The Tea Makers

You know we turned down Canadian Idol.

When I heard it, I thought: “Rightly so. That crappy pap doesn’t belong on the CBC.”

The Toronto Metro Convention Centre, where they tape the show live, is across from the CBC in Toronto. And when I left work on certain days I could see and hear the kids waiting to get in, yelling and screaming and cheering and having a great time. The excitement on the street was palpable. Parents were there, too, smiling and wearing Idol t-shirts. The contestants showed up and the crowd went wild screaming for this little star ecosystem that they had created with their cell phones.

Then I went home and watched Canadian Idol. Ironically, of course.

This continued week after week, for a few years in a row. Then I started to think: “Hm. Maybe we were a bit hasty.”

As I sipped my overpriced Starbucks latte I wondered if some of the critics are right: maybe we are out of touch? Maybe we are the Starbucks latte-sipping Toronto-centric intellectual wankers they accuse us of being?

Canadian Idol is the crack cocaine equivalent for TV, and I’m not suggesting we should’ve run the CTV version whole hog. We could’ve stripped out the crassness. We could’ve held it in multiple CBC locations across the country, and made it more Canadian and less idolatry.

Remember that back in the day, we used to do singing contests, like Pick the Stars, which Robert Goulet almost won. Almost. We had a lot of crappy pap back then, except people called it entertainment. And they were right steamed when we canceled those shows and went upscale. The ghost of goofy Don Messer still haunts us, as much as we try to forget him.

And lest we forget, part of what made the revered This Hour Has Seven Days so groundbreaking was the visceral, immediate, populist ways it tackled difficult subjects. More often than not it aimed low rather than high, and even the guys involved admitted it was more ‘show’ than ‘journalism.’ But it got everyone talking.

As such, Tout le monde en parle is its obvious successor. Maligned, lowbrow, hilarious, and popular. As is Les Bougon (think a French Trailer Park Boys, but better). These shows are distinctly Canadian, and sometimes offensive, but there is no denying their appeal.

But instead of Canadian Idol, we took another, more cerebral British concept/contest and made The Greatest Canadian. We hyped the show. The media was all over it. People in the street were discussing Canadian history. George Stroumboulopoulos blew up a toilet on the premiere and won his way into our hearts. This shit had “high-impact” written all over it.

The ratings? Not so great.

At the time I was baffled, but looking back on it, I see it failed in the execution. It was too complicated. The premise was too contrived and clever for its own good. People wanted a Biography-style look at Terry Fox and we gave them Sook-Yin Lee in India on a bicycle talking about Terry Fox. See the difference?

Now, I love public broadcasting more than anyone, and I believe that it should set at a higher standard. That’s why I’m here.

But as long as we have to play the ratings game, the advertising game, the popularity game, and the political game, maybe we should step back a bit and think about giving the people some more of what they crave, rather than what we think is good for them.

Because really, we know what they want. We’ve known it from the beginning. The CBC was built, for the most part, as a reaction to Amos ‘n’ Andy. This is why we show The Simpsons and American movies. But what we really need is some good, Canadian, popular, populist English TV.

And to do that, maybe we should lay off the Starbucks and spend a little more time at Tim Horton’s.