Ron Weyman died on June 26.

Weyman, born in 1915, was a veteran of the Second World War who left London for Ottawa to become a painter. In Ottawa, he met Sydney Newman of the NFB who encouraged him to pursue filmmaking. Weyman produced documentaries for the NFB from 1946-1953.

In 1954 he began work as a producer and director at the CBC, under Robert Allen, head of television drama (Weyman’s sister, broadcaster, writer and sculptor Rita Allen, is the widow of Robert Allen).

Weyman would go on to produce thousands of hours of television drama over his 26-year career, pioneering programs such as The Serial, which dramatized Canadian novels, and the ground-breaking hit series Wojeck (1966-1968). An impassioned advocate of Canadian drama and Canadian communities of talent, Weyman took aim at the CBC when it failed to renew Wojeck for a third season.

In the 1970s, Weyman contributed to Corwin, and The Manipulators - a made in Vancouver series starring Marc Strange, co-creator of the Beachcombers. In this weekend’s Globe, Sandra Martin said of Weyman that he was responsible for taking directors “out of the studio and into the streets so that they could use real locations in home-grown stories that reflected contemporary social issues” - no doubt we can observe a direct line between Weyman’s daring and later CBC dramas such as Sidestreet, Da Vinci’s Inquest & City Hall and Intelligence.

Hat tip to Anu.

	Add Comment »	Email This Post
	Drama, Obits	Posted at 1:46 pm (13 Jul 2007)

More than 1,000 of you have had a look at the video below, a tour of CBC Radio Vancouver’s radio drama studio:

The guy in charge of this room, Chris Cutress, posted a comment here with some more details on the room, and I thought I’d post them here.

Hi Tod: I was away doing a remote music recording when you visited studio 3.

We actually record telephone in the small area outside of the studio before you enter the studio proper. The “best room” is called the “dead room” and we do exterior scenes and readings / narrations in that room due to the lack of room bounce [dead ambient].

You passed a window in the dead room hallway which we open and use to mic interior car scenes by having the microphone record the bounce off the window rather than mic’ing the actors directly.

The 1/4″ recording tape can be used for fire or rain [we usually do that from cd now] but it is most often used to represent the sound of grass. We use 2″ tape for the sound of long grass or underbrush. If you had had the time to uncover all the sfx foley pit you would have seen different sizes of stone, dirt and sand as well as recording tape for different live footstep effects. The platform over the pit makes a good wharf when the sound of lapping water is added to the scene.

In the main studio we record interior scenes and use the overhead mic to add room or depth to the sound. By doing this we can create space without needing to add electronic reverb or echo [although we sometimes do that when required].

The little area before the kitchen / bathroom area is our locker room where we do school hallway scenes as its sound is midway between dead and the reverberance of the main room. We call it the locker room because we have metal school storage lockers along one side of the wall. The chairs are stored there do the construction slated to occur in the two back rooms.

At the top of the stairs is our bedroom. It has two small couches which can be used to mimic the feel and sound of a bedroom. It has an intimate sound when close mic’ed but is different in sound texture to the dead room.

The main studio microphones are Neuman U87’s which are all over 25 years of age. In the dead room we use one Neuman U87 for narrations and readings with a pair of Sony C48’s for our stereo pickups. In the kitchen we use an AKG 422 stereo mic which has been removed to safety during construction. I hope that fills in what you missed during your private tour.

Sweet. Thanks Chris!

	Add Comment »	Email This Post
	Drama, How Shows Work	Posted at 3:15 am (10 Feb 2007)

From the Toronto Star: “Richard Stursberg, who decides what we will and won’t see on CBC Television, seems to have made a more startling New Year’s resolution. He seems to believe that what this country really needs is less arts programming…. ‘Once we finish work on this season, there may not be anything more I can do except turn out the lights,’ says Robert Sherrin, executive producer of arts programming for the network.” Full article

What do you think? Is arts programming important enough on television to take programming time away from developing “hits”?

	3 Comments »	Email This Post
	CBC Television, Drama, Programming	Posted at 2:06 am (04 Jan 2007)

You may not know Richard French yet, but some people believe he’ll be the CRTC’s next chairperson. And in today’s Globe and Mail, John Doyle discovered French has strong views about the request of Canadian culture groups to have broadcasters spend money on Canadian talent for their drama programs. Doyle notes the “pitch made by the creative groups isn’t taken seriously by the CRTC. In particular, it is dismaying to read the comments and questions of Commissioner Richard French… to call him a skeptic about Canadian-content regulation would be an understatement.”
     Responding to suggestions from film director Tim Southam that broadcasters spend just 7% of their ad revenue on hiring Canadian talent, French replied, with a heavy dose of sarcasm:

“We are going to require them to invest a minimum of their revenue in Canadian drama. We are going to require them to produce a minimum amount per week. We are going to tell them when they have to schedule that drama. We are going to require them to pay an unspecified amount for an unspecified source to promote the drama. We are going to require them to take a percentage of the total moneys and invest them in the development of scripts and projects. We are going to regulate the entertainment shows so that only real, legitimate, bona-fide Canadians get built into stars in our star system promotion machinery.
     ”You know, I know the purposes for all those recommendations and, you know, I see the happy coincidence between your members’ interests and the Canadian public interest, but I submit to you that there is not a hell of a lot left for a programmer to do after you or we have told them to do all those things, is there?”

Commissioner French, coincidentally, served as a senior executive for a private firm with broadcasting interests. He was Group Vice President for with Bell Canada and was the Quebec minister of communications for a time. He also served in the Government of Canada at the Privy Council Office — the office where CRTC commissioners are appointed.
     Doyle’s reaction: “Cry me a river, Commissioner. The vastly profitable commercial broadcasting racket in Canada doesn’t need a break. It needs regulation and a sharp reminder about cultural responsibility. Later, they can cry all the way to the banks. These days, the CRTC’s policy is to pamper the pampered and let everyone thrive except the creative community in Canadian TV. And yes, it’s a disgrace.”

	Add Comment »	Email This Post
	Drama, The CRTC	Posted at 7:10 pm (07 Dec 2006)

The total audience captured by Canadian drama series (across all TV networks) has dropped by half in a year. Viewership fell to 1.8% in March/May 2006, just half the level in March/May 2005.
     By comparison, American and other foreign drama shows accounted for 27.4% of total viewing.

Canadian Media Research Inc.

	8 Comments »	Email This Post
	Drama	Posted at 12:31 pm (21 Nov 2006)

Saying it faces a “financial crisis,” CBC/Radio-Canada will not proceed with its television drama strategy or proposed HDTV transition if “additional new funding” is not provided by the federal government, according to the CBC’s five-year Corporate Plan, released this week.
     For the past five years, the CBC has relied on annual $60 million grants, but those grants have always been disbursed as special “one time only” payments. “If this funding is not made permanent,” the Plan states, “Cuts will have to be made to existing services. In the absence of additional new funding, several initiatives will not be able to proceed as planned. In particular, CBC Television’s drama strategy, the proposed HDTV transition, and the regional expansion plan all require additional funding.”
     The CBC also stated that it plans to ask the Minister of Finance to let it take loans out to enhance its ability to meet its mandate. According to the Broadcasting Act, the Corporation can borrow up to $25 million dollars, provided the projects funded generate enough revenue to achieve a positive rate of return.
     In addition, over the next five years, the CBC says it plans to:

• Add full-length regional morning and afternoon shows on CBC Radio One in Kitchener, Red Deer, Hamilton, Barrie, Kingston, Nanaimo, Kelowna, Chilliwack, Saskatoon, Peterborough, Cranbrook, and Kamloops.

• Explore the viability of establishing a foundation to which Canadians could offer direct financial support to key CBC|Radio-Canada programming initiatives
• Commission drama series based first upon research about what “specific audience segments” want to see on television
• Focus on comedy and performing arts, commissioning three new half-hour comedy series
• Program television using emerging forms of narrative, including single-camera shooting, mockumentaries, and animation for adults.
• Revitalise Canada Now, its national-regional supper hour news program, by increasing coordination and cooperation between the regional programs

	1 Comment »	Email This Post
	Drama, Financial	Posted at 10:56 pm (09 Nov 2006)

You’ve got to hand it to CTV — they seem to have developed an excellent multi-platform model for extending one of our their most successful young-adult brands: Degrassi.
     Besides the regular television debut later this month, Degrassi: The Next Generation will have the following extras.

• A double-feature style airing of back-to-back episodes, beginning November 28 on CTV and on CTV HD East/West

• It will air a pre-release of Episode 1 on the web a full week ahead of its television premiere. CTV’s newly positioned “CTV Broadband Network” (brilliant branding, in itself) will begin streaming the season premiere Tuesday, November 21 at 12 noon ET.
• Exclusive online content with 19 scripted webisodes (a.k.a. “Degrassi Minis”)
• 19 behind-the-scenes documentaries (a.k.a. “Degrassi: On the Set”)
• Two animated shorts (a.k.a. “Degrassi Mangasodes”)
• All 40 bonus-elements will be available on-demand throughout the season via The CTV Broadband Network.

And, just in case that wasn’t enough, in addition to the multi-platform campaign in support of the series, CTV has released Degrassi: Extra Credit, a multiple-volume series of graphic novels that expand on Degrassi plotlines.

Sooner or later, we’re all going to hit a tipping point where this kind of multi-platform programming is simply the way television has to be done. In that future, no television executive in their right mind would air a show without extensive support online (and I’m not talking about just a blog or podcast here and there).
     In other words, the television show simply becomes something of a necessary evil.
     Did CTV just force the entire TV industry into coming a little bit closer to that future, or is CTV’s Degrassi push too far ahead of its time? What do you think?

	3 Comments »	Email This Post
	Drama, Programming, The Media Landscape	Posted at 4:53 pm (06 Nov 2006)

CBC Radio today launches “Afghanda” — a series of radio dramas about Canada’s military presence in Afghanada. Joe Mahoney has the full schedule.
     Today’s episode: Five Canada soldiers and their translator head out from Kandahar to establish contact with a local village and deliver supplies to a school. The meeting with village elders, a shura, is successful but the delivery to the school is intercepted by the Taliban and one of the unit disappears.
     The first episode is tonight at 8:30 p.m.

But Joe raises an interesting point in his coverage — he was unable to find any information about the series on the cbc.ca web site. The only thing I could find was that odd landing page that all shows get (complete with a typo and inaccurate schedule information)
I tried blind-typing cbc.ca/drama and, remarkably, the page doesn’t exist (surely I’m not the only person that would guess that?). Neither does “radiodrama”.
     What has always saddened me, as a radio person, is that were this a TV series, it would have likely been featured on the beautiful and always-fresh www.cbc.ca/television page. Going to its counterpart, www.cbc.ca/radio , on the other hand, gets visitors a pedestrian schedule of the day’s full programming. Boo.

	5 Comments »	Email This Post
	CBC Radio 1, Drama	Posted at 10:24 am (02 Nov 2006)

CBC Television will produce TV adaptations of three popular Canadian novels.

Works from Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and Douglas Coupland will be part of a new initiative titled From Page & Stage.

• The first program in the new category will be Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, which debuts Jan. 21 at 8 p.m.

• Coupland’s jPod is currently in production for a potential series
• Mordecai Richler’s novel St. Urbain’s Horseman will run as a miniseries
• Richler’s Barney’s Version is slated as a feature film

Also scheduled to air in the next year are a miniseries based on Guy Vanderhaege’s The Englishman’s Boy, a live adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s novel Wind in the Willows and Iron Road, a miniseries inspired by the opera of the same name composed by Cha Ka Nin and written by Mark Brownell.
     In the last two years, the CBC says it has invested more than $11 million to bring works of literature to the screen. which generated more than $84 million in production.
     The CBC previously adapted such works as Anne of Green Gables, Road to Avonlea and Random Passage. In six years, from 2001 to 2007, CBC television has aired, or will air, 19 dramas or other programs based on Canadian literary works.

What do you think? Is there a quintessential Canadian novel that we’re missing? What other book should we be adapting?

Other media reaction:

• Toronto Star: “But consider CBC history. Many saddened devotees of public broadcasting can remember when there was adventurous, ambitious drama on the public network week after week. The projects being feted now will be spread out over several seasons. And given the Soprano-ization of the television universe, I for one would be a lot more interested in seeing them without the many commercial interruptions viewers will be subjected to on CBC — just as a couple of seasons ago, I was much happier watching the last Prime Suspect and the biography of Joni Mitchell on PBS instead of suffering through the chopped-up, crudely edited CBC versions.” [full article]

	Add Comment »	Email This Post
	CBC Television, Drama	Posted at 9:58 am (01 Nov 2006)

Diminutive English star Bob Hoskins has joined the cast of the upcoming CBC-TV miniseries The Englishman’s Boy, according to stories by CP and Reuters.

Hoskins, who you can see in theatres now in Hollywoodland will play a 1920s movie mogul in a cast that includes Nicholas Campbell (Da Vinci’s Inquest), Michael Therriault (Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story), R.H. Thomson (Road to Avonlea) and Michael Eisner in the title role.

The two-part miniseries, an adaptation of the Governor-General’s Award-winning book by Guy Vanderhaeghe, is currently shooting in Saskatchewan.

	1 Comment »	Email This Post
	CBC Television, Drama	Posted at 9:47 am (27 Sep 2006)

One of my favourite channels on Sirius is the radio classics channel. It airs shows like The Shadow, Dragnet, and War of the Worlds. I’ve always loved radio drama — losing myself in the production and the story. It’s theatre of the mind in its truest form.
     I’ve tried audiobooks but without hearing the rain described or listening to someone walk up rickety stairs… it just doesn’t make for the same experience.
     Which is why I was intrigued when I spotted this trademark application for “The Virus” — described as “an on-going radio program for broadcasting via satellite digital audio radio services and over the Internet.”
     XM Satellite has filed for the trademark which leads me to believe they’re planning an original radio drama series.

	2 Comments »	Email This Post
	Drama, The Media Landscape	Posted at 8:23 am (06 Sep 2006)

CBC-TV’s cancelled legal drama This Is Wonderland leads the nominees for the 21st Gemini Awards, the annual celebration of excellence in English Canadian television.
     Wonderland, which ran for three seasons but was cancelled earlier this year (and yet, its promotional web site still exists as a kind of eerie time capsule), received 14 nominations, including best dramatic series. The show, which starred Cara Pifko as a young defence lawyer at the Old City Hall courts in Toronto, had been hailed for its insightful writing and for avoiding the traditional legal show format.
     Tied with nine nominations each are CBC-TV’s investigative journalism newsmagazine the fifth estate and its controversial miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, which was criticized for historical inaccuracy in portraying former Saskatchewan premier James Gardiner and ultimately pulled from additional broadcast.

	7 Comments »	Email This Post
	Awards, CBC Television, Drama	Posted at 10:47 am (29 Aug 2006)