Hell yeah! “Bimbo, Bimbo, everybody Bimbo!”
No surprise that you’ve met Canadians that don’t remember Uncle Bobby, though – he was never delivered through the graces of the CBC; he was strictly for Toronto tots.
(This is how I came to understand, for the first time, that people in different places saw different TV shows. :D)
In Spokane, we used to get the CBC as part of our cable package until around 15 years ago. It was great watching new episodes of SCTV early in the evening instead of staying up until 2 a.m. to watch them on NBC. Other stuff we got included Montreal Expos games during those years in the early 80’s when the team was actually competitive and drew a lot of fans and the NHL when it wasn’t being broadcast on any American network.
Unfortunately, the local cable company dropped CBC supposedly due to lack of viewer interest and too much of an overlap between Canadian and American network programming. Oddly enough, however, that last reason hasn’t stopped many Spokane stations from still being aired on cable in Calgary and Edmonton.
i’m looking through thebuffalo channels, but i don’t see it. then again, it could be regulated by the school…you know how the pesky colleges try and limit defectors.
we’ve DEFINITELY got it back home in detroit, though
And Detroit tots, apparently. 
Yeah, but on Canadian cable and satellite, Rochester is often the default place where we get our American networks - ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS. We usually get PBS Detroit though.
When my son was at Gonzaga around the turn of the millenium, he got CBC on the cable that ran through the dorms. I know this because he called me during the Nagano games to describe, at length, the awesomeness which is curling on television. :dubious: Oh yeah, and also how nice it is to watch the olympics without a saccharine athelete-overcomes-adversity-to-score-one-for-Gipper-USA!-USA!-USA! story every 11 seconds.
Maybe they brought it back after you left?
Turned on CBC’s Olympic coverage this afternoon. The first thing I saw? A sappy portrayal of a Canadian athlete.
The difference with the CBC seems to be, simply, that they try to stay live for the entire sporting day; there seems to be some sort of network rule that they have to put on a live sporting event every fifteen minutes. They’ll always go to something Canada can win in whenever possible, but the default priority is to get a sport on the tube.
The NBC approach appears to be to never, ever show any sporting event live if they can possibly avoid it, and to minimize the number of events shown. I don’t really understand why, because I’ve never heard an American with any opinion of the coverage other than “this sucks.”
In Seattle it’s included in the basic cable package but not restricted cable. Now that the olympics are here and I’m stuck with the lousy NBC coverage I really miss CBC.
On the radio side: I used to listen to Canadian radio stations when I lived in Ann Arbor. For when I wanted to hear debate on how to fix Windsor’s traffic problems, you know.
But I was pretty surprised when Chicago Public Radio (our local NPR affiliate) started carrying As It Happens, a CBC Radio program. I didn’t know that there was a real demand for wacky Canadian current events in Chicago, but after listening for a few months, I’m hooked. I especially like it when they talk to Americans. I’m pretty sure they intentionally look for the doofiest Americans they can possibly find. (Like, last week they interviewed some guy from … Alabama? … who performed CPR on a chicken.)
No shit…I guess the Olympics haven’t been going on long enough for the biennial “Fuck you, NBC!” threads to show up in the Pit. I’m still pissed off that they tape-delayed the Salt Lake City stuff in the Pacific time. Everyone else gets to watch the Olympics live, but if you’re dumb enough to live on the West Coast - one hour behind SLC - you get a tape-delay. I wish whoever’d come with that idiocy had been fired, but knowing NBC, s/he probably got a promotion.
My fondest memories of the CBC are discovering the Kids in the Hall, and movies with full-frontal female nudity late at night on Fridays.
I dunno - I remember watching “Uncle Bobby” (how did I forget about Bimbo the Birthday Clown? - and wasn’t this the show with the magician who said “IT’S MAAAAAgic”?) in small town Saskatchewan. Course, I’ve never seen The Electric Company or Schoolhouse Rock (well, once, for 20 minutes in 1990).
I get CBC News as part of one of my digital cable channels (one that focuses on foreign news broadcasts).
No entertainment programs, however.
That’s rather unusual, seeing as Schoolhouse Rock was three-minute shorts that appeared during ABC’s Saturday Morning cartoons. Are you sure you’re not confusing it with your visit to the Marianas Trench?
Not so. I had Uncle Bobby in rural Alberta in the early 70s. I loved that bunny.
I grew up in Cleveland in the 1960s, and I remember watching CBC from Windsor. But we got poor reception. I watched it anyway because I dug being able to see Canada.
Y’know, just because everyone has access to the same shows means everyone watches the same shows. I never saw Schoolhouse Rock until a couple years ago when my then-roommate bought the DVD set. I’m the right demographic and everything. Just never watched Saturday morning cartoons.
I can’t believe some of you don’t get any CBC. It isn’t great quality of coverage, but it is great quantity. NBC covers a few things…CBC covers a ton.
My wife and I have been watching Olympics today…we watched about 70% CBC.
I was in Spokane at that time and the CBC still wasn’t part of the local cable line-up. I think Gonzaga had a different company for its cable provider or had satellite TV.
Different cable provider: possibly.
Satellite? He never would have done anything useful. 
Did you, by any chance, ever happen to see Codco, which aired right before it?
For me, KITH was just something you watched because you were already glued to the set for Codco – at least in the beginning, before it really grew on me, and when Codco was still at its peak.
Codco was smarter and edgier than Kids in the Hall, but I’ve often wondered if its humour translated well across the border. To say that it was extremely (Atlantic) Canadian is something of an understatement.