That’s quite the accolade! The Tea Makers thanks Richard Stursberg for bringing us this news. Stursberg also claims “CBC TV’s never been better”:
Ah, say our critics, we’re not “distinctive” because CBC shows are made within the same narrative and format conventions as many U.S. television shows. They argue that the Canadian privates could make these shows.
Maybe. But they don’t. CBC spends more on Canadian drama and comedy than all the privates combined. [...]
But, say the critics, it’s not “high quality” and a public broadcaster needs to focus on quality, not popularity.... They want it to be a university lecture, a ballet, or a treatise on world hunger. [...]
In English Canada, it’s sometimes argued that we’ve fallen away from CBC’s Golden Age in the 1970s and 1980s.
A lot of us here would be happy to return to the Golden Age of Da Vinci’s fucking Inquest and Intelligence. (And Opening Night. And The Fifth Estate with enough of a budget to rub two Schreibers together.)
Happily, the CBC is full of imaginative, intelligent and creative people. Sadly, we’re in the process of letting many of them go.
The CBC is one of those places where not only do the rats actually helm the sinking ship, they get to write op-ed pieces extolling the unheralded good works of rats and their rodentlike taste.