The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
923

You’re not alone. It seems most Canadians don’t watch the CBC, since CBC shows up so rarely in the TV ratings. The Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM) publishes TV ratings online, and they demonstrate that CBC’s most popular offering is hockey. CBC’s news doesn’t even show up in the top 30 shows weekly, the BBM archive of which is here. (Note that I did not look at radio ratings.)

Here, for example, is the December 5-11, 2011 chart. (Warning, PDF.) The top CBC show is Hockey Night in Canada, at position 13 out of 30. Only three other CBC offerings made the top 30 that week: Dragon’s Den at position 18, the original animated Grinch at position 27, and the Sunday Evening Movie, at position 30. By contrast, CTV had 19 shows in the top 30, and Global had 7. The top show was the US-produced Big Bang Theory, on CTV.

Or, looking back a ways, we have the week of October 31-November 6, 2011. CBC had only one show in the top 30 that week; and it was (you guessed it), hockey.

Back farther, August 29-September 4, 2011, CBC managed to get three shows in the top 30. Two were American game shows (Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, at positions 29 and 30, respectively), and the highest CBC could manage was Dragon’s Den, at number 20. Of course, the hockey season had not started at that time.

I did take a look at CBC’s (that is, SRC’s) offerings in the French ratings, and it does score better there. Not by much at a quick glance, but it does. I understand that the Francophone population needs to be served in French, and SRC is willing to do it, so I have no complaints there.

Interestingly, CBC news doesn’t show up in the English ratings. Nor does Global’s, but CTV news does, constantly.

So perhaps CBC English is not propagandizing as much as we may think (and if it was, who’s watching it anyway?). Still, given the ratings, CBC is reaching very few Canadians except hockey fans. If Canadians vote with their remotes, then the BBM results indicate that it’s offerings don’t seem to be wanted by Canadians as a whole–not just westerners.

I’ve always said that more dialogue between Canadians is a good thing; and perhaps CBC could lead the way in that regard. Forget “Little Mosque,” and “The Beachcombers,” and “Adventures in Rainbow Country” (argh, I’m showing my age); let’s figure out a way to use CBC to bring the country together. As it is, it can’t do that if nobody is watching it.

924

That’s a great idea. I don’t know just how it would work, but I like the idea.

925

A few months back when we had that silly thing with Rob Ford and the unfunny woman from “This Hour Has 22 Minutes,” someone was arguing to me that Ford should have known who she was because “everyone watches 22 Minutes.” I replied that I didn’t know for sure but would guess that the vast majority of Canadians never watch the program.

I went and looked up the ratings, and in fact if they are correct, “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” is watched by about half a million people per episode, which means that about one and a half percent of Canadians bother to watch it.

I admit I found this quite amazing given that a lot of people SAY they’re watching it, and claim to find the Viking outfit/screaming thing funny. But they aren’t tuning in.

The funny thing about TV shows is that people seem remarkably aware of shows they aren’t watching. Either that or we just hear a lot about them. Almost no regular program in Canada, or the USA for that matter, can claim to get one in ten people watching it; this year’s top rated program, NCIS, draws maybe one in every 13 people, and that’s a fantastic score. Rare sporting events, like the Super Bowl or Olympic hockey final, will blow past that.

And yet TV shows that get few viewers are huge, huge news. People made a lot about the Jay Leno / Conan O’Brien thing despite the inescapable fact that nobody actually watches those shows. 11:30 talk shows regularly pull just one percent of the population to watch them - indeed, the very reason they have talk shows on at 11:30 is because they’re cheap to make. And here we are talking about the alleged bias of a news program that is watched by a miniscule percentage of Canadians.

I wonder why that is.

926

I think a number of shows, particularly those that don’t have a serial format, have a lot more casual viewers than people typically think. And then if we’re talking about shows that run for decades, people will have watched at some point in its run and dropped it, or intermittently returned to it. I used to watch 22 Minutes many moons ago (Rick Mercer was still on it when I stopped) and I would certainly know Marg Delahunty’s shtick, but I’m not in that half a million people that watch it week after week. Same deal with the talk shows. I don’t have time to watch Letterman or Ferguson or whomever five nights a week, but I might check in if there’s a guest I’m interested in. On any one night, no one’s watching. Over a long period of time, many, many people have watched them.

927

At the start of the month, one of my friends noted that CBC Radio One in TBAY (where we have a good selection of radio stations) was first in mornings, first in afternoons, and first overall.

I think CBC Radio 1 is the shiznitz. I would have said that CBC TV only rates a “meh” for me, but it (along with all broadcast TV) does not rate even that highly with me anymore, for I have not bothered to keep up with the change to digital and thus no longer receive TV.

928

Also: YouTube and Facebook. I’ll catch clips of 22 Minutes or RMR on people’s Facebook pages, so I have a vague sense of the “characters” and their schticks.

Unrelated to anything going on in this thread, I bought my 6 month old nephew some awesome soft plastic alphabet blocks; they are colourful and have animals in relief all over them and have different shapes (triangles and columns and arches!) and I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to play with them.

My husband assures me that my nephew will share and let me play with them at Christmas. :slight_smile:

929

CBC Radio 1 is OK to listen to because it’s commercial-free. But if you listen long enough you’ll come to the realization that it sounds like it’s programmed, edited and announced by a group of 25 year old recent university graduates, who were formerly Young Liberals.

I have a two hour commute every day. Since A.M. stations decrease their power after sunset and before sunrise, I am forced to get most of my news on the CBC because my car radio can’t pull in my favourite A.M. station during the darkness.

I’m glad the daylight starts returning, little by little, in a few days. In a couple of months I’ll be back to A.M. for most of my drive, and not the other way around.

(What the hell kind of an accent does Carol Off have anyway?)

930

Although I like CBC Radio (granted, given how horrible all other terrestrial radio is, they could hardly lose that battle) I have to say, NPR in the States just blows it out of the water. I love listening to NPR. And part of it is that NPR sounds like it’s made by adults, not just recent college grads. I can even overlook Michelle Norris’s incredibly annoying insistence at pronouncing her name “MEE-shell.”

Not sure why that is, but it’s true.

931

Yes, NPR is great. Unfortunately there’s no coverage up here.

932

I pick up NPR in my vehicle near my home and south of my home, but not in my home and not downtown. I like it a lot, but I find that it is short on content, by which I mean that when it has something, it usually quite good, but often it does not have anything and falls back on music.

933

I think I’ve posted this in this thread before, but I really enjoy CBC’s “Doc Zone” (their documentary show). I started watching one last night that was fascinating (I have to finish it online - it was just on too late for me) - The Secret World of Shoplifting. They do a fine documentary.

934

Check out Documentary Storm and Television Ontario / TVO. Lots of terrific docs on line at those sites.

TVO also has some excellent current events discussions (Steve Paiken / The Agenda), interviews (Allan Greg In Conversation), and lectures (Big Ideas).

Every couple of weeks, for work I drive along much of the North Shore of Superior – twelve hours of driving over two or three days through some of Canada’s loveliest scenery. Most of the trip is outside of cell and radio range, so it’s a great oppotunity to play Television Ontario / TVO andBBCpodcasts (In Our Time). I truly love those trips!

935

Calgary is a cool city filled with interesting people and their mayor is a great representative for them. Here he is reading ‘The Night Before Christmas.’

936

Why, thank you. We think we’re pretty awesome, too :slight_smile:

937

Spoons, I resent the implication that Bruno Gerussi didn’t bring television audiences across Canada together. :smiley:

I never watch or listen to the CBC. I used to listen to CBC radio 2, but they got rid of classical music and Jurgen Goth, and decided to play shitty indy hipster music. Their prerogative, I suppose, but I just have no interest in anything save Saturday Night hockey from them. Now that Bell AND Rogers own the Leafs, I’d say even the future of HNIC is in peril…

938

Attawapiskat update: Houses on their way to the reserve.

939

Here’s what they should be sending: Portable Sawmills and Wood Processing Equipment | Wood-Mizer USA

940

Or this guy. :slight_smile:

941

He’s working on a project on a reserve near Sudbury, addressing design and materials issues relevant to the location.

In my opinion, the way to go for public housing on remote reserves that have extremely limited water and waste water facilities, that generate all their electricity by diesel, and that have incredible problems with people destroying their own homes and/or failing to properly maintain their homes, would be to build cinder block/concrete apartment buildings that have live-in building supervisors/maintenance workers.

942

I’ll whole heartedly second that opinion.