The Corp

Last night, my boys were discussing the CBC and there was some factionalizing. As you probably know if you're reading this (and if you are, you were probably part of that discussion anyway - why don't you go watch some more Bernard Purdie videos on YouTube and quit wasting your time on my stupid blog?), the CBC is in a financial pickle yet again. To me, this is where they deserve to be after being run completely into the ground by idiot executives who have all the worst ideas about what a public broadcaster should do.

I don't care too much what happens on CBC TV. Almost never do they produce a program worth watching (that Little Mosque show is for suburban mum types who will laugh at anything as long as it's bland enough (note to suburban mums: this is not a slam against you - you are the salt of the earth and the backbone of society - we love you)), although I liked a couple of the series of The Newsroom. A few years ago, they put in some money to help the BBC produce the revival of Doctor Who - only to completely piss away that money by scheduling it irregularly, interrupting it for months at a time, moving it from one dead zone (Friday nights) to another (Monday nights at like 1:00 AM). I love Doctor Who, but that's taxpayers' money that they tossed away for the benefit of the British viewing public. These people can't even be trusted to make intelligent monetary decisions, let alone artistic ones.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the TV network. News coverage has been getting worse and worse (see John Doyle of the Globe for a good example of this: http://www.friends.ca/news-item/7875). Coverage of the various 2008 elections, for example, was pathetic. I was embarrassed by all the inarticulate, time-wasting, amateurish bullshit on display (and I think Peter Mansbridge was too). I still like Don Newman, Henry Champ ("they're using their text-messaging machines!" God bless him), the gang of cranks who do that commentary roundup (Chantal Hebert and that lot - she is magnificently cynical) - basically, the older crew that I'm sure the current CBC executive cannot wait to push out the door so they can get more former MuchMusic VJs to do the news broadcasts, with theme music by Stephen Page. But they are not being replaced with younger people of equal calibre (well, Harry Forestall, but I'm sure he'll be replaced by Ben Mulroney or something). So fuck CBC TV. Maybe if they didn't piss away so much money making terrible sitcoms that no one watches - but that's unfair, all the Canadian networks do that. It's a tax writeoff, I have to assume.

CBC radio was all I was ever interested in, but since they started cutting back on the culturally valuable stuff - i.e. broadcasts of live performances, especially of Canadian "serious" music - in order to beef up their playlist of bland strumming troubadours from in and around Toronto, there's nothing I care to listen to anyway. This may seem like an egotistical position, and it's superficially identical to the solipsism of the Philistines and right-wingers who want to eliminate the CBC altogether - "it doesn't play anything *I* want to hear/see, so therefore no tax dollars should be spent on it" - but it amazes me that the case for having a reasonable representation of stuff that isn't otherwise going to be accessible in any way to the Canadian public on a public broadcaster even has to be made. Why even have a publicly-funded station at all if it doesn't offer alternatives to the stuff already available elsewhere? I know that the strumming faction will complain that they don't get airplay anywhere else - and I don't deny them the right to be heard on the CBC, but the executives are putting all this strumming and cooing on the air purely because they think that's going to attract people who don't listen to the CBC already, not because they think they're courageously championing a roster of significant but obscure Canadian artists (although this is unbelievably how they've been trying to justify it, calling the people who wouldn't mind keeping some of the non-pop stuff "elitists", as if there were anything more ghettoized than writing "classical" music nowadays). This latter is a well-travelled point over which I mustn't linger.

I think the CBC should be allowed to rot for the time being because the people who make all these decisions are probably departing soon. The CBC has been in a constant state of chaos for years, mainly because they keep getting in new managers and presidents who think that they need to shake everything up, reallocating resources to stroke their own egos. Their budget problems are not primarily about lack of money, but lack of judgement. The Corporation has been plagued by managers who keep making bad decisions with what is objectively a perfectly adequate amount of money, so I have no sympathy when they go snivelling to Parliament asking for an advance on next year's allowance. Let the CBC rot!

One memorable thing I've listened to on the CBC is a series of lectures on "The Rights Revolution" by Michael Ignatieff, broadcast on the program "Ideas" in 2000. Presumably, within a few years, Ignatieff will be Prime Minister, and I would be astounded if he didn't put the CBC back on track at least a little bit. Let the CBC rot for a while, and then let Mr. Philosopher King take the credit for trying to restore it to its mandate. Of course, he might end up treating it like most previous Liberal governments have, in which case, put the darned thing out of its misery, because it ain't never coming back.