Canadian Television

Whats on TV? In Canadian Television Today, authors Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan explore the current challenges and issues facing the English-language television industry in Canada.

“My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!” How did a beer ad featuring an unassuming guy in a plaid shirt become a national anthem? This book about Canadian TV examines how affect and consumption work together, producing national practices framed by the television screen. Drawing on the new field of affect theory, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect tracks the ways that ideas about the Canadian nation flow from screen to audience and then from body to body. From the most recent Quebec referendum to 9/11 and current news coverage of the so-called “terrorist threat,” media theorist Marusya Bociurkiw argues that a significant intensifying of nationalist content on Canadian television became apparent after 1995. Close readings of TV shows and news items such as Canada: A People’s History, North of 60, and coverage of the funeral of Pierre Trudeau reveal how television works to resolve the imagined community of nation, as well as the idea of a national self and national others, via affect. Affect theory, with its notions of changeability, fluidity, and contagion, is, the author argues, well suited to the study of television and its audience. Useful for scholars and students of media studies, communications theory, and national television and for anyone interested in Canadian popular culture, this highly readable book fills the need for critical scholarly analysis of Canadian television’s nationalist practices.

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada—to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.

Since 1952, CBC television has played a unique role as the primary mass media purveyor of Canadian history. Yet until now, there have been no comprehensive accounts of Canadian history on television. Monica MacDonald takes us behind the scenes of the major documentaries and docudramas broadcast on the CBC, including in Explorations (1956–64) and the series Images of Canada (1972–76), The National Dream (1974), The Valour and the Horror (1992), and Canada: A People's History (2000–02). Drawing on a wide range of sources, MacDonald explores how producers struggled to represent the Canadian past under a range of external and internal pressures. Despite dramatic shifts in the writing of history over this period, she determines that television themes and interpretations largely remained the same. The greater change was in the production and presentation, particularly in the role of professional historians, as journalists emerged not only as the new producers of Canadian history on CBC television, but also as the new content authorities. A critique of public history through the lens of political economy, Recasting History reveals the conflicts, compromises, and controversies that have shaped the CBC version of the Canadian past.

Since the inception of Canadian television in the early 1950s, documentary television, consistently a favourite among viewers, has been misunderstood and often maligned by its critics. More popular, and arguably more innovative, than its cinematic counterpart or than dramatic Canadian television, Canadian documentary television has decisively shaped the form and function of public service television in this country. David Hogarth traces its history back to its roots in radio in the 1930s and 1940s and examines the variety of forms of documentary television that developed in the decades that followed, focusing on newsmagazines, science programs, historical essays, docudramas, and verité investigations. He concludes with a discussion of the recent international success of documentary television as one of Canada's leading cultural exports, examining the effects of globalization and looking forward to the future of this genre. While principally an overview of the last half century and an analysis of current conditions, Documentary Television in Canada also includes detailed analysis of selected programs, such as the For the Record series on schizophrenia, "Warrendale" (by Allan King), "Images of Canada" (by Vincent Tovell), "The Valour and The Horror" episode, "Death by Moonlight" and "Shooting Indians" (by Ali Kazimi) among others.

Canadian Television: Text and Context explores the creation and circulation of entertainment television in Canada from the interdisciplinary perspective of television studies. Each chapter connects arguments about particular texts of Canadian television to critical analysis of the wider cultural, social, and economic contexts in which they are created. The book surveys the commercial and technological imperatives of the Canadian television industry, the shifting role of the CBC as Canada’s public broadcaster, the dynamics of Canada’s multicultural and multiracial audiences, and the function of television’s “star system.” Foreword by The Globe and Mail’s television critic, John Doyle.

With the establishment of the Board of Broadcast Governors in 1958, Canada entered into a watershed decade in the development of Canadian broadcasting. Andrew Stewart offers his unique perspective as the first Chairman of the BBG. William Hull provides an in-depth analysis of the functioning of the BBG as a regulatory agency.

This is an entertaining and nostalgic encyclopedia of Canadian television. History textbooks pale in comparison to this retro look at what's hot and what's not on Canada's small screen.