Village Squire, 1979-05, Page 41P.S.
Continued from page 40
station in the days of live television
produces something like 36 hours a week of
local programing. Today they produce
about a third of that, nearly all of it news.
You can understand whvhen you know
that it costs several hundred dollars an
hour just to operate a small television
studio, with its expensive equipment and
trained personnel, let alone hire talent to
go before the camera. Even with all that,
the quality of the show just can't match the
product turned out in Hollywood studios
with the best trained and paid people in the
business and sets that cost as much as an
entire season's budget around here. When
people are given a choice between a local
show and a high-priced. highly -publicized,
U.S. import, they're most likely to take the
import. Add to that the fact that the station
can't make money on it's own show
anyway. and is guaranteed to make money
on the American import, and you can see
why there isn't more local television.
On top of all this there's the fact that
cable television has fragmented the local
advertising market so much that advertis-
ing rates can't keep up with rising costs.
Once all people in a town of say 10,000
people might have a choice of one or two
television stations. That meant that each
station could figure on about 5000 people
watching their station. Today, each of
those stations may be competing with eight
stations piped in from Bay City or Erie
Pennsylvania meaning that if the market
was divided evenly among the 10 available
stations, only 1000 would be watching any
particular channel. No advertiser wants to
spend his money to get only one-tenth of
the available viewers:
What all this is doing is eliminating jobs
for anyone who might want to work in the
television industry in Canada. Whether he
be a writer, an actor, a makeup girl or a
camera technician, the chances for jobs in
Canada are far less than they would be if
we had a healthy television industry. So
instead we ship all our talented people like
Bernard Slade and Norman Jewison and
Lorne Green off to the U.S. where they can
work at what they're good at. Remember
when the Prime Minister told young
college graduates a year or so ago that if
they couldn't find jobs in Canada they'd
have to look elsewhere? It practically
caused a scandal. Yet ordinary people have
been quite happy to see that happen in our
television industry for years.
The less noticeable part of this is that
North America is becoming homogenized.
The center of all thought is California.
Whether it be in Chicago or Cargill,
Kalamazoo or Komoka we are all being
brainwashed with a view of life as seen
through the smog of Los Angeles. The
realities of life in the rest of the continent
are all but ignored by the television
factories of Hollywood.
It's not only in Canada this has been
recognized as a problem. We've reacted
here with Canadian content quotas which
have often been ridiculed and even more
often been circumvented. But the Federal
Communications Commission in the U.S.
has also seen the danger of one city
producing all the television for the country.
It has come in with regulations which force
a certain number of hours to be produced
by each local station. We often laugh at
Americans who carry their idea of Canada
as being a land of ice and snow, but how
much more informed is our knowledge of
everyday life in Indiana or Missouri or
Wyoming, in those huge sections of the
United States where millions of people are
just as ignored by U.S. big-time television
as Canadians are.
Television is a very precious and
powerful medium. Its value has been
proved of late with series like Roots in the
U.S. and Riel and The Newcomers in
Canada, series that teach us what it's like
to live in another time, in another
language, even in another skin. It's
potential for good is great. Unfortunately,
we've got to try to iron out the bugs so that
the value of that medium to teach us about
ourselves, about people all over rather than
just people living in the dreamworld of
Hollywood. And the work must be done not
just by government, but by you and me
expressing our agreement, our right, to see
the medium used properly.
Exit Boredom
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May 1979, Village Squire 39