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According to BBM/Nielsen, CBC’s Grey Cup coverage (Sunday, Nov. 25) took the number one spot on the ratings chart for the week of Nov. 19-25 (.pdf). With 2.887 million viewers (up slightly from last year) it edged out Desperate Housewives (2.166 million) and other American series. Last year the Cup was unable to surpass CSI on the charts.
The newspapers aren’t the only ones who think CBC-TV did “a job well done” covering the 95th Grey Cup. The boss liked it too!
(H/T to Jennifer Good for the great pic of Kirstine Layfield, executive director, network programming. It sure beats the extreme close-up in the last week’s Post, no?)
What did you think of CBC’s coverage? Was it Canada’s best?
This doesn’t look like Toronto, not at all.
Peering out the window of the CBC.ca offices overlooking Front Street this morning, the first thing I see is a sausage grill the size of a tanker truck.
There are pickup trucks on the sidewalk. Cowboy hats in the club district. There’s a pep band playing Garry Glitter on the trombone in the Barbara Frum Atrium. People wearing parkas made from flags of teams that didn’t even make the playoffs. Last night I saw a horse that didn’t have a police officer aboard. And for the first time since before the lockout, the old Mövenpick restaurant on the southwest corner of the CBC building has life in it!
The Grey Cup football game isn’t until Sunday, and the Argos won’t be there, but Toronto has definitely got Grey Cup fever (even though the unseasonable cold seems to have scared some people indoors). And CBC is in the middle of the craziness, with cameras everywhere, a shop full of swag, and a public “CBC Sports Cafe” acting as party central.
(Insiders say that when the facility opened up, the permit police were out in full force, incredulous that CBC could actually serve beer and, you know, have fun. Use of the facility is rumoured to be planned for upcoming hockey broadcasts, and the Cafe may be used for other events.)
Grey Cup weekend is a bittersweet event for CBC, though, because (as the newspapers are keen to point out) after 55 years this is CBC’s last CFL broadcast for the forseeable future. Starting in 2008, TSN has sole broadcast rights for at least five years.
So, CBC is going out with a bang. The game will have an amazing 29 cameras inside the stadium alone (the division finals had nine) including the famous Cablecam above the field.
The game will be carried in high definition, on the FAN radio network, Sirius satellite radio and to 74 million homes abroad via cable (standard definition.) Coverage begins on CBC-TV at 2:30 EDT on Sunday, with the game broadcast starting at 5:30.
I’ve uploaded some more CBC Sports Cafe and Front Street photos to Flickr (hat tip to Tony for some of them.) You can watch this year’s events, plus recent Grey Cup games on the CBCSports.ca main page. And check out some great moments from Grey Cup history (like the 1950 “mud bowl”) at CBC Digital Archives. Oh, and be sure to have your say on who you think will win. (Like most people, CBC analysts Greg Frers and Khari Jones both pick Saskatchewan, 24-10 and 17-13.)
Scott Moore, CBC’s relatively new head of CBC sports, ate a bit of Saskatchewan humble pie yesterday, after after football fans outside Saskatchewan were not shown the conclusion of Saturday’s Roughriders-Edmonton Eskimos game.
Looks like a comedy of errors had it in for the broadcast.
First, it was delayed nearly an hour after a lightning strike knocked out power and phone lines to Mosaic Stadium and the CBC’s broadcast truck. Edmonton was ahead 32-27 when the lights went out.
That’s when goof #2 happened: Someone in the CBC programming department decided to switched to a Nick Nolte [ed: of all actors] movie. When the power finally came back on, only viewers in Saskatchewan got to see the final 13 minutes when the Riders scored 12 points.
And finally, Moore said he turned his cell phone off that night (and, having recently moved, nobody at CBC had his landline number) so technicians couldn’t reach him to make a decision on broadcasting.
CBC will rebroadcast the final quarter of the game across Canada early Monday morning — starting at 12:30 a.m. local time.
(Some newspaper commentators said the incident was reminiscent of 1968’s so-called Heidi Bowl. U.S. football fans were outraged that year when they missed the last 65 seconds of a New York Jets-Oakland Raiders NFL game after NBC switched to a made-for-TV Heidi movie.)
Toronto Star reviews CBC’s Grey Cup coverage: “Cameras also spotted a couple of faked injuries, too, which demonstrated the gamesmanship on the turf. On one, a feigned injury by a Montreal linebacker, was turned into a three-act play. Cameras caught the player dropping to the turf, then showed the Alouette bench signalling for him to go down before B.C. coach Wally Buono was shown walking away in disgust.”
While CBC Thunder Bay dries out, the folks at CBC Winnipeg are enjoying a rather warm spell — perhaps partially due to the heat they’re generating for their long-suffering CFL Bombers. “While our beloved Bombers got their clocks cleaned by Toronto (the shame! the horror!) our plant has gone Cup crazy,” Winnipeg staffer Louise Waldman writes.
This morning, they launched a blitz of Cup-related programming, which you can read about “below the fold.”
Pictured: Donna Carreiro (Producer, ETV News) and Marcy Markusa (Roving Reporter, Information Radio). Middle row: Peter Li (Special Projects Engineer, ETV Sports from Toronto), Crystal Goomansingh (acting host, CBC News at Six), Ron Robinson (host, Weekend Morning Show) and Terry MacLeod (host, Information Radio). Back row: Mychaylo Prystupa (Reporter, ETV News), Sean Kavanagh (Reporter, English Radio) and Fern Cabral (Videotape Production Editor, TPC Post Production)
Sometimes, you just can’t cut a break.
The Globe and Mail is reporting this morning that ABC has made a last-minute scheduling change of its reality show The One: Making a Music Star — a change that may force CBC-TV to move The National one more time this summer.
ABC programming executives apparently made the decision late last week (gee, thanks for the advance notice, ABC!) to air a two-hour recap show on Wednesdays. It wasn’t clear whether the rescheduling would continue through The One’s full run or this was a one-off thing.
Kirstine Layfield, CBC TV programming executive, told the Globe that such last-minute changes are in the nature of simulcast. "This happens to CTV and Global all the time. They are having to redo their schedules constantly. We’re fortunate in the sense that we only have one show that we’re dealing with like this."
The National, of course, continues to air unadulterated on CBC Newsworld. "We’re very proud of The National," said Layfield. "I just hope that gets across."
I kind of get the sense that ABC really doesn’t consider CBC to be a partner at all in this. I suppose it’s just part of the regular "mouse in the elephant’s shadow" syndrome that affects most Canada-USA relations. But really, I mean they are using one of our top people (Strombo) for their programming. The least they can do is include us in conference calls about this kind of stuff.
Globe and Mail, July 18 2006
Thirty-six year old Elliotte Friedman will take over from Brian Williams in the CFL anchor chair.
He’s the new host of the “CFL ON CBC” (the ‘ON’ in caps is the official CBC way of writing it. Along with CBC’S HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA. Don’t blame me. I guess the Caps Lock key was stuck when they wrote it up.)
Anyway, Elliotte’s first night is June 17 — appropriately, the first telecast of the season. (He continues to work on Hockey N… er, CBC’S HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA.)
Elliotte joined CBC in 2003 and has worked on CFL ON CBC broadcasts for the past three seasons as a sideline reporter. In his new role, Elliotte will host the CFL ON CBC Pre-Game Show.
I thought the funniest thing in the CBC’s official news release announcing the decision was what we used to call the obquote when I worked in the public relations business (it’s short for “the obligatory quote”). You see it all the time in news releases. Elliotte’s looked like this:
“This is terrific opportunity for me and I’m really excited to step into
this new role,” said Elliotte Friedman, Host, CFL ON CBC. “I can’t wait to get
started.”
I’ve always wondered if these people actually said those things. (Truth be told, when we launched CBC Radio’s podcasts, a little hole was left for me to insert my own obquote. A temporary suggestion was there for me as a template. I think it was something like “I’m really excited that we’re going to blah blah blah.”)
Personally, I think Elliotte’s actual words when told were probably a lot closer to:
“Holy crap!”, said Elliotte Friedman, Host, CFL ON CBC. “Are you serious?! Get… OUT! This freakin’ ROCKS!”
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