CSI: New York may be a very good show, heck, it may even be a great show. But it has no place on Canada's History channel.
That's the ruling of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which heard a complaint by Maureen Parker, executive director of the Writers Guild of Canada, that CSI: New York should not be running on History Television given the cable network's mandate from the CRTC. Alliance Atlantis has until Sept. 1 to remove the show.
It seems we're entering another period of tit-for-tat scheduling. Like the time CTV successfully got the CRTC to order CBC to remove Royal Canadian Air Farce from Newsworld. CTV argued successfully RCAF had nothing to do with the making and reporting of news.
Or the time CBC shot back that CTV's own NewsNet wasn't fulfilling its broadcast regulation of providing an hourly news wheel of Canadian and international events with the introduction of Mike Duffy's Ottawa reports.
When Elwy Yost started decades ago with his old movies show, Saturday Night at the Movies, he had to insert an hour of educational fodder between his two gloriously golden old flicks and carefully link them to the theme of the night. If he didn't, CBC bureaucrats who were assigned to watch squawked to the CRTC.
It was the presence of up to 18 hours of CSI: New York on History that prompted Parker's successful write-in campaign. In its defence, Alliance Atlantis said the back story of CSI: NY included a lead character whose wife died in 9/11 and the program makes continuing references to Ground Zero and terrorist threats.
Will the CRTC's negative ruling against History reopen the door to the days every network engaged its own board of "content police" to check rivals' schedules for programs clearly not approved by the CRTC?
Thumbing my Starweek, I see reruns of Holmes on Homes are on BBCCanada. Yipes! This is a Canadian show. Is Mike Holmes going haughty on us by adopting a posh Brit accent or what? Or is it merely BBCC borrowing some programs from sister network HGTV?
The Métis poet Gregory Scofield recently got the profile treatment on Bravo! in a pretty wonderful hour special, Singing Home the Bones. Loved it, but should I have placed an anonymous call to the CRTC wondering why it hadn't run on APTN, the Aboriginal Peoples TV Network?
Now I'm going to feel guilty every time I watch Alfred Hitchcock or Batman. On Book Television. Not that American channels haven't been getting away with this kind of entanglement for years. A&E, as the title suggests, was once a high arts channel with dancing getting a night of its own each week and another devoted to opera. The network ditched arts and entertainment years ago, just forgot to change its name.
And today? You can catch such current A&E series as Dallas SWAT, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Gene Simmons: Family Jewels and The Two Coreys.
Parker's ploy was a brilliant way of highlighting the lack of Canadian content on Canadian cable networks. Of course, the Writers Guild of Canada would like to have Canadian series as popular as CSI: New York that could be rerun 18 hours a week. Think of all the residuals Canadian talent could be making.
My advice to cable programmers: be careful in the next few months what you're actually running. Hey, you guys at the Outdoor Life Network, don't get careless and clumsily insert something girlie from Slice by mistake. And you folks at YTV, its okay to rerun Falcon Beach but not Falcon Crest.
Me, I'll continue to watch what I want to watch no matter the station. And so will most other Canadian viewers indifferent to bureaucratic teasing. I'll even sneak in some reruns of CSI: New York if I know what cable channel might pick them up next.
Fashion TV, Food TV? I'll keep on trying.
Anarchists. They think they are the coolest thing, tricked out in balaclavas, bandannas, punk style and black clothes. Reminds me of the garb we wore in college, except the bandannas weren’t a tear gas shield, but a hair accessory. We didn’t run riot in the streets, either, just skulked past our exasperated parents, who were [...]
