– Citytv’s Gallagher goes national on TSN

Yeaaaah baby! tsn is unleashing Citytv and Q107 sportsnews energyforce John Gallagher in his own half-hour live talk vehicle, banking on the fact that the ‘regional sports phenomenon’ will quickly score a national following.

Gallagher cross-Canada airplay on the unnamed show kicks off in August. Booked four to five times a week at 10:30 p.m., the skedding is a moveable feast, ironically bumpable at the whim of sports events.

The slot has opened up due to league play start times moving back a half-hour, such as baseball’s 7 o’clock start. The show may air pre- or post-game, with a variable number of episodes, depending on the week’s live sports lineup.

tsn had a live talk show back in the late ’80s, It’s Your Call with Pat Marsden, and vp programming Phil King says the new show is a ’90s version thereof, with an ‘entertaining and fun’ format consisting of call/e-mail fielding, guests and bits, possibly the ilk of Top Ten lists and bloopers. King’s one-line descriptor is ‘Larry King Live meets Don Cherry meets Letterman.’

Gallagher has resigned his position at City, and City’s newest and even nattier sportscasting presence, Kathryn Humphreys (whose verve in reporting things athletic receives meritorious standing on the Gallagher enthusiasm scale), is moving from weekends to weeknights at 11. John Whaley is moving into sports on the weekend and they’re looking for a new videographer.

Gallagher joins tsn June 1, and will segue in with some reporting duties as the show develops.

– CBC doc fest

CBC’s Documentary Festival: Five Nights, five non-fiction films by acclaimed Canadian filmmakers, is hopefully a precursor to more of the same. The week of March 23, the post late-night local news slot typically occupied by Omerta and movies is a debut for one-off acquisitions, which Mark Starowicz, exec producer of docs for cbc, hopes will spawn further doc fests – two or three a year – with the ultimate desired segue being the grandfathering of a procurement strand.

Hot Docs! timing was a factor in the scheduling of the tv fest, which is being positioned as a virtual reality festival, more accessible than Sundance. As to the 11:55 p.m. slot, Starowicz pegs the apres news tuning to be anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000, and given the shelf space crisis, it’s a window amenable to airing director’s-length cuts.

Starowicz has been working for some time now to get a feature doc strategy underway as ‘not everything fits into the program description of Witness or Life and Times.’

Despite incompatibility for being ‘exposed to the Darwinian exigencies of a Sunday night,’ Starowicz says ‘there’s a lot of very high-quality material out there for which the cbc should be the national theater.’

bbc’s Fine Cuts, a feature doc copro strand, is deemed a suitable analogy for the hoped-for end game of this initiative, which is right now strictly acquisitions. ‘It’s a step in two directions, the ultimate dream would be a coproduction strand like Fine Cut,’ and there’s also a wider-ranging strategy.

Starowicz’s full complement documentary strategy, put on the table three years ago, first consists of Witness, a primetime premiere copro strand; second, the biography strand Life and Times; then accelerated series and specials programming (implementing an mow strategy, ‘docs with broad appeal that would fight their way to air, doc equivalents of The Arrow’).

The next plank is to be ‘more emphatically producing limited series [the likes of The Human Race and The Lost Tribes], which is a growing currency internationally.’

‘The cbc’s produced more of them than it does [now],’ continues Starowicz, ‘and we’d like to go back to those days.’ And ultimately somewhere down the road, a home for the one-off doc pickups is sought for the likes of fare coming out of the National Film Board or produced with educational broadcasters.

Also on the agenda is programming akin to the audience-friendly factual soaps, so ubiquitous on the dial in the u.k.

‘HMS Brilliant is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, there’s enthusiasm for it and I hope we’ll be developing one in the next year here.’ To that end, Starowicz is talking to indies, looking for proposals for non-fiction serials, hoping to bring to the screen some of the drama inherent when real life unfolds spontaneously.

‘We ran The Ark several years ago, and we’re developing a couple of others. We’re doing a pilot on Mondo Canuck – which will be more of a genre unto itself. The unit here would love to bring two serials to the network next year and say `Pick one.’ ‘

Janice Tufford is commissioning editor for the Five Nights programming venture, which entails three tv premieres: Anne Claire Poirier’s Tu as crie LET ME GO, Gail Singer’s You Can’t Beat a Woman! and Tim Southam’s Drowning in Dreams. Also slated for a midnight slot, March 23-27, are Daniel Cross’ The Street: A Film with the Homeless and Don McWilliams’ The Passerby.

Four of the five national net debuts are nfb productions.

– TVO doc call

Elsewhere in doc programming, Rudy Buttignol has put out a call for (preferably finished) Canadian-made docs for the sixth season of tvontario’s primetime From The Heart series, launching in June.

On tap so far for the Wednesday 10 p.m. summer slot are Ali Kazimi’s Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas, Laurie Colbert’s My Feminism, David Vaisbord’s Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man and the National Film Board’s Kid Nerds from Shereen Jerrett, and Adrienne Amato and Derek Rogers’ First Break.

April 1, same time slot, different strand, The View From Here will premier the McMahon brothers’ (Kevin and Michael) nfb copro Intelligence. The filmmakers behind The Falls once again push the bounds of doc convention with this feature-length exploration of what constitutes intelligence, yielding nuggets such as this student’s response to a query about where technology is leading: ‘To be successful, I may have to do something that will be detrimental to humankind.’

– Rita rating

Baton/ctv’s March 8 broadcast of Rita MacNeil’s Celtic Celebration pulled in 1,624,000 viewers across the country.

The one-hour special was produced by SFA Productions’ Sandra Faire and Trisa Dayot, with MacNeil’s manager Wade Langham of Lupins Productions coproducing.