For the first few years that they aired together, I was much more partial to Codco than the The Kids in the Hall, which seemed a little too American-influenced and by “American,” I mean Lorne Michaels mediocre. Of course, they got much better - but at first I only watched them because I was recovering from seeing Codco immediately before, it was a bit of a let-down.
This is a show that parodied the frequency with which the drinks cabinet featured (to no actual effect) in Edward and Mrs. Simpson, by showing the pair players getting incoherently inebriated, amping up until they were having gin and tonic literally pumped up their asses by the help.
Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation caused some controversy (certainly not because of the solitary “horseshit”, which wouldn’t raise an eyebrow) and was held back, but eventually aired in the regular 9:00pm spot - God bless the CBC.
It ain’t really language that makes “Never in a million years on American TV,” programming though. Middle America, watch a typical Codco sketch like House of Budgel - The Purloined Hash and try to keep in mind that it’s state-sponsored public television. Warms the very cockles of my Hortons’-hampered heart.
I suppose, technically, since a household without cable or satellite would be a rare thing, but it’s carried on broadcast networks, up here - CTV this year, Global, when the incident in question happened in 2004.
Network, cable, whatever - my point was we were watching it in Canada, too (well, I wasn’t, since football is the most boring sport of all to watch, but I think my husband was).
Hey, shut your mouth! Football is as good as game as any other, and almost as engaging as hockey or curling. It actually gets a bit rousing when they hold those World Cup thingies every few years.
** American** football., Hmphh ! 4 downs are for wimps. Real men only needs 3. And what’s with the kiddie-sized field ?
To return to the iscussion about TV. Keep in mind also that we have 2 types of TV up here : English and French. Although there are many translations of American and British series on the air, we also make several original series in French. I remember in 1986-87 when He shoots, He scores first aired that there was lots of nudity and swearing during prime time and as far as I know, nobody blinked an eye. Also, Dopers in New England might also remember Bleu Nuit (I think that was the title) coming from Sherbrooke which broadcasted porn movies late at night on Fridays.
Talking about Canadian TV (although not about swearing), I was in Calgary in 1981 and had the TV on one night in my hotel room. They had some action/mystery/PI show running that I wasn’t paying much attention to. Until near the end of the movie where there was a shootout between the PI and the bad guys. A bullet hit a bad guy, and blood poured out of the bullet hole. Now, American MOVIES might have that in it, but for TV, at that time it was edited out as too “graphic”. So I just assumed it must have been a Canadian movie. Especially when the next bullet hit a car, and blood started pouring out of THAT hole. Another shot, and it hit a building, which started pouring blood out of the hole. Even a stray shot that hit the ground started bleeding profusely. I figured that must be the oddball Canadian humor (which really was pretty funny) since American movies hadn’t done anything that weird yet. (Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane were very recent concepts in the U.S.)
That was pre-VCR days (for most of the public) and long before VHS rental days, so I never bothered to get the name of the movie. Now I regret it because no one can tell me. Someone suggested that it was Police Squad but I have all the episodes and it wasn’t them. And the Naked Gun trilogy hadn’t yet come out at that time.
So if anyone knows if that really was a Canadian movie (or not) and remembers the name, I’d buy a copy just for that end scene alone.
Well, I assumed that by Canadian television the original poster meant Canadian television in English, since that’s the one Americans are most likely to be aware of or interested in. But the first thing that came to my mind reading the OP was an ancient (1993) episode of La P’tite Vie which I just happened to see on Thursday, in replacement of Infoman since Jean-René Dufort is still recovering from his illness. Pôpa and Môman are at a motel in Plattsburgh – having traded a trip to China for 37 trips to Plattsburgh – and see a scary black guy in the parking lot, which they describe as “Martin Luther King, Kennedy’s assassin!” So to defend himself Pôpa throws him his wallet screaming “Fuck away! Fuck away!” much to the scary black guy’s amusement.
So I guess that there is cussing on prime-time Canadian television, although it is true that “fuck” doesn’t have the same strength in Canadian French than in Canadian English.
That might be why I missed it; I’m in Chicago, and the only time I ever see the WGN satellite feed is when I’m traveling (which is usually on the weekends). I remember seeing ads for it on the WGN satellite feed, but only for the midnight showings.
What I remember most from Canadian TV was how much they had to remind everyone they were Canadian. Promos would talk about your CANADIAN show on your CANADIAN network and the ads would talk about what real canadians want and the local news would have to say canada or canadian roughly once every 3 seconds. It was kind of sad and funny to me, like they’d forget who they were if not constantly reminded.
Growing up on the Canadian border, this. The Canadian-this and Canadian-that gets especially thick if an iconic actor or actress dies; e.g. Ernie Coombs, who was actually American. Like I’ve posted before, I saw a greater concentration of Canadian flags flying west of the border than US flags to the east, not to mention the maple leaves slapped on every other corporate logo.
Anyhow, growing up watching Canadian television, I never thought there was that much more swearing. HBO series aired uncensored on Canadian network television, and I heard second-tier profanities (shit, asshole, etc) a bit more later at night, but that’s about it. Canadian commercials were dull by American standards, with no European-style nudity as some might think. The French channels were definitely more blue than the English channels; what kid needs scrambled porn when there’s Channel 25!
The one thing I always noticed about Canadian television is that the colors are less saturated than in the US. It’s like the color level control is turned way down.
When you live next door to the US, constantly reminding yourself that you’re a different country is kind of necessary to keep from being completely submerged.
The CBC was especially notorious for this. Ignoring its sports and news programming, which should be expected to be more locally-oriented; the CBC’s sitcoms and dramas were unabashedly Canadian: if it wasn’t obvious from the setting and the characters (“Adventures in Rainbow Country”), endless and often unnecessary-to-the-plot references would be made to Canadian city streets, sports teams, and other bits of Canadiana (“King of Kensington,” “Sidestreet”). Heck, in “Quentin Durgens MP,” we even got a political drama, set in Canada’s Parliament.
Neither CTV nor Global were this over-the-top in their programming–heck, CTV produced the aforementioned “Night Heat,” which was set in an unnamed city; and the truly awful “The Trouble with Tracy,” which was set in New York. And these (and other) shows qualified as Canadian programming, in spite of a lack of references to hockey, Yonge Street, the CFL, French, and Mounties.
SCTV did an excellent sendup of the CBC and its programming when it did an episode where its production staff went on strike, so SCTV management bought a feed from the CBC. Viewers were treated to “Monday Night Curling,” to “Hinterland: Who’s Who” (older Canadians will well remember the nature shorts beginning with a narrator saying something like, “The woodchuck lives in wooded areas…”), and to “Front Page Challenge,” where they were presented with dead-on caricatures of media personalities like Barbara Frum and Pierre Berton, all dressed in varying shades of grey playing the game dully, and laughing at their own jokes.
I don’t know how this SCTV "CBC feed"episode went down with American viewers, since it contained so many in-jokes that only those of us who had spent years watching CBC would get, but it sure had us laughing. Homer Simpson is absolutely correct when he says, “It’s funny 'cause it’s true.” The SCTV sendup of CBC was certainly both.
Lacey was attractive, but greater more than the comedy is the delight of watching the sweetest little cop who ever existed on film…
And when I say little, it’s not patronising: “The smallest size [ uniform ] they come in was too big for me, so in real life I don’t know if I’d be allowed to be a cop.”
