Summer. Finally. Bugs, barbecues, and the Banff Television Festival, the annual trek west to play, pitch, and work in some serious relationship building high in the Alberta Rockies with colleagues, national and international.

The Banff powers that be are gearing up for the week-long festivities that this year will include a mix of people and seminars reflecting what the festival is all about: the best of commercial and public television.

Melvyn Bragg, Steven Bochco, virtually all of the cbc executive (union negotiations a thing of the past), and the 40 CTV Fellowship recipients will curl up in Banff, June 9-14, along with more than 1,000 other production and broadcasting industry types from around the world.

Since it began in 1979, Banff has become a much-anticipated industry rendezvous, a calm Canadian cousin to the high-pressure buy-and-sell foreign markets that take place the rest of the year. Big trees, big hats, and new this year among the 60 hours of seminars, Pat Ferns and ‘Two in a Room,’ which will result in one production pitched at the festival being greenlit for production on the spot.

The Two in a Room forum, which began at Scotland’s Sharing Stories and will see cbc and the u.k.’s Channel 4 grant up to $300,000 for the best documentary pitch at the end of the week, is one of a few new legs Banff is growing this year.

Shorter sessions are on the agenda, with none of the seminars on the creative and practical aspects of production, broadcasting, international markets and the new media running longer than an hour, except the two-hour market simulation.

Longtime morning announcement man Fred Keating has his own daily forum from 8:15 to 8:45 a.m., and an entire day will be dedicated to this year’s Banff Outstanding Achievement Award winner, wgbh-tv, Boston’s public broadcaster.

Also changed will be the number of international attendees as a result of the festival exec’s initiative in taking part of the whopping $1 million donation from NetStar Communications and putting into play an industrial strategy to broaden the festival’s base and increase both the number of individuals and the number of countries in attendance.

The announcement of the Banff Rockie Awards nominees in April at mip-tv at a well-attended press conference on the Cannes’ Gray D’Albion Beach, was step one of the process. A final attendance tally isn’t in yet, but the party already seems to have paid off with numbers sure to eclipse last year’s record, says Jerry Ezekiel, president of the Banff Television Festival.

‘Preliminary indications are that this will be the most international festival we’ve ever had, which makes it that much better for the Canadian contingent.’

NetStar, a consortium of broadcasters including tsn, rds and Discovery Channel formerly under the Labatt Communications umbrella, is a longtime festival sponsor, but this year decided to make the $200,000 commitment for five years to give the event a leg up in increasing its international profile, a growing concern for the Banff executive over the past three years.

The mind-set in part stems from the increasing importance for the Canadian film and television industry in scoring an international sale, but this year’s world-stage pr campaign, with a Banff presence planned at other program markets, is simply a natural evolution of the festival’s profile. ‘This is a big Canadian success story,’ says Ezekiel, part of the planning executive for all of the festival’s 17 years.

‘Its reputation already extends far beyond our borders and it was time to leverage it. We aren’t exactly infants when it comes to international contacts and the NetStar grant makes it possible for us to have a significant presence at other international events, which means we get to meet more contacts to draw on as resource people.’

Already on the resource list are 27 high-profile industry players from all over the world joining the 28 Canadian reps as part of the festival’s new international board of governors, which will meet three times a year – at natpe in January, mip in April and Banff in June – and will be responsible for selecting the outstanding achievement award every year.

‘To have these people on board is a real reflection of how far the festival has come,’ says Ezekiel. ‘It’s an international think tank which will help us as we move forward.’

While the out-of-territory input is welcome, Ezekiel adds that this year’s $2.3 million event owes much to the more local talents of festival chairman Arthur Weinthal and executive vp Ferns, who have nailed down perhaps the strongest pack of workshops and seminars the festival has ever put together.

Monday will kick off with the keynote address by Melvyn Bragg, controller of the arts at London Weekend Television, u.k. The world-renowned editor and presenter of The South Bank Show, a producer, writer, editor and director of more than 10 arts series for the bbc and Channel 4, and the writing power behind more than 15 novels and screenplays including Jesus Christ Superstar and Isadora, Bragg is taking time out to ruminate on the relationship between the arts and the television audience.

The purpose is, says Bragg, to suss out how the chew-and-spit medium of television can deal with the kind of creativity once limited to theater and opera houses. tv, the likes of Bravo!, a&e et al, have opened up what was an elitist experience, and the Brit-born presenter will outline the challenges of presenting the arts, writers and their work using examples from his over 500 programs on authors like William Golding and John Updike.

Sun or no sun, an interview with Award of Excellence winner Steven Bochco Monday at noon will no doubt hold the keynote audience, with the rest of the day bleeding into the first of the awards ceremonies, all of which are packed into the first three days.

Alberta native Paul Gross will take his effervescent self to the microphone Monday night to host the Rockie Awards, which will announce the winners from the 70 programs nominated, themselves chosen from over 600 entries from 35 countries. There are 12 program categories, but the ‘long-fiction’ categories, mows and miniseries seemed especially good this year, says Ezekiel.

Tuesday night will host the international dinner. Wednesday evening festivities cap wgbh day, which will profile and celebrate the service, the leading producer for pbs and an industry leader in educational and access technologies.

Baton Broadcasting System’s traditional western barbecue rounds out Thursday night, with attendees trading suits for Levis and donning some unlikely headgear.

Fine evening festivities will cap action-packed days, organized in horizontal strands running the course of the week with a series of debates sandwiched throughout.

Monday’s post-Bragg governors seminar, ‘Responsibility, V-Chip and Television,’ could bring new life to the seemingly never-ending v-chip saga. With the Canadian contingent struggling to come up with a classification system before September, and some international players reportedly backing off their wholehearted support of the chip, dead air isn’t expected to be a problem amongst the nine-member panel, which includes Keith Spicer, Trina McQueen, Michael McCabe and Jeff Cole, director for the Centre of Communication Policy at ucla.

Other sessions of particular note include Thursday’s face-off between Spicer and u.s. entertainment lawyer Mickey Gardner in ‘The Great Debate,’ which will crystallize the protectionist vs. reciprocal access argument at the root of trade war threats over the past year. The subject: does the globalization of communications expand choice and opportunity for viewers or must nations resist these pressures to protect national culture?

Two in a Room will begin Monday morning with Mark Starowicz, executive producer, tv documentaries for cbc, and Jacquie Lawrence, deputy commissioning editor for independent film and video, Channel 4, discussing the terms of tender for a one-hour doc to be commissioned on Friday. Ferns is attempting to keep the two as separate as possible before the morning, ‘because you really want to get a clear picture of how difficult putting together a coproduction can be.’

Producers will have until Wednesday at 6 p.m. to submit proposals, with finalists announced Thursday and the short list Friday at 9 a.m. before the presentation at noon. It’s a bit of a nefarious plot, making everyone wait until the last day of the festival for the winner, says Ferns. ‘The only way you can expect people to show up the morning after the Baton barbecue is to give away money, so that’s what we’re doing.’

To fill the time before the announcement, other pitching opportunities run amok. Last year, Discovery heard more than 30 formal proposals over the course of the week during the pitch sessions and almost half received development funding from the specialty channel.

Those hankering for more information-type interaction are privy to streamed panels on Canadian broadcasting, the ‘In the Spotlight’ series with Laurier La Pierre, and new market studies on sponsorship, merchandising and marketing.

News, the arts, documentary and children’s programming will be of focus in separate sessions. ‘Children’s Report: A Jury of Peers’ is a new concept in which students from Banff High School and Canmore Collegiate compare notes with the international jury and children’s programmers on the five children’s and seven animation entries for the Rockie Awards.

Everything you ever needed to know about working in the international market is also available with a series of case studies on international coproduction, the ‘Banff as Bridge: Europe Meets North America’ series, and the ‘International Focus’ hours on the u.s., Germany, and Australia and New Zealand.

It’s a lineup, says Ferns, which epitomizes everything the Banff festival is about. ‘When people ask me what Banff is I say it’s three things: a competition for program excellence; a conference where the best minds in the world come together to talk about television programming; and a place where broadcasters and producers come together and take steps to make terrific product. We’ve got all that and more this year.’