Halifax’s Salter Street Films’ television slate for 1999/2000 marks the Halifax-based company’s biggest roster of production yet with a confirmed 210 half-hours of programming, including three new shows.

Last year saw 194 half-hours of programming delivered and company execs estimate that production revenue for fiscal 1999 will total $30 million, a 30% jump from the previous year.

The cbc has renewed the satirical series This Hour Has 22 Minutes for a three-year term, extending it to 2002, and the Rick Mercer starrer Made in Canada for 13 more episodes.

The German copro series lexx will go into production on 13 episodes for Chum City and Space: The Imagination Station, while Emily of New Moon, coproduced with Cinar, will shoot seven episodes for wic.

Life Network has picked up a second season of comedy gardening series Mrs. Greenthumbs plus 13 episodes of Foodessence, a doc series exploring the anthropology of food.

New programs on the slate cover fish, fun and fantasy.

Based on the best-selling book by Mark Kurlansky, Cod: The Fish That Changed The World is a three-part documentary series for Discovery Channel with Toronto-based Primitive Features exploring man’s involvement with the disappearing fish.

The first hour covers the early days of the Viking explorers and Basque fishermen who kept their fishing grounds a secret.

Part two looks at how the advent of technology in the 20th century changed the nature of fishing, and part three asks the question ‘Will the cod return?’

Production of Cod is set for spring in Canada, the u.s., u.k. and Iceland, with delivery in spring 2000. The budget for the doc, which will be written and directed by Kevin McMahon, is $1.2 million.

Also in the works for spring is a pilot for 13 half-hours of Pipedreams, a sitcom for cbc about a bunch of ‘hosers’ and a cultural conflict. Proposed budget for the series is $4.9 million.

Set in Cape Breton Island, the main characters are MacLeod, a 36ish local, and Patricia, a 33ish high-born Brit invited by MacLeod to stay as she awaits trial for negligence in a car accident that killed her husband and MacLeod’s wife. Patricia, a barrister who’s quickly becoming infatuated with MacLeod, is stuck on the island when the longest running snowstorm in Nova Scotia history delays the trial.

Joining them are MacLeod’s 14-year-old daughter Tiffany, a Goth who talks to the dead, and 16-year-old son Kenneth, who doesn’t talk to anyone, along with the Macs, a clan of ne’er-do-wells led by a Cape Breton-style Ma Barker.

Adult drama series Desire, produced by Back Alley Films and distributed by Salter Street, is based on erotic fiction penned by a cross-section of women and adapted for tv by women. The 13 half-hour episodes for Showcase focus on three females in their early 30s who get together for a private evening of erotica readings. Over the course of the evening they indulge their love of literature by reading 13 erotic stories, each of which is dramatized. The proposed budget is a $450,000 per erotic tale.

Blackfly, also a pilot for Showcase, revolves around the Bennie ‘Blackfly’ Brouton character created by stand-up comedic Ron James.

Blackfly was born into poverty in 18th century Nova Scotia, picked up a second-grade education, a criminal record, and decided to join the Armed Forces where he made his way up the ranks to sergeant.

After 20 years of action, Blackfly is sent to terminate a ‘brazen rogue’ fur trader named Moose Jaw, whose personal vendetta against the Hudson Bay Company is threatening its corporate monopoly. Moose Jaw is ‘a cross between Stompin Tom, Louis Riel and Colonel Kurtz,’ and as Blackfly gets closer to his quarry he begins to feel he has more in common with his nemesis than those calling the shots.

*New on the Halifax scene

Citing creative differences with her previous partner, Lesley Ann Patten, a cofounder of Victory Motion Pictures, has moved on to form Ziji Productions.

The new Halifax company will focus on performance films, children’s television, dramatic series and documentaries, the first of which, The Voice Set Free, is already in the works.

The one-hour doc for ctv, wtn and Vision tv recounts the story of Jo-Anne Mayhew, a Canadian housewife who, through her experiences with the correctional system, became a human rights activist.

Mayhew, a well-educated, upper-middle-class woman, was a battered wife who landed in prison after shooting her husband, a well-respected Nova Scotian.

Patten first came in contact with Mayhew while teaching meditation at the local prison. Later Patten was asked to write a film about women and the justice system.

The Voice Set Free spans the 1980s and ‘is about Mayhew setting free her voice as a writer and a person who can be an enabler for others,’ says Patten.

The doc will combine excerpts from Mayhew’s book (written prior to her death of als), interviews conducted by Patten and others, and will be told from the perspective of her eldest daughter. Kent Nason is dop on the doc, which begins shooting this summer on what Patten’s describes as ‘a generous budget.’

Patten’s Loyalties, a film about two women who discover they are connected through an ancestral lineage of slavery, has been nominated for best social issue documentary at the Hot Docs festival, running My 5-9 in Toronto.

*More adventure for Collideascope

Halifax-based Collideascope has entered into a development deal with Teletoon for its half-hour animated kids’ series Ollie’s Under The Bed Adventures.

Ollie is a hyperactive six-year-old who constantly finds himself at odds with the world of adults and big sisters. But under his bed exists a parallel universe where his toys, including a street-wise iguana, a dog and an alien, come to life and take him on some wild adventures.

Collideascope’s short Tongue Twister, which airs on Teletoon, has been sold to Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival.

In other news, the shop recently entered into a strategic alliance with Vancouver multimedia distribution company Khyber Pass, and has hired Jessica Andrews as business and marketing manager.