Those of us concerned with knowing and preserving Canadian film and television have to scrounge our sources wherever we can find them.

There is a small and resolute band of us who continue to believe that one day we should have, and will have, a comprehensive encyclopedia, or database, or Web site of the moving image in Canada. But whether Canadian resources, cooperation and pride in our own production will ever be sufficient to accomplish this remains to be seen.

In the meantime we take note of, and delight in, any partial sources and this past Christmas we had two very different new contributions to treasure and keep readily at hand.

Mondo Canuck

Prentice Hall published Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, the irreverent, brave, breezy, and eclectic (to use their own perfectly apt adjectives) documenting of our popular culture by Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond.

The book consists of a series of essays or capsules with compelling titles such as ‘Death, Taxes, Wayne and Shuster.’ They have lots of sidebars with intriguing lists such as ‘We are not Amused: The Canadian Sitcom Hall of Shame.’

Mondo Canuck tells us what Pevere and Dymond know and have collected in their thirtysomething years. And since those thirtysomething years coincide with the fortysomething years of Canadian television, Mondo Canuck incidentally tells us lots about Canadian tv.

Pevere and Dymond have amassed an amazing quantity of useful, intriguing, scandalous and irrelevant information/tidbits that is great fun to have. Their effort and style obviously struck a chord in that Mondo Canuck was the surprise success of the past Christmas season and is now in its third printing

What they know and tell us about the Canadian moving image is far from encyclopedic (another of their adjectives) and is sometimes idiosyncratic, but nonetheless valuable for all of that.

Gordon Pinsent’s role as the quintessential Mountie in The Forest Rangers is summarized, but he is ignored as The Rowdyman or as Sergeant Sturgess in A Gift to Last (perhaps even better known figures).

Quebecois film is known to the authors but the immensely more popular Quebecois television is harder for an Anglophone to know. The Royal Canadian Air Farce receives passing mention, despite their two decades of packed houses across the country, whereas Kids in the Hall are lavished with attention.

Pevere/Dymond somewhat fall into the colonial mind-set of valuing higher those that make it big elsewhere and are particularly caustic with homegrown successes such as Peter Gzowski or Front Page Challenge.

However, to be fair to them, the authors never pretended to be comprehensive, fair-minded, or reverential towards established Canadiana. Indeed, their self-proclaimed selection criteria for whatever was to be included was simply ‘anything that made it into their rec rooms.’

Much of what they know has been culled from extensive clipping files and previous publications and here is compiled, regurgitated, and commented upon without attribution. I rather enjoy the liberties they have taken in this regard but regret that they did not find an unobtrusive and non-stuffy way to provide some hint of their sources.

One would hope that their wide-ranging poking around Canada’s pop culture might provoke others to follow up, and for this their sources would be valuable. Unfortunately, acknowledging their sources would also have revealed how dependent the authors were on the likes of Pierre Berton, the cbc, and other venerable Canadian institutions that they would prefer to trash.

30 years of CBC series

Then very quietly on the Internet, just before Christmas, appeared the results of Blaine Allan’s research (//www.film.queenu.ca/cbc/ Index.html). Allan is a professor of film studies at Queen’s University and has been working on documenting Canadian television for a good 10 years now in a great variety of sources.

The Directory of CBC Television Series from 1952-82 documents hundreds of series, giving us the dates and times of their broadcast, on-air and production credits, a description of the type of program and its public reaction. Major series often include a thumbnail photograph that can be enlarged although I rarely take the time to do so, but others might well appreciate this feature.

The mini-essays about each series are well done and are written in a lively and engaging fashion. Indeed, the Directory is more opinionated and subjective than one might expect from a university-based project – and this is a compliment, not a criticism.

Professor Allan did a lot of work on non-cbc television programming over the years and one hopes that this might some day be included to be make this a truly comprehensive encyclopedia of Canadian television.

However, researching an ephemeral medium such as television is difficult enough and private television in Canada is surely the most elusive and transitory component of the Canadian moving image over the years.

Searching difficult

The biggest complaint with the Directory of CBC Television is the difficulty of searching within it for a particular series when you may not remember its exact name. Indeed, even when you know the name actually finding the entry is slow and tedious without the ease of instantaneous indexing that we have become accustomed to on the Internet.

The Queen’s University Directory has no index, or cross-referencing, a curious lack given its ‘publication’ on the Web. Consequently, it does not allow you to trace the cbc career of Pinsent or Norman Jewison or the hundreds of others who are referred to in their descriptions.

Mondo Canuck has an index, albeit a very brief one, and it unfortunately continues the idiosyncratic style of their prose. Thus you have to know to look for Stompin’ Tom Connors under ‘Sudbury Saturday Night.’ And the capsule about Mr. Dressup cannot be referenced by looking under Ernie Coombs, although he is referred to in their write-up on the series. This index could easily be improved, and if Mondo Canuck continues to sell well, hopefully this will be considered for subsequent editions.

Neither enterprise will be read cover to cover, but rather should be dipped into many times when the mood or need strikes. Both lend themselves to being corrected, argued about, and added to. I suspect that both authors would enjoy such responses and consider such reactions the highest compliment. These days the Internet allows and encourages this, but here both miss the boat.

The Prentice Hall Web site promotes Mondo Canuck but does not invite such interaction.

Neither does the Queen’s University Directory on the Web, although Professor Allan does respond to his e-mail and acknowledges that he would like to make such improvements.

Indeed, one of the curiosities of all sorts of Web sites that I consult regularly is how little interaction they invite or respond to, even if one does find an e-mail address somewhere. Despite all the talk about the Internet affording opportunity for interaction, few of the established communication institutions have yet figured out how to do it.

Surfing the Net

There are other Internet sources that look promising but end up very limited in what they actually tell us about Canadian film and television programming. The Web site (//www.rcc.ryersoh.ca:80/schools/rta/ccf/index.html) of the Canadian Communications Foundation – created by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters in 1967 to ‘chronicle and document the history of Canadian broadcasting’ – has a wide range of private station histories but only scattered references to programming and pointedly ignores the cbc.

The Web site (//www.mztv. com/mztv/daven.html) of the MZTV Museum founded by Moses Znaimer at Citytv is slowly constructing a virtual gallery so that you can see their world-class collection of television sets. But for the moment the selection of sets available, and the quality of the images on their Web site, pale in comparison to their exhibition, ‘Watching Television’ (currently on display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Que.) and even to the catalogue of the exhibition.

The National Film Board Web site (//www.nfb.ca) does the best job in providing a description and production credits for all of its 9,000 titles since 1939 (the same information as published in The NFB Film Guide for the board’s 50th anniversary in 1989).

The Fraser Institute (// www.fraserinstitute.ca) Web site includes The National Media Archive, but to consult the transcripts that they have compiled of the cbc and ctv national news since 1988 you have to contact the Institute directly and pay their research fees.

The cbc Web site (//www. cbc.ca) has received much well-deserved praise for being the first to deliver audio on the Internet and for its dynamic design.

However, it offers no access to cbc’s past programming and pays only token respect to the cbc’s past with the inclusion of a 1976 text from their 40th anniversary. There may well be other Internet sources on the Canadian moving image that I have missed and I look forward to hearing about them.

On the shelves

But one should not ignore conventional, and sometimes limited-run and long-forgotten, publications for tracing Canadian film and broadcasting production. A delightful route, albeit long and convoluted, is to find and read the hundreds of biographies of the personalities that have been instrumental in Canadian film and broadcasting over the years. From Gordon Sinclair to Barbara Frum, from Mavor Moore to Dick Smythe there exist hundreds of such volumes of varying styles and usefulness.

Similarly, long-standing and successful television programs from Front Page Challenge to sctv have had volumes prepared over the years.

However, many of these did not have a long shelf life; therefore they are nowhere comprehensively listed, let alone easily found to consult.

Encyclopedia-type sources

A number of encyclopedia-type publications do exist and are all indispensable tools. Film/Video Canadianna has existed for over 20 years as a federal initiative and attempted to list current film and television production on an annual basis. It never achieved its objective of annual publication, and despite going to cd-rom publication in its most recent incarnation (1995), dependence on government funding makes its future very tenuous.

The Canadian Feature Film Index, 1913-85, published by the Public Archives of Canada, is wonderfully comprehensive for cast and production credits, shooting, distribution and release details.

In 1984, Peter Morris, the senior historian of Canadian film at York University, published The Film Companion: A comprehensive guide to more than 650 Canadian Films & Filmmakers, which is invaluable for Canadian feature film to 1984.

Most provinces have compiled film/videographies, often done by provincial archives, though few of these have been published.

One of the greatest success stories of Canadian broadcasting is Quebecois dramatic programming and here we have two directories that are invaluable. Radio-Canada published Vingt-cinq ans de Dramatiques a la television de Radio-Canada for the 25th anniversary of television, and the Cinematheque quebecoise published Repertoire des series, feuilletons et teleromans quebecoise for the 40th anniversary of television in Canada.

The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1992, includes more passing references to Canadian film and television than one might expect.

Academics have long been intrigued with the politics and regulation of Canadian broadcasting and only recently have begun to look at and study programming for its own sake.

Professor Allen is representative of this trend as are Paul Rutherford, historian at the University of Toronto, and Mary Jane Miller, a professor of dramatic literature at Brock University.

Rutherford’s volume on primetime Canadian television, When Television was Young, and Miller’s on cbc television drama, Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television Drama since 1952, are formidable critiques of programming as well as being invaluable sources.

The Association for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television, the Canadian Communications Association, and the Canadian Film Studies Association are the academic societies bringing together the scholars and students increasingly looking at many aspects of the Canadian moving image past.

So, the next time you need to know, or are simply curious about some aspect of past Canadian film or television production, expect to look in many places. There are more sources than are conventionally known, but bringing them together and making effective use of them is going to be a challenge.

Ernest J. Dick is a consulting archivist based in Granville Ferry, n.s. He can be reached at ejdick@atcon.com.