Ever since The Tea Makers hit the street with that fateful broadsheet on April 1 1929, claiming “John Aird is Akin To A Wart-Hog,” there has been no finer place in the Dominion for commentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The reportage improved, of course, after the CBC was invented, and throughout the years Canadians have come to associate The Tea Makers brand with edutainment of the highest calibre.
There have been some missteps, to be sure. It retrospect it’s clear that the audience for a program like “Allan’s Jamboree” would never be large enough to please advertisers. The advent of colour seemed to make things worse. And giving Mark Starowicz free reign and an unlimited budget for a 12-part “Tod Maffin: A Futurist’s History” miniseries proved confusing for audiences who were never sure what was the future and what was the past. And the CBC Drone’s live call-in radio show, “Drone On,” proved monotonous for listeners and was canceled after 13 years.
But there were unexpected surprises as well. Few could have predicted, when unionized Tea Makers staff were locked out in the late 70s, that Fake Ouimet’s ribald catalogue of captioning oddities would strum the nation’s heartstrings with such profundity. It became a regular feature after Casuals were euthanized and our labour disputes solved.
But times have changed and advertisers are no longer interested in our broadcast offerings. And in truth the public has moved on to their FaceSpaces and whatnot.
It’s with sadness that we announce the closing of Tea Makers Radio 1 and 2 and 3, Tea Makers-TV in English and French and Inuinnaqtun, and The Tea Makers Daily Sun newspaper. Our 24 hour cable news channel, The Tea Makers World, will survive as a weekly podcast, with Jesse Brown as sole producer, editor, writer, and reporter. Any other broadcast properties we own and may have forgotten about will also be closed.
The Tea Makers Broadcast Centre in Toronto will also be sold, and operations moved to our new headquarters in Chinatown.
Those who are left will be moving online to www.theteamakers.com, save The Tea Makers Page Three Girl 16-Month Calendar division, which is still profitable and will be sold in finer bookstores across Canada. Staff at overseas bureaux will be retrained to assist our World Of Warcraft gold farming initiatives.
Apparently the Chinese character for “disaster” is also the same one used for “opportunity.” And the character for “danger” is the same one used for “user-generated content.”
It’s a brave new world and we welcome you to it, Tea Makers style!
Enjoy!
ooh. schmancy.
Guild rules allowed me to bump somebody. I’™m sure you’™ll land on your feet, Kev.
Sorry, different unions, so different bumping pools – one of us is in the Complainers and Moaners Guild, the other’s in the Association of Pedantic Sarcasts.
Which is which is left as an exercise for the reader. Assuming there’s still one.
Thus far, 259 of them, Kev.
What they really mean to say under that verbiage, they’ve got their own address and are no longer on Google’s blogspot.
first it was Michael Jackson’s death, then El Nino and now this! Next you’ll be telling us the world will end on Dec 21, 2012!
Well, this will take…all of 30 seconds to get used to.
Done!
If the Teamakers started in 1929 why are the archives only back to 2005?
Jonathan
We’™re awaiting the outcome of the Google Books settlement. They’™re supposed to be scanning and OCRing everything, but the feds might put the kibosh on it down south.
But who is going to change their bookmark, or notice
[ old visual illusion
Paris
in the
the springtime ]
the presence of the the there?
If the penurious Bronfman’s couldn’t afford to buy
http://www.canadianencyclopedia.com from url rustler,*
how can the richer Teamaker(s) cabal not buy
http://www.teamakers.com and have to settle as the
Bronfman pennies did with their Historica Foundation
and THECanadian…. and use online support
of the best use of old MacLeans **
* Charles Bronfman’s pennies did an end-run around
the url-squatters with http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com,
as the Teakamers have done with their definite article:
http://www.THEteamakers.com eh? And shouldn’t teamaker.com
also belong to the media empire?
**As the Bronfman pennies can’t pay enough academics to
update their magisterial articles. Macleans articles are used
as part of the newness shine of any topics search, thus
distorting the minds of little Canadian students in their
current events essays.
CBC assumes that students, after playing suduko and
astrology (see most searched terms) http://www.cbc.ca/diversions/sudoku/
etc. will find on the CBC website a relevant polemic for their essays due tomorrow.
cbc.ca/searches
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