For years at Christmastide, CBC Radio’s As It Happens called round to Canadian peacekeeping forces based in various war-torn or contentious spots – like Cypress or the Middle East or Africa. Hosts Barbara Frum and Alan Maitland, or Michael Enright and Alan Maitland got the soldiers on the phone to sing carols and pass messages to partners and children who would miss them all the more over the holidays. Sweet, warm and frequently funny it was, but only what you might call interactive in a limited way; for instance, you could hear people’s reactions the following night when they’d play back phoned-in comments.

But this year, tv shone an interactive klieg light on Canadian peacekeepers. They have been the focus of one of the most intelligent, ingenious and inspired exercises in interactivity we have seen to date, on a large scale, in Canada. Courtesy of whose brightly lit brain? Why, the incisive producers of 22 Minutes, of course.

In the lead-up to the peacekeeper incident, 22 Minutes drove hundreds of thousands of visitors to its website by inviting viewers to vote with their mice and support an online call for politico Stockwell Day to change his name to Doris. But the show lifted the itv bar to new byte heights when it sent cohost Rick Mercer to visit the peacekeepers in Bosnia. More than 1.3 million viewers tuned in to watch as Canadian soldiers in pop music production numbers grinned, waved and danced for the aerial camera. Mercer had us laughing in no time. Better yet, couch potatoes everywhere felt like they could get involved because there were real live peacekeepers on tv encouraging one and all to ‘send us a message!’ on 22minutes.com.

‘The theme of the piece is ‘send us a message’,’ said producer Geoff D’Eon before Playback press time, ‘and boy have [viewers] ever done it. There are almost 5,000 messages posted right now, from all over the country. It’s an outpouring of national pride and gratitude directed toward these peacekeepers whose mission in Bosnia has become invisible because it has fallen off the news agenda.’

Maybe you thought, as many an itv Web designer has thought before you, that extending tv to the Net is only about program-themed coupons, recipes, background info and chat rooms. It seems as if many of Canada’s new digital specialty channel licensees – all of which had to outline their channel’s interactive component – think about coupons and background info a lot, too. To be fair, many recognize the lameness of their interactive proposals. Several promised to rev up their itv brains just as soon as they get the techno toys to allow for true interactivity.

So then, how is it that 22 Minutes, using today’s technology, could drive thousands of viewers to its site, not by offering to give them something, but by asking that they give something of themselves to peacekeepers far away?

As the 22 Minutes doughnut shop pundit would snort, ‘It’s a good idea, eh.’