A CBC that dares to make fun of itself has done just that after mining its historic film archives to produce the eight-part mockumentary Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada.

The half-hour series, which bowed on June 12 and runs on Sunday nights at 11 p.m. through the summer, features supposed 1960s CBC ‘superstar’ host Jimmy MacDonald ranting about sex, drugs and rock and roll, and using CBC archival footage from the 1960s to press his case.

Maria Mironowicz, head of the CBC’s newly formed retro production unit, says Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada and two upcoming shows, Pop-Up Royals and John and Yoko Give Peace a Song, aim at repurposing the public broadcaster’s archives to create cost-effective programming for multiple platforms.

‘We’re melding fiction and fact, taking fact from the archives and wrapping fiction around it, and giving audiences a new context and a fun way to appreciate the archives,’ she says.

To lend authenticity to scenes in which actor Richard Waugh plays Jimmy MacDonald, the show’s creators ‘distressed’ the contemporary footage by washing out the picture and adding a few scratches to mesh the old and new material.

The artifice is deliberate. Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada puts the joke on audiences, as MacDonald is not real, but instead a composite of stiff, paternalistic 1960s CBC hosts.

‘We worked our way through early archive footage and were surprised to see just how arrogant the CBC announcers were,’ Mironowicz recalls.

So she and series writer and director Greig Dymond used the smug, all-knowing tone of 1960s CBC hosts, and the unit’s old video clips, to develop the hyper-realism underlying Jimmy MacDonald and the spoof series.

For example, the retro department pulled CBC archival footage taken during interviews with The Rolling Stones and The Beatles on their Canadian tours to illustrate an episode on rock and roll.

The recent episode ‘Hippies in Canada: The Long-Haired Menace’ includes video clips of a Vancouver ‘be-in’ in Stanley Park, a tour through Toronto’s Yorkville hippie haven, and incensed Vancouver mayor Tom Campbell defending the local police after they moved hippies who were apparently obstructing commercial businesses.

In an earlier episode entitled ‘Food in Canada: Heartburn and the Heartache,’ MacDonald pours scorn on Canadian food, amid clips of a studio guest preparing a new exotic Italian dish – the ‘pizza pie’ – and a new obsession with margarine.

Other episodes include ‘Fashion in Canada: Function or Fantasy?’ and ‘The Canadian Sexplosion: Strangers in the Night.’

Each episode features five or six video clips from the CBC’s archival vault, providing about 75% of the show’s content.

Mironowicz insists the retro show has so far impressed Canadians in its Sunday 11 p.m. timeslot. The series has lately delivered an audience of around 180,000 viewers.

The next retro series from the CBC will be three half-hours of Pop-Up Royals, where Scott Thompson goes drag to play Queen Elizabeth II, and uses archival footage to pronounce on past Royal visits to Canada.

After that, the CBC will sort through its vault to produce the one-hour documentary John and Yoko Give Peace a Song, which recalls the duo’s bedroom protest at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel in 1969.

‘We’ve just started looking at what we have in the archives, and from that we’re looking to create innovative formats,’ Mironowicz says.

The retro series are also cost-

effective because the CBC is building around core archival material, and not shooting much from scratch.

What’s more, Mironowicz insists, Canadians deserve to see into the CBC’s archives to judge how their country has evolved.

‘Keeping the vault locked up doesn’t make sense. Many CBC shows already use the archives. My department is getting those archives out as series,’ she says.