Just in time for the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April comes Chasing The Royals: The Media and the Monarchy, a John Curtin film for the CBC about a British tabloid hacks red in tooth and claw chasing newspaper-selling ‘scoops.’

The takeaway from tonight’s Doc Zone film is the British Royals are Canada’s Royals, but hardly born of a media culture like our own.

“It’s not the Canadian way. We’re somewhat wishy-washy in Canada,” Curtin, an avid Royal watcher who earlier made After Elizabeth II: Monarchy in Peril for the CBC last year, says of Canada’s lack of hard-driving tabloid hacks in nationwide newsrooms.

However much Canadians frown on digging the dirt on the Royals as salacious and demeaning, do they care enough about the British Royals to follow their long-running soap opera?

“I feel the Canadian public is interested and read the toe-soaking stories as avidly as the British,” Curtin said, recalling the 1992 tabloid photos of a lover captured sucking the toes of a topless Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson.

But why doesn’t the Canadian media push as hard to pursue the powerful and expose their hypocrisy and errant ways, if only to drive up TV ratings and newsstand sales for grubby journalists?

“We don’t have that tradition and there isn’t the ferocious competition of upwards of a dozen newspapers competing with each other,” he said of competing Canadian newspapers.

If anything, Canadian newspapers are as much threatened by TV tabloid TV shows and the Internet, and need to remain profitable as any other media.

But here likenesses between the Canadian and British media end.

Chasing the Royals captures a British paparazzi that peer as intently through their camera shutters as a hunter through a powerful rifle lens, or who sneak into palaces, hack into voice mails or stage sting operations to trap Royal outcasts or their courtiers.

That media hunt, with fame and fortune as its grand ambition, has the signature of the reality TV world that Canadians passionately consume night after night in prime time.

They are just not our soap operas, or stars.

Curtin’s camera and crew tagged along with British and Canadian reporters during last summer’s Royal visit to Canada by Queen Elizabeth and her entourage.

In Chasing The Royals, the British royal correspondents come across as a dutiful lot, aiming their cameras from a respectful distance and using intuition to read the Royal’s stiff body language for clues to their possible pleasure or displeasure.

But it’s the Canadian press corps that most puzzled Curtin.

“Quite frankly, in general, the Canadian media is overly differential to the monarchy, more so than the British media,” he observed.

As Queen Elizabeth inspected naval armadas in Halifax, or museums or workplaces in Ottawa and Toronto, the local press forever remarked on the weather, and the British monarch’s clothing, and whether she wore a rain hat or rain coat or sloshed about in low-heeled shoes.

“Somehow the Canadian media did that for the ten days during which she toured Canada, and everyone said that’s the way to cover the monarchy,” Curtin recalled.

That said, the Montreal filmmaker fully expects Canadian royal interest to peak in April when the British heir to the throne weds his university sweetheart.

“I guess a wedding is always of interest. We’re responding to the hype of Fleet Street, to their beating the drum and we’re beating the drum as well,” Curtin said.

Against that din, and after two CBC documentaries about the British Royals in as many years, this filmmaker could well be forgiven for keeping only one eye on the upcoming wedding day and its British tabloid folly.

“I guess I’ll be watching. I’m thinking it’s time to be finishing up with the royals, and I’ve had enough of the soap opera. It doesn’t bear much examination. You wonder why people are so enamored,” Curtin observed.

Chasing the Royals, produced by Kaos Productions, will air Thursday night (March 31) at 9 p,m. on the CBC network.