The Globe and Mail this morning reports:
Last summer’s dust-up over Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, in which CBC Television withdrew the $7.9-million drama under pressure from the descendants of the NDP leader’s old political foes, has reached a sunny resolution for the miniseries’ embattled writers and producers.
At the Cannes MIPTV broadcast marketplace on the French Riviera earlier this spring, Giant’s producer, Kevin De Walt of Mind’s Eye Entertainment, revealed that a deal had been struck with Hallmark International to air the two-part drama on Hallmark specialty channels in 156 territories, from Scandinavia to the Middle East.
The deal means that Prairie Giant can be screened again, something that looked unlikely after CBC cancelled a scheduled rebroadcast and suspended sales of Prairie Giant DVDs, citing uneasiness over the way it had been dramatized.
In 2005, when CBC invested $1.2-million in the biographical drama, and the Saskatchewan NDP government put in $600,000, the Opposition Saskatchewan Party complained that the project was politically partisan. The Opposition renewed the attack after Giant was broadcast in March, 2006, and seen by more than 800,000 viewers, in part because Tommy Douglas’s old adversary, Liberal premier Jimmy Gardiner, was depicted as a reactionary xenophobe with a drink in his hand.
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Comments below | See also: Media Coverage, Specials |
| Email this | Posted at 4:12 am (21 Jun 2007) |
I interviewed writer Bruce Smith and TV writer Keith Leckie on this subject for Canadian Screenwriter Magazine. Smith was pretty steamed with the way the mini-series had been shunted aside, though he insisted he remained a fan of the CBC.
You can find an excerpt and link to the full story here.
This is not the sort of result I’d wanted to see for Prairie Giant. And I admit that I sympathize with Bruce Smith over this.
“The Opposition renewed the attack . . . in part because Tommy Douglas’s old adversary, Liberal premier Jimmy Gardiner, was depicted as a reactionary xenophobe with a drink in his hand.”
Was there not more to it than this (I know, Tod wrote ‘in part’). What were the other parts? I can’t imagine CBC would have back off the way it did if it weren’t a bit more serious than a single scene.
Anything that Tommy Douglas’s CCF party had a hand in penning for Parliament had to be transcribed on the prevailing elected Governments’ legislation. The current political atmosphere in our country- fed by the Money Media- makes opposition incentives invisible. We had an objective press then. Passing medicare legislation would be impossible now for any political party… and it would have been for the past thirty years. How a non-governing party could have inspired and cajoled the Headline Parties to be so socially responsible needs to be seen in historical context… for the present offers no explanations. We need to regain a Parliament of objective and conscious representatives who hold Canada’s best interests above their party politics. Tommy Douglas was not a glorified Socialist Prairie Giant… he was one small person operating in a democracy that cared for Canadians. What made him a Giant in the producers eyes (I imagine) was the fact that he could see from the shoulders of the Parliamentary system of his day as he helped all the others pass legislation that mades us unique in the world today. All the glory belongs to our democracy… but only for those lucky enough to have a memory of what Canada was, is, and can yet become. I am saddened to see such self-censorship strangling a drama production that I may never get to see unless I go to Scandanavia or the Middle East.