The Tea Makers

Would you like to work for The Hour?
A reader tips us off that The Hour is looking for new blood (in line with the current fascination with vampires).
And if anyone bothers to scan the list of duties for some of these new hires, there’s a surprising indication that The Hour is trying to get back to what it could have been all along.

A new slate of people is needed for the start of the next season in October.
For example:
A Program Assistant, who will, among other subservient duties, “pick up and deliver various production elements such as set elements, costumes, musical instruments and food.”
We may deduce from that that there’s going to be actual performances of songs by guest artists, and not just George picking up a flute before going to commercial.
The Program Assistant will also require “leadership skills,” which one presumes is to be used in this flunkie position to give orders to the counter staff at Starbucks when getting coffee for the really important people of The Hour.
But there’s also the stunning requirement to be something that even the host of the show is not.
A “Creative Thinker with a keen interest in finding new ways to tell stories and expand the limits of traditional programming.”

It would be easy to say that the only problem with the show has always been George.
But it hasn’t.
The problem has been the CBC.
The CBC taking a weak host and promoting him as if he were the answer to today’s need for relevance and authenticity, only to give audiences squat.
Geri Hall has more humour and edge than this guy will ever have, when the only thing he seems to be able to do well is to introduce someone else.
A Canadian version of Ryan Seacrest is not representative of today’s generation.
Yes, George must take responsibility for the way he’s been used, and how happily he allowed the CBC to feed his ego with relentless marketing and exaggerated claims of him having a unique perspective and insight. Selling it to us as if he’s in the league of Stewart, Colbert and Maher, let alone the daring and phoniness of Geraldo Rivera.
Is it any wonder that we feel insulted when we see the actual show, and realize that we’ve just accepted delivery of fake goods and the Purolator guy is long gone.

The goal of the interviews that George has done has never been to inform the audience.
They’ve been to please the guests, and to one day score George Clooney.
All of the interviews have a message built in – “look how safe and pleasant it is to be interviewed by George. We are there to help you sell your product. There’ll be no surprises, no ambush, no challenge here. We are not aspiring toward transcribing the discussion and printing it in The Paris Review. The onus is on you, the choice is yours, if you want to make it into a YouTube hit. Our role is to be an easy harbour of painless fluff.”
Viewers are assumed to be entertained and enthralled by the mere fact that these interviews are happening at all, and that they’re “live.”
But can anyone explain the difference between an interview being done at The Newsstand and one being done in front of a studio audience?
Newsstand interviews are produced using one tenth the staff, yet are often twice as good as those done sitting on red chairs.

Had George just once gone off script and asked the questions that inadvertently popped into his head we might have had something, something spontaneous and even dangerous.
But those are of course the two elements of broadcasting that the prepared-to-death-ahead-of-time CBC could never allow.
Instead, there’s a sense that management has always just patted him on the head while knowing full well that George is being fooled just as much as his small audience is into thinking that there’s anything about The Hour that smacks of “freedom.”

The CBC has been just plain stupid in the way they’ve used George.
Had they been able to get Tom Green or Russell Peters, then yes, they could claim that they have a personality-driven show that will always be entertaining and interesting.
But they don’t have that caliber of talent on the payroll.
They have George, just another photogenic dufus with “personality.”
The most appropriate use they could have made of him was to have him cast as the ringmaster of a group of varied, dynamic and under-recognized journalists and artists.
A group effort, with George placed at the front of what promised nightly to be an experience of fun, innovation and the unexpected. And always worth seeing, and always causing the audience to ask “what will they do next?”
Instead, it’s all about George.

And yes, George is reading this, because he’s so vain, and he probably thinks this… no, that’s part of the problem. George doesn’t think very much at all.
And the CBC thinks Canadians, you & I, are dumb enough to fall for this sham.
How’s that been working out?