Newsworld repeats. And CBC was able to line up only one of five hoped-for corporate sponsors, meaning that even though audiences chose to tune in at some point, advertisers shunned this worthy special. That's the really bad news -- cheap TV is preferable, and we're unlikely to see anything of this quality in the near
future. (Episodes 1 through 5 will be shown yet again, between Christmas and New Year's on CBC Newsworld.)
Recycling Art: A couple of months ago I wrote up a piece on Halifax-based architect Brian MacKay-Lyons. He was in the throes of getting involved in a new touring exhibition entitled E12 Canadian & Japanese Designs for Living. Well the show is on the road but what's it all about? E12 is a celebration of the millennial year "through which contemporary dance and design artists from Canada and Japan collaborate on the joint creation of new works to be presented in both countries." The show debuted in Halifax, it's currently in Toronto, on to Montreal in January and then off to Vancouver and then across the Pacific to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.
Twenty clicks through Canadian culture: Test your memory, from Anne
of Green Gables to Shift.