pbs.old

Remember when PBS was the TV station for kindergartners and grandparents? I preferred The Electric Company to Sesame Street (I still love the Muppets, but Big Bird annoyed me right out of the gate) and the documentaries taught me more about the world than my elementary school teachers. As a teenager, I watched Saturday afternoon cooking shows with Mum, and Masterpiece Theatre was a Sunday night staple where I learned about history and literature through British dramas like I Claudius, Elizabeth R and The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

I suppose I’ve always viewed public TV as an educational tool more than entertainment (though, as in the case of MT, combining the two makes superior competition to the offerings of commercial networks). But the musical programming is either highbrow or old hat, certainly not aimed at the original MTV generation of which I am a member.

Ter and I—perhaps snobbishly—have a running joke that we’ll know we’re past our prime when Def Leppard show up on one of those oldies revues we recall from our youth. You know what I mean: the 50s and 60s singers/bands playing to a full-yet-middle-aged crowd in a nostalgic nod to better days, usually broadcast during pledge drives so you know who provides the bulk of their funding.

Music became important to me in the 70s. In the 80s, it was vital. And while our 80s icons continue touring into the 21^st century, there’s a pervading sense that, at some point, they’ll show up on public TV with—let’s just say it—the other has-beens.

One evening Ter asked me if I’ve heard of Duran Duran’s A Diamond in the Mind.

“Yeah, it’s the concert film from the tour for All You Need Is Now,” I replied.

“Have we seen it?”

“We have it.”

Surprised, she looked up. “We do?”

“We do. Why?”

She brandished the program guide she was perusing. “It’s on channel 9 at ten o’clock.”

*THUD*

Ter continued as if I hadn’t blacked out while staying upright. “You say we have it?”

“Yeah,” I said. I went to the DVD library and produced our copy. “It’s on PBS?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Yup,” she said. Then she laughed, feigning (?) horror. “Oh, my God, Duran Duran beat the Leps onto PBS! Who saw that coming?”

We fell about with hysterical laughter, but it’s seemingly official. We have become the PBS generation.

Starlight

A light year is the length of time it takes for light to travel from its source to Earth. A star that shines a hundred light years away can die, but the light will continue to shine for a century before we’ll see it go out.

A lot of stars have gone out this year. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. Leonard Cohen. Prince. George Michael. (That one hurt more than the others put together because I have more of his albums than I do of all the others put together.) Then, in tragically quick succession, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. It seems to me that a mass exodus is happening, but I may only be so aware of it because these famous names are a part of my generation; after all, thousands of people die every day and most of us don’t even blink. At least the famous ones leave behind a legacy of work that keeps them alive in the hearts of their fans.

Truth is, the world is always a little bit darker when someone dies.

I like to watch Jeopardy! to test my memory banks and see how far out of the loop I’ve fallen with regard to pop culture. Once in a while, I’ll take an inexplicable shine to a contestant and root for that person through victory after victory. Halfway through December, a quiet young woman named Cindy Stowell won her first game and took her place as the defending champion. Her run took her through six wins and over $100,000, before she was inevitably defeated. She gave Ter and me more than one heart attack over the course of her appearance—she wasn’t always quick with the buzzer, but she consistently came back from the red to win the game with a clever bet on the Daily Double or knowing the answer to an obscure Final Jeopardy question. And she never lost her cool. She was a little mouse with big eyes and dark hair, a shy smile and sweet demeanour. Something about her was delightful and fragile and made you want to cheer for her.

On her seventh appearance, at the start of the game, Alex Trebek mentioned that her goal had been to win $100,000 and she had accomplished this with her previous win. My radar pinged with an uh oh, and sure enough, regrettably, she lost her seventh game. At the end of that show, however, a clip of Mr Trebek came up after the credits, in which he explained that, during the filming of Cindy’s shows a few weeks earlier, she had been fighting stage four cancer. She lost her battle with it on December 5, almost two weeks before her shows aired. In short, she had already departed when her championship run was broadcast.

Like a little star whose light took a few weeks to wink out of our sky.

N H ell

ah, for the good old days ...

It’s finally happened. I’ve become one of the duffers. One of the crusties who remembers the good old days when one referee was just as incompetent as two, overtime was restricted to the playoffs, and the shootout was a cheap way to win an international hockey game. When the stars played with goons watching their backs and the boys thought twice before hitting a guy in the numbers.

When Ron MacLean hosted Hockey Night in Canada instead of a Sunday night mercy slot.

The game has changed, the league has changed, nothing is sacred and precious little makes sense.

The Flyers lost two in a row over the weekend. In the old days, I’d have gone, Guys, smarten up. Now I’m looking at the schedule and thinking, with 82 games in a season, who gets five days off then has to play back to back, one at home and one on the road? Who set that schedule in stone? I didn’t see the Columbus game, but the boys arrived in Montreal at 1:00 a.m. on game day against the Canadiens and tried to claw their way back from a 2 goal deficit only to fold like a cheap tent in the third period. They were tired! Heck, I get dopey after a long weekend and these guys are expected to hit the ice running after twice that long? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they’re professional athletes, they’re millionaires, they have nothing else to do but stay in shape for a brutally long season, but come on.

And that’s just the players. The fans are suffering mightily too, since the wedding news broke last spring: Rogers had bought broadcast rights to all NHL games and everyone else could go fish. Which is pretty much what TSN has had to do.

Not that TSN trumped CBC for hockey broadcasts, because for most of my life, CBC was where hockey lived. But there were also Canuck games on Wednesday nights, on the CTV affiliate out of Vancouver. Then cable TV expanded and sports channels were born. The Sports Network, for one. I was miffed when the CBC let the Hockey Night in Canada theme go to TSN, but got over it because, hey, TSN ran NHL double headers on Wednesday nights. Better yet, Tuesday night Flyer games were picked up by TSN2—a joy I discovered right before the apocalypse happened.

Most Canuck games were cast on Sportsnet Pacific, called by John and John—Shorthouse on play-by-play and Garrett on colour commentary. A pair of goofballs to be sure, but I enjoyed their banter as much as (and often more than) the game, and it was good to know that, if Ter and I were at loose ends on a winter’s night, there was probably a game somewhere on Shaw’s basic cable.

And, like Old Faithful, on Saturday nights, the CBC reigned supreme.

Not anymore.

HNIC still exists, but I no longer recognize it. Ron MacLean could be cloying, but I liked him better than George Snufflufagus. At least MacLean has sports broadcasting cred. Strombo is a glamour boy trying to be hip and falling embarrassingly short. The broadcast teams are all haywire. Gone from the booth are Rick Ball and Kelly Hrudey, replaced by no-name whozits dredged from the Sportsnet vault. And the panel between periods? I avoided Sportsnet to steer clear of Nick Kypreos and now he’s sitting in PJ Stock’s place with the sad remains of the HNIC talking heads.

Gone almost entirely are TSN broadcasts. Oh, there are games on the new TSN3, TSN4, TSN5 cable stations, when there’s no blackout in effect. Most are part of a new “sports channel” package requiring extra payment for the privilege of viewing. Which might be okay if there were no commercials, but who are we kidding?

Sportsnet channels … now there are a thousand of them, only three of which remain attached to the basic cable package (demanding no extra funding from the viewer) and none of which seem to carry Canuck games on a regular basis. Or any games, for that matter. When we do catch a Vancouver game, the Johns aren’t always calling it. As for the games included in our already exorbitant cable fee, the screen is often so busy with tickertape news items, irrelevant stats and those truly irritating banner ads for cars, restaurants and upcoming broadcast events, that the game is as disrespected as the viewer.

I hate this. I loathe the change, resent the suits responsible, and am powerless to do anything about it. I would stop watching hockey, but I’ve been robbed of that form of protest because I will not pay for games that were once “free” on basic cable.

Only on the Rogers network, you say?

Pity.

I Love TSN2!

The trouble with following an American hockey team is that Canadian stations rarely broadcast Flyer games unless they’re in the playoffs; however, TSN2 picks up their signal from NBC. Thanks to the Shaw digital box (where there are upwards of 400 stations and nights when there’s still nothing worth watching), this year I have seen more regular season Philly games – sometimes in Philadelphia – than I did when the NHL consisted of 21 teams!

Puck drop is usually around the time I get home, so if Ter comes in and the TV is on, she’s guaranteed to find Basher on the coffee table and me drinking buttered rum tea, warming up my vocal cords for inevitably poor language midway through the first period. It’s nice when the boys win, but I’m just thrilled to see them often enough to match faces with numbers … though looking along the bench the other night, I realized that the majority of the lads are shaggy, strawberry blond, and sporting various degrees of scruff on their toothless mugs.

They’re also clinging to third spot in their division, behind the New York Rangers and doomed to play them in the first round if things remain as they are. They were in NY when this pic was taken (and lost the game, ^%$&*#), reminding me that, had I spied Ron Duguay instead of Bobby Clarke that fateful day in 1974, I would have been a Rangers fan.

Oscars Wild

There was a time when I watched the Academy Awards to see how my favourite movies fared. These days, I watch them to see what’s worth seeing after the fact. And to see who’s wearing what, of course, and if the host can do better than Bob Hope, Billy Crystal, or Steve Martin did in their time. Awards as rule mean little to me, but the Oscars are an event. Even when they suck, they’re still the Oscars.

Ellen DeGeneres made them more fun, this year. Movies are magic and she has the right blend of humour and wide-eyed wonder to let the starts shine in their designer best. Her face in the “selfie that crashed Twitter” says it all: “Look, Ma! An ordinary kid in the midst of a constellation!” Honestly, I loved it enough to post it and copyright be hanged. I’d happily have Ellen host into the next millennium.

Alas, there were no real surprises among the winners except for the original song. I was stunned when Let it Go from “Frozen” beat out U2 and Pharrell Williams. I was dancing to Happy and bobbing to Ordinary Love, so was floored when neither of them scored the little golden guy. I thought for sure the political nod would go to U2 for their song (featured in “Mandela”), but “Frozen”, I am told, is also political. It’s the first Disney animated pic where the heroine is rescued not by the traditionally strong and handsome prince, but by another girl (her sister)! Oops. Well, having being enlightened, the song still left me cold.

Same for the naysayers who question that the selfie and pizza segments were staged. Um, these people are actors, folks. Staged or not, their job is to make us believe it’s for real. So buy in and enjoy, for Pete’s sake. Besides, if it was a staged promo, it failed because I’m not running out to buy a Samsung iPhone. As a spontaneous show of fun, however, they knocked it out of the park.

I love the movies. I don’t go to them as much anymore—too many explosions and too little story—but the cinema had a powerful influence on my budding creativity (not to mention my hormones) when I was a teen. It can still inspire me to rend my garments and wail, “I wish I’d written that!”

Hey, I’m only 52. I may yet write that Oscar-winning screenplay, perhaps adapted from my own original work.

“I’d like to thank God, my family, and the Academy …”

Food Porn

It helps that I live with a foodie, but even as a teenager, I’d tune into PBS on Saturday afternoon to see if Julia Child was making dessert. I recall coming home from grade school in Quebec to be greeted at the door by my wee sister proclaiming I’d “just missed the funny man” on TV: Graham Kerr, so dubbed because he made my mother laugh out loud with his stories and kitchen antics as The Galloping Gourmet.

I remember most recently when Food TV was about cooking rather than competing—lately the schedule is jammed with killer cooks and wannabe chefs duking it out over who can create the frilliest cupcake. It’s the only time culinary programming has made me sick. It’s no longer about the food or teaching technique; it’s the fall of the Roman Empire, gladiators in aprons wielding machetes and trying to emerge victorious by cutting down the competition. I didn’t bother to check the schedule for holiday programming after catching an ad for Christmas Dinner Wars or some such nonsense—no hope there of a heartwarming ode to the communal Yuletide feast.

It’s taken 30-odd years, but now I’m back with PBS on Saturday afternoon. Ter and I do the laundry and drink tea while watching Cooks’ Country, Lidia’s Italy and Cooking with Nick Stellino. Ah, the bliss of comfort food and how to prepare it. The joy of taste tests and small appliance appraisals. Programs hosted by personalities who don’t outshine the ingredients (though Stellino is hilarious). Better yet, there are no cutthroat cookie queens or desperate donut decorators out to sabotage their neighbours at all costs. It’s all about food and helpful hints—what food TV should be and actually was when it started.

Sleepy Hollow

With Halloween lurking, it’s time to spook things up a bit. I’ll start by raving with confidence about my new favourite show – an updated version of Sleepy Hollow executive-produced by the writer-geniuses behind the rebooted Star Trek films. I watched the first episode, loved it, made Ter watch it on demand, she loved it, and now we’re both hooked. Count us among the loyal followers known collectively as “Sleepy Heads”. 

Normally, I’d say nothing. I have a habit of flipping out over things that the rest of the world doesn’t get, ergo any TV show in which I see potential will disappear in six weeks or less. In the days of Twin Peaks, NBC tried a forensic crime drama called Unsub that was simply too far ahead of its time and thus did not last. Ter and I were on board from the first episode, which is especially ironic since we watch none of the series so popular nowadays, most of which owe their success to that sick little show being the first of their kind: FBI forensics team investigates murder scenes and builds a profile of the killer, who is then hunted down and brought to justice. Sound familiar? It’s all the rage ... now. 

About ten years ago, a new spin on Tarzan was attempted. Sure, it was kinda hokey, but it was harmless fun and Travis Fimmell was yummy in the title loincloth. It should at least have played out its first season, but no, it was axed after six episodes. 

Sleepy Hollow, however, has already been signed to a second season, so either the rest of the TV viewing public is finally getting up to speed, or my standards are dropping. In any event, the actor playing Ichabod Crane – a comely fellow named Tom Mison – is simply superb, as is Nicole Beharie in the female lead. Their rapport developed quickly and is part of the fun in watching, but there’s other creepily cool stuff in the plot: witches and demons and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, all trying to bust through and destroy the world as per the Book of Revelation. It’s such a good show that we were vexed when the local station re-ran the pilot instead of a new episode this week, doubtless trying to snag those folks who are hearing about it from other people and going, “Sleepy what?” (Actually, it was to excuse regular viewers who care about the World Series – Fox is broadcasting the baseball finals, which means we’re screwed for next Monday, as well.) 

So if you missed it on the first round, now is your chance to find it on demand and get caught up before November 4. I dare you not to fall in love with Ichabod and his buttery British accent!