Results tagged “cbc”

Last night's episode of the increasingly addictive Being Erica sent its eponymous protagonist ten years into the future, where she proclaimed that 2019 was pretty similar to 2009. And indeed it was, save for a bad haircut and a few subtle embellishments that we're really looking forward to a decade from now.

In an ad for a recycling campaign, it seems appropriate, clever even, to recycle elements of an old image. But when the ad is for Belgian beer, and the logo belongs to someone else, it doesn't make much sense—particularly when the designer fails to ask permission for its use.

"Did they say Joel Plaskett?" Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham giggled, half-delirious with genuine shock and excitement minutes after he and the rest of the band (drummer Jonah Falco, guitarist Mike Haliechuk, bassist Sandy Miranda, guitarist Josh Zucker, and guitarist Ben Cook) accepted the 2009 Polaris Music Prize for their acclaimed, soaring hardcore epic, The Chemistry of Common Life. The press conference immediately following last night's performance gala and award presentation was full of journalists, but it was oddly silent, maybe because, for the infinite snide opining on the awards' predictability and who really deserved it, no one actually thought Fucked Up would win. Maybe we truly were, as Abraham mocked, all still in shock.

It’s a surreal experience—interviewing a guy about an online “lifecasting” experiment and unwittingly becoming a part of it. But if there’s one lesson we can take away from the hour we spent with Hal Niedzviecki and his surveillance equipment (in his home, no less), it’s this: we should probably get used to it. That is, we should—and you should—probably get used to being watched.

To Sydney Newman, television drama was all about appealing to the common man. Described in an obituary as “brash and charmingly outrageous," Newman "shrewdly cast himself as the low-brow who punctures the pretensions of high-minded rivals.” In a film and television career that included major posts in Canada and Great Britain, the Toronto native used his hustling, straight-talking, frank approach to production to bring viewers down-to-earth dramas, time-travelling aliens, morale boosts during wartime, and even a hockey game or two.

Will.i.am and Fergie are probably asking this of Perez Hilton, but MuchMusic must be wondering the same thing: Sunday night's TV ratings show that the CBC’s re-airing of Happy Gilmore drew over twice as many viewers as the MMVAs. MuchMusic's smaller audience (368,000 viewers versus 801,000 for the CBC) could just as easily be the result of poor promotion as it is a reflection of apathy for the annual awards show—or maybe, on a more superficial level, viewers simply like watching Happy doing his thing. Who said golf was boring?

Have you ever had one of those days where you just want to shout at your coworkers to shut the hell up because you—unlike those gabby, inconsiderate fools—are actually trying to get some work done? Chances are the yearning has crossed your mind, before being promptly snuffed out by the fear of getting your walking papers in the process. That second part of the equation—the self-restraint—seems to have been overlooked today by one unfortunate CBC Newsworld translator who, during an announcement by Minister of Public Safety and MP for York-Simcoe Peter Van Loan, suddenly stopped providing French-to-English interpretation in order to yell "I can't hear! Fuck!" at one of her (by now probably former) colleagues.

Between Doubt for the Sega Genesis and a promise that overlong speeches would be played off by Keyboard Cat, this year's Andy Samberg–hosted MTV Movie Awards were reliably entertaining—despite the fact that online public voting meant that virtually every prize went to Twilight. Among those that didn't, however, was the Best Song from a Movie trophy, which was given to little-known Sundance fave The Climb from Hannah, according to the CBC. The MTV Awards, which are known for quirky perennials like Best Fight and Best Kiss, this year also added in a new category simply called Montana, bestowed to The Movie, Miley Cyrus's postmodern directorial debut.

Search Engine, the critically acclaimed and wildly popular CBC tech podcast, is moving to TVO. Since June 2008, when budget problems forced the CBC to cancel the Radio One version of the program and cut the show’s staff, the program has existed in a kind of uncertain limbo. But now, with the move to TVO, the show’s future has been secured.

See? See what we did there? We wrote a haiku in lieu of providing you with a proper headline. And did you see what else we did? We stuck in a jaunty "Tra la la la la" because we still had five syllables to use, and we couldn’t think of anything else we wanted to write. Now, before the mud slinging begins, let’s consider why we wrote such a terrible poem. Was it because the last time we attempted such a feat, we were in grade six, and our English teacher informed us that our poem—which saw the words "Jonathan," "Taylor," and "Thomas" arranged in three different ways on three different lines—was "abysmal," and our haiku-writing confidence was shaken? Yes! Was it also, in (most) part, because we wanted you to know about CBC Radio One’s Toronto-themed haiku-writing contest, and actually spent an hour trying to write a half-decent poem, but ultimately failed and decided to leave the "good" writing to you? Yes!

At first it all seemed simple: Billy Bob Thornton, famous actor, goes on CBC's Q last Wednesday and is a total dick to the show's host, Jian Ghomeshi, for hinting at Thornton's Hollywood fame rather than his barely known band, the Boxmasters. And that's how it played out, for a while, landing on Perez Hilton, Gawker, the Star, BlogTO, the Canadian Press, Digg, etc., etc., etc.

Toronto needs a song. Yes, there are plenty of tunes about Toronto, plenty of albums inspired by Toronto, plenty of lyrics that namedrop Toronto. But we lack an anthem. Songs that have this city as their explicit subject tend to be at least one of: a) ironic, b) mournful, c) novelties, or d) dated. Yet we suspect there are already some hymns-in-waiting that defy these categories; perhaps you've even written one yourself.

By the time you read this, you may have already received an email from an online group called Avaaz asking you to "pull out all the stops" by spending a minute to fill out an online petition which will be "delivered to parliament" to pressure the Harper government into granting the CBC's loan request, thereby "saving the CBC."

The CBC is just wrapping up a town hall meeting for its staff, held so that the corporation's president, Hubert Lacroix, could outline the plan for tackling a major funding shortfall. The key announcement: eight hundred jobs need to be cut, to be divided more or less equally between the English and French services, with seventy of the positions coming from the corporate side. The majority of the cuts will be in television, and radio will stay commercial-free. Asset sales are also planned, though they will not be enough to rescue any of the jobs slated for elimination.

We got roped into watching Being Erica the way we're assuming most people did: through persistent advertising. Can you blame us? Its star, Erin Karpluk, was everywhere in the build-up to the show’s January 5 premiere; her image was especially prevalent on the concourse level of Union Station, where a series of Karpluks-in-costume greeted holiday pedestrian traffic. After a while, resistance proved futile.

At left, Gary Clement's National Post cartoon from Friday. At right, a CBC TV crew spotted on Canwest death watch outside the Post's Don Mills HQ the same day.

The CBC doesn't always get it right. In the last few months alone we've mocked it for losing an iconic hockey anthem, been exasperated by its new primetime television show, and condemned its poor taste in music venues. Still and all, we're pretty sure that the CBC is essential to keeping Canada, well, Canadian, and we'd very much like for the federal government to stop kicking it around quite so much.

Why does CBC's new show Being Erica, with all its snappy writing and solid acting, go out of its way to reduce Toronto to a robotic, corporate caricature of the sort that's lampooned across the rest of Canada?

For the record, we still think Soundscapes or Sonic Boom should have taken the trophy last time. In CBC Radio 3's inaugural edition of Searchlight last year, an infant store from Prince George, B.C. claimed the prize for Best Record Store in Canada. But this was clearly pre-ordained―in Prince George, a town of about eighty thousand in the northern abyss of a province known best for its bud, it's only natural that hordes of bored (and potentially stoned) music fanatics would rally together to vote for their one and only vinyl shop, Meow Records, a shop already adored for surviving a flood and forming an all-girl roller derby team. Record-loving Torontonians, however, must have been divided amongst the city's divine selection, deciding to act on the virtues of fairness so that none of our wonderful vinyl depots would feel left out. We understand.

...and nary an "I Get on the TTC" in sight. [Torontonians breathe sigh of relief.] As reported on CBC.ca, our nation has spoken, and we've chosen 49 Can-con classics to "give" to the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama. While we think Stompin' Tom Connors's "Bud the Spud" (and a Tegan and Sara tune or two) should have made CBC Radio 2's final list, we're too busy Googling photos of Aretha Franklin's bedazzled hat (and, uh, basking in the glory of America's undeniably brighter future) to really be disappointed. [via CanCult.]

Tomorrow, for the first time since March 16, 1996, the Toronto Maple Leafs won’t be playing on a non-holiday, regular season Saturday. They play tonight in Buffalo; they won’t be in action again until next Tuesday.

SLUMBER PARTY: Kids are invited to pass out on the floor of the museum, without getting dragged out by security guards like you did during frosh week. The Royal Ontario Museum opens its doors tonight for a sleep-over like no other—children five and older are invited to check out dinosaur exhibits, talk to experts, watch a screening of A Night at the Museum, and take part in a late-night DJ/PJ party at ROMkids Sleepover: December. The night includes an evening snack, a healthy breakfast, and a high likelihood of someone looking up at the giant T-Rex skeleton in the middle of the night and peeing themselves. Royal Ontario Museum (100 Queen's Park), December 5, 5 p.m.–December 6, 10 a.m., $67.50 for members, $75.00 for non-members.

Screenshot taken around 11 p.m., about four hours after the story went up. The error has since been corrected.

TRANSIT: While your SUV is in the shop, why don't you participate in an open discussion on public transit in Toronto? Metrolinx (an agency of the Province of Ontario) has released the first draft of their 25-year plan for public transportation. It's titled The Big Move: Transforming Transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, and they want to hear what you think of it, so head down to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (after having thoroughly read the 114-page draft regional transportation plan and registered in advance on-line). Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front Street West), 5–9 p.m., FREE.

Toronto's extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn't always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

It's election day—do you know which media outlet you'll be glued to tonight to discover the results? Among the options for Golden Horseshoe voters on election night in November 1965 were a national network (CBC) and a local independent (CHCH in Hamilton). Both touted the latest in news-gathering technology, with the inevitable period nod to the magic of IBM technology.

The winner of CBC's Hockey Night in Canada Anthem Challenge was announced tonight, and it's not that kid from Toronto, that savant from Aurora, or that conflict-of-interest-y guy: it's "Canadian Gold" by Albertan music teacher Colin Oberst! (No relation.) The song's not bad, but its win over 14,000 other anthems demonstrates that what the CBC—and, we guess, the Canadian public, who picked this song out of the final five— really wanted to replace one of our country's iconic songs was something safe, a little on the dull side, and more than a little generic. We're sure that CTV is pretty happy about the whole thing, though.

There's controversy brewing around CBC's Hockey Night in Canada Anthem Challenge, and it doesn't even involve "Hockey Scores"!