Slawko Klymkiw has folded his gangly six-foot-four body into the corner of the couch in his seventh floor corner office at the CBC Broadcast Centre.

Hangdog face, all arms and legs with a restless energy and a direct delivery, the 10 a.m. sun this morning is shining directly into his eyes. He leans forward into the shadow to talk. The tape recorder, voice-sensitive, stops turning. He moves back and squints for the next hour. When its batteries die, he sends his assistant to find a working pair.

When he’s unsure of the cbc’s audience reach ­ 75%, maybe 80% ­ one phone call brings a statistician huddled somewhere in the bowels of the broadcast center monolith to the door of his office within seconds with the right number. 80%.

So in three clean moves we have The Facilitator in action. Klymkiw, the pundits say, has an inordinate ability to get things done. He’s not a cbc type, meaning he’s not a bureaucrat. He is ‘results oriented,’ a necessary mind set considering the status quo for Canada’s public broadcaster.

If History Television program chief Norm Bolen scooped the most coveted job in TV Land this year, it’s Klymkiw who snagged its antithesis as the head of cbc English-language television. The final cut looms. English tv’s share of the cbc’s $414 million cut to its parliamentary appropriation is $171 million. Axed to date is $127 million. Another $44 million is slated to come out before April 1, 1998. At the end of the day, the overall budget for English television will drop from $602 million in 1994/95 to $431 million in 1998.

At the same time, the mandate is for an all-Canadian schedule by 1998/99. Next year, 20 hours per week of American tv in the afternoon sked will have to be replaced by Canadiana. The primetime conversion is complete this year, with a Canadian lineup including Traders, Red Green, Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. All have established, popular viewing franchises.

With the promise of a Liberal spending spree in the air, clearly many are entertaining the idea that the final blow to the pubcaster may not, for the first time, be a foregone conclusion. In the time between the 1997/98 season and the next federal budget, it couldn’t hurt to drum up wider-spread popular support amongst the viewing masses. It in fact, may be integral and may be at least in part behind the new mass audience scheduling philosophy Klymkiw is frontlining.

Case in point: The National at 11 p.m. up against ctv’s Lloyd Robertson. The cbc won’t sequester a significant portion of the Robertson following, he says. That’s not the point. ‘We’ll take maybe 2%. Maybe. But whether it beats ctv or not is irrelevant. What’s important is that more people will be using the service.’

The new three phases of the tv season ­ September to January, January to April, April to September ­ draws from the same philosophy.

‘For us to be relevant, people have to watch us, they have to want us. If the majority of the population sees value in the service the cbc provides in tv and radio and specialty channels, English and French, it will legitimate the cbc’s existence.’

It’s a little unsettling to see the cbc focused on mass appeal. That phrase ‘dumbing down’ comes to mind. Klymkiw calls finding programming that’s both popular and smart ‘the greatest challenge’ at hand.

‘I think it’s possible. I think people are dying for quality television. Maybe we just haven’t been smart enough to find a way of attracting them to it. That’s what we have to do ­ we the industry, not just we the cbc ­ because there is a lot of good television.

‘The Americans make some of the greatest programs in world and at the end of the day our success will rest on the quality and intelligence of our programs, the notion that they speak to what’s important. All that will have to happen while we’re trying to be popular.’

Due South, Traders and the cbc signature comedies have begun to break the ‘colonial mentality’ but there’s a long way to go, says Klymkiw. ‘We at the cbc should be driving that agenda.’

It’s a task that becomes increasingly difficult with the final cut. Klymkiw says he d’esn’t know how the final million-dollar shortfall will manifest itself in the program offerings, whether cbc will be able to maintain even today’s bare-bones level of in-house-produced drama or not.

‘I wish we didn’t have one more cut because I think we’re beginning to turn the corner. We’ve done everything they’ve asked us to do, become a more open organization, one prepared to do business in a different way, a Canadianized schedule with quality programming, an organization that has downsized and downsized at a rate faster than any other government department anywhere, and one that has taken the issues of efficiency seriously. The country’s gone through it; we’ve gone through it.

‘If we didn’t have to go through one more phase of our cut, I think I could guarantee to you that the future of English television would not only be prosperous but my sense is that it would continue to drive and be the center of Canadian production. What the cut will do to us, I’m not sure. We have to work through that.’

1997/98 sked

The National playing at 10 p.m. and repeating at 11 p.m. next season has some producers believing it is Klymkiw’s gentle way of clearing the 10 p.m. slot for another hour of Canadian drama.

Klymkiw says primetime shelf space is a ‘huge issue’ but that he will in no way tamper with the 10 o’clock news in the near future. ‘We will not make any errors in judgment about what our viewers want.’

The three-season schedule concept will open new windows throughout the year ­ ‘We’ll be watching program performance very carefully. I don’t believe that just because it’s on the cbc a program has to be around forever’ ­ and there is a will to experiment with the schedule which will find Cancon in new and unusual places.

This summer, for example, Saturday nights have a Canadian film strip at 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Newsworld programs like Fashion File are getting a trial run on the main net, Sullivan Entertainment’s Road to Avonlea and Wind at My Back are packaged together Sunday nights until September.

‘We now have a fairly high number of light viewers that turn on the network and if we can turn them into medium or heavy viewers, that would really help us. It’s not 18-49 that we’re after. If I could build up a new demographic, I’d say 25-49, but really it’s 30-49. That’s the audience we need to get more and more involved.’

To that end, Atlantis Communications’ Traders and Salter Street Films’ Emily of New Moon are set up for this year, a sublicensing deal with Global and wic that has stirred up controversy on the funding side of the equation.

Klymkiw says the argument withers away when you put a microscope to it.

‘First of all, if we did not do Traders and Emily, those programs would still have access to funds. Nothing would have changed. That money would have been spent.’

‘Second, we have a lot less money in this company. We’ve been asked to be a more open institution, we’ve been asked to be a more Canadianized broadcaster and those two deals represent that.

‘I guess there’s been complaining. But look how many people are pleased. wic, Cinar, Salter Street, Atlantis, GlobalŠdo I have to go on? I think other broadcasters and producers are saying maybe this is okay because we might be able to do some of those things together. We are prepared to talk to everyone and see what relationships there are that can strengthen all of our positions. We are talking with many.’

Klymkiw also points out that cbc’s fee to the broadcasters came straight out of its acquisition envelope, so better that money is spent in Canada than outside the country on foreign programming which would wind up in other slots while lesser quality Canadian filled the primetime void. It’s part of a larger issue.

‘Another problem we all have to deal with is finding the acquisitions market in Canada. Where do you buy Canadian programs at a price point that makes some sense? It’s a challenge.’