“He’s running… running… and!…” {click}
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.)
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OUCH.
As a Saskatchewan Roughriders fan who lives in Ottawa… *winces in agony*
Intentionally or unintentionally, national CBC programming continues to collapse and become largely regional Toronto that is being broadcast nationally, and that is being switched off by Canadians. CFL games have a huge, truly national, audience. There were close to 600,000 people watching that game. Why was there even a question about picking it up again when it re-started? How utterly incompetent and completely out of touch would the individual who made that call have to be to decide not to? It’s mind-boggling, almost as mind-boggling as the CBC hiring two middle aged regional hicks who’ve never lived anywhere but Toronto to host two of it’s prominent “national” pop culture shows. The CBC has screwed up it’s handling of CFL games so badly in recent years that it has now lost the rights to broadcast them next year. Instead it has picked up some Toronto Blue Jays games, which draw a fraction of the audience of a CFL game and most of that audience will come from Toronto and souther Ontario, and Toronto’s TFC’s soccer games, which are drawing infomercial type numbers, also mostly from Toronto and southern Ontario. I am a huge supporter of having a national, publically funded, broadcaster, but I don’t believe that we have one in Canada anymore, even though we’re paying for one. The national CBC programming group either needs massive, drastic, reform, or we need to pull the plug on it entirely and start from scratch. I’ve never voted Tory in my life, but at this point I believe I would support the Tories if the wanted to take the latter route.
Quick sidebar: Please don’t call them “Tories”. They’re not entitled to the nickname. The political party that did is dead.
Back to the main point of the article: I’d very much like to see the whole game re-aired, in full, at a decent hour of the night. Or a convenient afternoon. Not after midnight, please.
Fair enough. You are correct. These are the Conservatives, not the Tories. Is there a new nickname for them in Ottawa, at least one that you can mention on this blog?
(I also need to apologise for repeatedly spelling its, it’s.
I don’t know why my fingers commit that typo so often, but for some reason they do. Bad fingers!)