TVO is a publicly funded television network in Ontario. Search Engine was canceled on radio last year, but it lived on a podcast, where it found a devoted audience. A TVO blog discussed the move with the host, Jesse Brown, this afternoon:

The CBC has been great- they put Search Engine on the air in the first place and helped it grow into their most downloaded audio podcast. It’s won an international radio award and has been on iTunes’ “Best Podcasts of The Year List” for each year that it’s been around. But our timing stinks- times are tough and the CBC has been forced to make tough decisions. Luckily, TVO sees an opportunity here.

According to NOW Magazine the move was orchestrated by Mike Miner, producer of The Agenda. ““When I found out that his podcast wasn’t going to be renewed, we quickly moved to bring it over to TVO. It all came together amazingly quickly. Everybody here is a big fan of Search Engine, so it was clear right away we wanted to have it,” Miner said.

Yes, the boat from The Beachcombers is still alive, if not actively combing any beaches off the south-west coast of British Columbia. This photo of The Persephone was taken four weeks ago in Gibsons B.C. where the show was shot.

The series ran from 1972 to 1990 and is the longest-running dramatic series ever made for Canadian television. In all, 387 episodes were produced. During the final season, the show’s title was shortened to Beachcombers.

Photo by Katakandian, used with permission.

But now, living a “second life” on the Amercian cable network Soapnet, the show has produced some unlikely praise. The New Yorker magazine, described by the Toronto Star, is “a high-brow magazine popular among the intellectual set.”

The New Yorker wrote in a recent review: “[The show] “calls to mind such past treasures as Dynasty and
almost every other nighttime soap you can think of…. I’m going to sit right down and send Canada a thank-you note.”

A writer with the Boston Herald agreed: “Not since the glory days of Melrose Place has a soap seemed like such a naughty pleasure.”

Should jPod fans be knocking down the doors of the Harper’s Magazine?

Fans of Da Vinci’s Inquest rejoice — a made for TV movie based on the series is coming to the CBC on June 14.

The movie “Quality of Life” will bring together series vets Mary Walsh, Hugh Dillon and Nicholas Campbell to solve a murder at a big city mayor’s conference.

Let’s hope that a UFC face-off between Nicholas Campbell and David Caruso is not far off.

Timing their campaign to coincide with the LEO awards, these eager Jpod’ers are asking all and sundry to mail CBC staff Lego figures with a short note begging the CBC to not cancel Jpod. Yes, it’s true; the tech-loving fans of the show are actually using snail mail to launch a campaign!

The fans of the show have chosen Lego both as a homage to the cover of the book that the series has been based on, and as a tip of the hat to Douglas Coupland’s apparent love of the Lego.

The date of the guerrilla mail-in has been set for Monday, May 19th. Jpod’ers have been instructed to keep the tone light and keep the figure happy, so get ready to be bombarded with little Lego men and women. Ideas for how to use the Lego figures should be submitted to the Interior Design department no later than Friday May 16th.

The Globe and Mail is reporting this morning that MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives will be picked up by an American cable network that specializes in — God help us all — the soap genre.

SOAPnet is owned by Walt Disney Co. and reaches about 41 million homes in the U.S. It will air the first season, beginning in June. The CBC cancelled the prime-time soap opera in its first season three weeks ago

“ABC is taking the cast around to do a number of promotions, as well as the talk-show circuit,” said MVP creator Mary Young Leckie, clearly taking a jab at the CBC, which has been criticized by independent producers for not spending enough money to promote their programs. The CBC says the cancellation was due to less-than-expected ratings, and not an issue of promotion.

But the Globe is quoting an unnamed source “close to CBC” that says the Corporation maintains second-season licensing rights for the show, leading some to speculate at the CBC will watch the U.S. ratings to see if a second season in Canada is viable.

MVP which employed about 175 people in production, administrative, and talent.

As part of that change, Sound Advice host Rick Phillips will be leaving the CBC, after 30 years with us. His last day will be March 29.

Rick Phillips began his career as a freelance music program producer at CBC Montreal in the late 1970s. That first gig led to subsequent assignments in Edmonton, Calgary and finally Toronto with such programs as RSVP, A Little Night Music, Stereo Morning and Arts National. As the area executive producer in Toronto, Phillips was intimately involved in the planning and design of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, including Glenn Gould Studio. Since 1994, he has been the host and producer of the popular Sound Advice.

Phillips plans to become more involved in teaching, writing, webcasts and hosting tours in the growing field of adult and continuing education.

In the case of jPod, it debuted on CBC-TV on Tuesday nights but, after disappointing ratings, was moved to Fridays — “traditionally a terrible night to draw an audience,” noted the Vancouver Sun. About 150 jPod cast and crew members are out of a job.

In a similar refrain as the producer of Intelligence, Larry Sugar, executive producer of jPod, said CBC did not adequately promote the show. “No other show was intended to meet the mandate of Canadian broadcasters than a show that was written by one of the great Canadian writers,” said Sugar. “To not fully support it is beyond me.”

It’s such a delicate balance. Do you throw promotional money into shows that are drawing low ratings, in order to try to increase ratings? Or is it the other way around? Where do you stand on the “CBC doesn’t promote its TV shows enough” debate?

(Ratings-wise, CBC Television broke viewership records with its 2007/2008 programming line-up. Our season-to-date prime-time share is 7.9, the highest in six years. In addition, Canadian content on the network increased significantly over the last two years, with drama series increasing 68 per cent on the network and comedy series up 41 per cent.)

The CBC is succeeding in getting Canadians talking about its new primetime shows, suggests a survey conducted late last month by The Canadian Press and Harris-Decima.

As of Jan. 28th, one in three people polled had heard about four of the CBC’s heavily promoted winter shows: “The Border,” “JPod,” “Sophie” and “MVP.” All of the shows launched in early January.

Now the bad news. That hasn’t yet translated into large numbers of Canadians tuning into the shows, however – only 10 per cent of those polled had actually seen “The Border,” about an elite team of Canadian border-security officers. That’s more viewers than the other shows had managed to attract among those surveyed.

Thirty-three per cent of those surveyed felt that the quality of CBC programming is getting better compared to previous years, compared to 21 per cent who felt it was getting worse. But those who had watched one or more of the new programs (19 per cent of respondents) were five times more likely to say the quality was improving (67 per cent)rather than declining (12 per cent).

More younger people than older people had a better opinion about the quality of CBC programming, the survey also found.

More than 1,000 Canadians were interviewed between Jan. 22 and 28th though Harris-Decima’s national online panel, and the results are considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Canadian Press

Steamy hockey soap-opera MVP will move to Tuesday nights, bumping jPod to Fridays beginning this week.

Media In Canada reports:

Both one-hours struggled to maintain audiences in the key 25-54 demographic. Produced in Vancouver, jPod started off with 293,000 in the Tuesday 9 pm time slot, but by the third week had dropped to 100,000. The story is much the same for MVP, about the office antics of hockey pros and their wives and girlfriends, which garnered 208,000 viewers in the demo with its debut, but was down to 51,000 last week.

Like drama series Intelligence, the shows are garnering positive reviews from critics; the reviews don’t seem to translate into viewers in the numbers CBC had hoped for. (CBC has yet to make a decision on whether it will renew Intelligence for a third season. The show’s producer, Chris Haddock, says CBC is dragging its feet on a decision and failed to promote the previous two seasons to his satisfaction.)

On Tuesday nights, MVP will now compete against ratings powerhouse American Idol on CTV and House on Global (though the latter has been airing re-runs for about two months, owing to the American writers’ strike).

THE GOOD NEWS?

It’s not all bad news at CBC Television. The sitcom Sophie was recently sold to ABC Family, and rumours say The Border will be sold to CBS or ABC soon. Reality series The Week the Women Went earned nearly 900,000 viewers last week.

An a memo to staff this morning titled “Champagne anyone?” CBC’s head of English services Richard Stursberg said CBC Television has “had an excellent season so far, including the highest launch week prime-time share (8.3%) in six years. And our fall regular season prime-time share is 7.6%, a 0.7 percentage point increase over 06/07.”

Our new research, tracking public opinion and perceptions about CBC-TV, suggests we’re making significant gains across the board. We measure people’s attitudes towards us; how people feel about the programs we broadcast. We think it’s important to know not only how many people are watching and what they watch, but how they feel about us. And when it comes to the values we at the CBC really care about, it turns out we leave the competition in the dust. Specifically, CBC continues to lead the other two conventional broadcasters on measures like “Distinctively Canadian” and “High Quality Programming.”

The memo did not mention MVP, jPod, or any information on CBC Radio numbers.

The steamy soap opera debuts Friday.

The CRTC smacked the Corp after a viewer complained that the ad was a little too dirty to air when it did, before 9:00 p.m.

The scene in question is in a locker room and shows a older woman (the team owner) with a guy (recent rookie recruit) in which she says “Let’s see what $5 million buys us.” She rips off the towel and, although the camera never follows where she clearly looks, the player’s bare rear is exposed.

That ad is now off the air (still viewable on YouTube, though) and has been replaced by new ones, including one in which the new player shows off his abs while female p.r. person says “I’m going to position you as the most visible rookie in the league.”

Comments so far on the full-length YouTube version of the trailer include:

WICKED!!! I can’t wait for this show to hit the air!

and

ok so this is obviously a Canadian rip off of Footballers Wives (MVP’s tag line is “The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives”). Honestly it just looks like another Sex and the City to me.

and

Not bad. Try (redacted).com for naughty cam girls!!!!

The original ad is below.

The show, starring Max Headroom Matt Frewer, has been a critical success, but only reached moderate audience levels (averaging 250,000 viewers weekly). The show’s head, Chris Haddock, complained to the online news site TheTyee.ca that his show wasn’t being promoted well enough by the CBC.

…Haddock suspects that the low numbers are in part a useful problem deliberately created by those who have their own reasons to change how drama is done at the network. “Somewhere in the CBC someone is saying ‘do not promote this show.’”

“The question is why would they be so hostile to the show? I can’t for the life of me put my finger on it because it is broadly appealing and has had such success internationally.”

The CBC shot back, addressing Haddock’s comments, saying there are lots of shows that need promotion and there’s nothing sinister going on with the Intelligence promotion.

We’re disappointed he feels he’s not being adequately promoted (but at same time doubt there’s a producer in the history of show business who thinks their program HAS been adequately promoted). And with all due respect to Chris, his is not the only program in our schedule that requires promotion. I can tell you that the program has received significant promotion in both its first and second seasons. It will continue to do so through its season finale;

What do you think of the promotion of the show? Has it reached you?

P.S. Anonymous CBC management blogger “Ouimet” caught this sticker on the ground on Queen Street West promoting the second season.

Cool sticker.

I wonder if we cleaned up after them?

Michael Wilson is a former U.S. intelligence operative who is now producing an American spy show (perhaps he’s waiting for his writers to come in from the cold….) Wilson wrote a letter to the Star about how informative and engaging Intelligence is.

The letter is a little odd – part ode to the show, part rant on U.S. political hegemony, and part a plea a for viewers for a fellow producer’s program. Here’s what he has to say about the finale:

You won’t need a spoiler alert for this next bit about Season Two, but Mary is about to be thrust onto the horns of a moral dilemma: do your job as a handler and protector of your country, but deal with the human cost of having that upper hand. If you’ve been following the story, you know our CSIS heroes and anti-heroes are fighting yet another egregious violation of Canadian sovereignty, this time from a CIA front. My advice to Mary echoes advice Haddock clearly channels from the collective spook unconscious: when you’re up against people whose job it is to break the law, previously of just the target country but increasingly the moribund, anachronistic concept of “international law,” your greatest skill may well be to lie like a f—ing rug.

It’s all here in the show: drugs, sex, money, betrayal, moles, smuggling, murder, money laundering, geopolitical stakes. But beyond just words, there’s an opportunity to immerse yourself in the distilled essence of the “Great Game” and decide if you want to play, and if so for which team? Choose, and watch.

The two-hour season finale of Intelligence runs tonight at 8:00 on CBC-TV.

According to a CBCNews.ca Arts story, the NHL wanted a sneak peek of MVP, a sexy prime-time soap about pro hockey players.

As the National Post put it, league execs “just wanted to see what kind of fictional, salacious shenanigans the fictional hockey players get up to in the fictional league”.

The good news is that they do indeed recognize that it’s, you know, not real.

“While it certainly could be interpreted not to cast professional hockey players in the most positive light, I also understand that its fiction,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly wrote in an e-mail to CBC.

“And I have enough faith in the Canadian public to see it as such. The CBC understood why we’d want to see a copy.”

I can see why CBC wants to sex up the game; according to a Toronto Star story, Hockey Night in Canada ratings are slumping due in part to the sucky Maple Leafs. (What? Three wins in a row? That’ll fix the power rankings!)

MVP premieres Jan. 11, 2008.

It should have been no surprise, but the shows I mentioned in yesterday’s item on the 2008 winter preview also have websites – you just haven’t seen them yet. And some of them are rather spiffy!

These sites are not yet promoted on main CBC pages or press releases, and they aren’t listed on the program index. But you can find them through a site search, or by just guessing the URLs – you’ll notice the obvious pattern.

• http://www.cbc.ca/theborder is my immediate favourite, in the dark-n-ominous vein carved out by Intelligence and even the long defunct Spynet. The site includes a nifty game where your first job is to withstand an airport interrogation. Stick with it, because if you can endure that it unlocks other games, with more to follow when the show goes to air. Mercifully, there appear to be no Tasers or cavity searches.
• http://www.cbc.ca/jpod – Weird. But not nearly as weird as the official site for the book, with its skateboarding turtle. Both sites are either very cool, or utterly awful – and I can’t decide which. Can you?
• http://www.cbc.ca/sophie – I think someone figures this site will appeal to women… It even uses the same shade of pink as Slice.ca. Not much information here yet, but I’m pleased to see a social bookmarking widget being built into the new designs.
• http://www.cbc.ca/mvp – Hockey! Babes! Music!… ouch, the music. How long will it take you to find the off button? (Or the swear word?)

Anyhow, give ‘em a click. What do you think?

Previewed programs include immigration drama The Border, sitcom Sophie, Douglas Coupland’s jPod, lifestyle series The Steven & Chris Show, reality program The Week the Women Went, and the much-anticipated MVP – “a sexy look at a fictional NHL team of hunky players and the women who love them.”

Special programming includes The Englishman’s Boy, Project X, The Confidential Series, plus the returns of H2O, Test the Nation and Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.

(Aside: I kept stumbling upon tidbits about the tapings of these shows back in July, when I last did this blog – including jPod, The Border and The Week the Women Went – so I’m looking forward to seeing them on air.)

Today’s Globe sees the lineup as an effort to attract “a younger, more female audience.” And the media has been quick to draw a correlation between CBC’s push and the ongoing American screenwriters strike. CBC executives admit there’s certainly an opening.

“All I see is opportunity – we have a shot,” head of network programming Kirstine Layfield told the Canadian Press. “People are going to be looking for something to watch, and I always find when people watch Canadian television, they are pleasantly surprised. It’s hard, it’s really hard, to make a mark and this is really going to help us.”

A day earlier, Layfield reported interest from U.S. networks in CBC programs . She confirmed that The Border was one of them. Westwind Production’s Mary Darling says Little Mosque on the Prairie is another.

But Writers Guild of Canada president Rebecca Schechter, who also had a hand in Little Mosque, said optimists like Darling are “dreaming in Technicolor.”

“It’s a weird pipe dream,” she said. “American giant conglomerates, they’ve not come across the border to Canada. They have consistently showed no interest in putting Canadian programming on American network television.”

The WGC plans to participate in an international display of solidarity on Nov. 28.

If you are really pining for American content, you’ll be able to get that on CBC too. According to CP, “CBC also said Tuesday it has acquired the rights to Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune from CBS Paramount International. Both shows will begin airing in September 2008.”

As for the Canadian stuff – well, the launch, and its fortuitous timing, managed to create a certain level of optimism. Prolific television blogger Denis McGrath, also a writer on The Border, had this to say of the event:

The impression I walked away with? When Layfield and the new regime started at CBC they took a lot of heat for saying they wanted to redefine and remake what the broadcaster was, and the kind of programming it did. This looks like a pretty vibrant schedule — it definitely has energy and a potential for big pop. I hope the stuff all works. It would be nice for CBC to get a win.

And if the WGA strike is still on, Canadians might actually get a chance to fairly sample their homegrown wares. It’s the best slate I’ve seen from CBC in a while.

What do you think of the winter lineup? Does the U.S. strike present an opportunity for CBC?

The new foreign-affairs program On The Map has used it a couple of times and CBC producer Christian Weller says the video quality is “as good as satellite” when used over the CBC’s dedicated Internet channels.

Still, there are bugs. The Skype-dedicated computer sits in a rack at CBC Toronto and “every time someone walks by the rack, it jiggles the mouse and Skype’s little Transport Window pops up on the screen.” And during their first Skype interview (with a documentary producer in Gaza) it went great. Too bad the technicians were so distracted by the success of the feed that they forgot to hit Record.

“There are so many different shows at the CBC that don’t have any money,” Weller says. “They can’t afford to pay for a full [satellite] video feed. This is so much better than doing a phone interview and just showing a photo of the guest.”

Christian says he’s more than happy to talk to other shows and show how they can use it too. Look him up in Groupwise.

CBC Television has hired one of the Internet’s most popular online celebrities to host its forthcoming late-night program.

Vancouver actor Lara Doucette, known to thousands of Internet fans as “Lala” from the top-rated video podcast Tiki Bar TV will host CBC Television’s Exposure, which begins airing this summer.

In an interview with InsideCBC.com, Doucette said getting the call from the Mother Corp was a surprise. “I would never think of phoning the CBC about a job. I didn’t know they’d be interested. They called me and I met up with him, and he said ‘Do you want to come on the air and do something?’”

Doucette has been an actor on local Vancouver stages and appears in her friends’ independent films. When asked her age, she confesses with a laugh “Well, my MySpace page says I’m 27…”

Tiki Bar TV is one of the Internet’s earliest and most popular video podcast. Produced in Vancouver by people employed professionally in the film industry, it has been in the top of the video podcast charts for more than a year.

This will be Doucette’s first gig with a broadcaster.

Exposure launches its full web site in one week; it goes to air July 29. It airs Sundays at 11pm.

Exposure is a “multi-platform entertainment property” (gak! — read: TV show with engaging web site) that lets people share their short digital films. The best shorts compete for a grand prize.

While anyone can upload a video to YouTube, Exposure will let the community help program the TV show — by rating, sharing their comments, and voting for their favourite digital short films and videos.  The most discussed, highly rated shorts will receive prime position online and will be evaluated by a jury of producers. Jury selected shorts then screen on television in a weekly showdown and a chance to go on to the Exposure Award finale – in which one digital film is declared as the winner of the grand prize, an online development deal worth up to $25,000. Showdown winners are determined by the audience’s online votes.

It will air every Sunday night at 11pm on CBC Television starting July 29. But its web site at cbc.ca/exposure is live now and will start collecting videos next month.