Rewind and Search: Conversations With the Makers and Decision-Makers of CBC Television Drama and Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television Drama Since 1952 by Mary Jane Miller (q.v.). Juicy quotes to come.
On the bookshelf
I’m actually Joe Clark. Fake Ouimet is merely a username.
Published September 7, 2009 12:48 pm
3 Comments
These are very good books, I have read both along with anything penned by Knowlton Nash. CBC English Television as we know it has abandoned in-house production along with respect for in-house knowledge and conversation (couldn’t one of the new social media producers asked for a budget number from HR and created an oral history website featuring the many voluntarily retired before they exited the CBC for good ? I could listen to those 30 years-in-craft services guys for an eternity) . So much would be gained if current managers took time to read these texts instead of paying outside research groups obscene sums ($100,000 proposed to study media consumption of Chinese Canadians???) to speculate on an institution whose core values they no nothing about. Books like Miller’s reveal and remind how policy makers and a range of cultural producers persevered in eras of shrinking budgets, changing demographics, new technologies, accelerated competition from US television fare etc. Stursberg comes off like that Titan, Atlas, posturing as if he is the first to bear so many burdens of national importance on his miserly shoulders. Rewind and Search Stursberg et al!
Thank you for the kind words, which mean a lot to me , since it comes from a maker. A friend directed me to this site and the comments. Teablog readers who were involved in Radisson, Forest Rangers, Adventures in Rainbow Country, Beachcombers, The Rez or North of 60 might like to know about my third and last book, out last year called Outside Looking In: viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series, McGill Queens University Press, 2008. McG Q did me the honour of bringing it out in paperback. mjm
I will seek out your book!