Saving Canada (A People's History)

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to sign a letter urging the CBC to save the documentary "Canada: A People's History" from being discarded over some unexplained rights-licensing issue. When filmmaker elephants battle, it's rarely us in the grass who have much at stake, so I hesitated. But with a little more information about the licensing matter, I accepted that the point seemed valid and offered my support, for what it was worth.

The battle is now going public, as in this opinion piece in the Globe and Mail. 

I had no significant role in the making of the film, and no doubt a 2020s version would look quite different, but I support its availability because I remember the enthusiasm it kindled in my then adolescent children when it was first broadcast a couple of decades ago.  

Thoughts?    

History of the Crown

Google "maple crown" and the first
page of hits is all whisky ads 

Over the holidays, we got through to the end of "The Crown" (more yet to come, I guess). God, was I sick of those people by the end of it. Not the program so much as the people it portrays. 

I know it's fiction and simplified and exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Can any human being, let alone the hyper-entitled Prince of Wales, actually hunch and cringe as much as the actor who plays Prince Charles does?). But what struck me most throughout was how foreign a story it all was. What horrible people they all are. And how unCanadian, thank heaven.

We have a lot of homegrown undesirables, sure. But Canada simply does not have a society even remotely similar to the one in which "The Crown" unfolds. British people remain used to their countryside being filled with ancient palaces, their public events dominated by titled nonentities, their newspapers busy with the doings of the offspring of dukes and countesses, their politics shaped by the House of Lords and the royal courtiers. They have a state church, for God's sake. They do live in a functioning monarchical society.

None of that exists, or even has resonance, in Canada. We do have a government "based on the well-understood principles of the British Constitution," but our two countries, being different societies, have always run differently. By now the gulf has become unbridgeable. For all practical purposes, the monarchy has long since ceased to exist in Canada.

Indeed, all the monarchy now does is inhibit the workings of our constitution.  Philippe Lagasse argued the other day that if a Canadian prime minister acted as President Trump has, the Crown is empowered to step in and dismiss him or her. But in our present circumstances, any minor-league Trumpish PM could easily discredit action by, on the one hand, an elderly English aristo living in a London palace or, on the other hand, by a governor-general forever condemned to second-tier status behind a largely imaginary monarch. 

And yet.... John Fraser and Nathan Tidridge urge us to see how important it is that in 2022 we properly observe a "platinum jubilee" (that's a thing?) "fit for a queen."  What we really need to prepare is a suitable mechanism for establishing the Canadian Governor General as the true and only head of state. 

Netflix history: chill out, it's television drama

(The CBC National News, also confused about fiction and nonfiction)

British journo Simon Jenkins is again furious that the television series "The Crown" is behaving as if it were a drama or something.

The royal family can look after themselves, and usually do. I am less sure of history, and especially contemporary history. The validity of “true story” docu-dramas can only lie in their veracity. We have to believe they are true, or why are we wasting our time?

Spoiler alert. We don't have to believe they are true. We have to believe they are fiction. Because they are. "The Crown" is a drama, the imaginative creation of its writer (Piers) Peter Morgan, its directors, and its actors. They are not documenting reality. They are creating a story and putting all their efforts to making it feel true. That's what fiction is: an imagined reality.

Evidence-based documentarians, including journalists and historians, need to stop complaining that fictions are "untrue", and start insisting on the difference between fiction and nonfiction.  Fiction is the genre that creates imaginary realities, and if it does so well, it succeeds. Nonfiction is the one that explores what's true and what's not, by presenting evidence and arguments for (and against) what's likely true -- arguments a reader can engage with and assess. Nonfiction isn't simply truth, for truth ain't that easy to find. But it's a search for truth. Imagining possible truths -- that's fiction's strong suit. 

"The Crown" is either a triumph of the imagination, or it isn't. And if it is, it's time well wasted, as they say. But squabbling about whether it is true or not demeans the truth itself.

If I may quote myself from the last time I read Simon Jenkins indulging in the same confusion:

Jenkins needs to reread Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" along with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. One is a great play in which Thomas More is a hero and Thomas Cromwell is the darkest of villains, and the other is a great novel in which Thomas Cromwell is a hero and Thomas More the darkest of villains. They cannot both be true, and we should not expect either of them to be. But they can both be literature.

Jenkins, however, doubles down, holding up Wolf Hall as the model of true fiction.

Most novelists go to great lengths to verify their version of events, as Hilary Mantel does. 

Umm, no. Hilary Mantel goes to great lengths to make her version of events feel true.  Which it is why it's a terrific novel. 

 

 

 

 

History on TV: Stitch in Time

SIT host Amber Butchart

British TV manages to produce regular streams of young, brash, irreverent historians who actually get to conceive and make programming  about things they actually know. (Imagine that in Canada!) 

One example worth a look is "A Stitch in Time," available on that cornucopia of sudsy British TV, Acorn, which is now making one-month streaming privileges available free.

Each episode of "A Stitch in Time" takes a painting that displays some historical fashion trend, and then works with tailors to recreate the garment in question and with curators, art historians, and period experts to flesh out the historical context.

It's also impressive in that it seems to be entirely a female production. A recent episode I saw did not have a single male on screen throughout, even though the costume in question was one originally worn by King Charles II.

In admiring "A Stitch in Time," I'm claiming no great gender progressivism on my own part. I started my historical career in historic sites work, where I got to wear a good deal of reproduction costuming and gained a longstanding interest in historical costume. But if you have seen "Great British Battles," or anything by David Starkey, say, you can't help but observe that history run by women doesn't exactly look like history run by men. 

History of dinner, TV dinner

I've caught several episodes of CBC-TV's brief summer series Back in Time for Dinner. There is food history on TV.

Okay, it's food history with a fair amount of cheese. This is a pretty soft presentation, very much for entertainment. The series immerses a Canadian family of five in the decor, clothing, technology, fads, and above all the food of six decades one after another, 1940s to 1990s, and it has to move fast and funny.

But time and again I was struck by how the program actually did achieve a certain time depth. The horror of the modern family obliged to follow the wartime forties' reliance on organ meats like kidneys ("All I smell is urine!") and other economical (and unprocessed) foods is striking, just as their disgusted amazement at the fifties' enthusiasm for jellied salads is entertaining.

But a sense of foreignness is effectively created. Back in Time for Dinner nicely notes how, when  kids went out for snacks and sociability in the fifties and sixties, they generally went to a mom-and-pop kind of place, not to the corporate-planned Macdonalds, Tims, or Starbucks we take for granted. The modern woman in the series, refusing to surrender her 21st century perspectives, effectively emphasizes the house work expected of women and only women, and the lack of kitchen technology in most of the decades they briefly inhabit.

The family seems very much white and Euro-Canadian -- until the father mentions his indigenous experience on his mother's side. And there were (a few) intriguing nods to diversity, as Canadians took shyly to Chinese food early, later to South Asian food (effectively linked to changes in immigration policy), later to global gourmet trends.   

There are even food historians -- U of T professor Jo Sharma for one -- featured.

Back in Time for Dinner ain't a Ken Burns documentary, for sure. But for a summer entertainment, I was kinda pleased with its sense of history and historical change.  Probably still available on demand on your TV service or online.

New Heritage Minute: LGBTQ history

I've meaning to draw attention to -- well, I've been meaning to watch -- the new Heritage Minute on LGBTQ history.  Well, now I have and there it is above, if you have not yet. Nice.

But I cannot help but note again that during the Harper government years, Historica's Heritage Minutes tended to be about hockey or war, or hockey AND war. Under the Trudeau government, they tend to be about Chanie Wenjack, refugees, multiculturalism, and gay rights.  Well, I prefer the greater diversity of the recent ones, for sure.

But the Minutes are principally funded by the federal government nowadays, and it's troubling to see how closely the Minutes' editorial choices track the political priorities of the parties in power. What happened to the arm's length principle? Can't help thinking the minute-makers had more freedom of expression years ago, when the money came from the Bronfman Foundation.

Government direction of popular media treatments of history: "Another part of our heritage"?

History on TV: "The Terror"

Visions of the North, the blog of Franklin scholar Russell Potter, recently noted its one-millionth visitor, and credited at least some of the uptick to interest generated by the AMC television drama "The Terror."  ("The Terror" doesn't appear to be on any channel we subscribe to). But Potter offers a list of the principal documentaries of the Franklin expedition, many of which are available in one format or another.

Visions also notes with approval the commitment "The Terror"' has made to actually having Inuit played by Inuit, and not just "generic" Inuit, but specific named actors. In other roles are an A list crowd of Brits: Jared Harris (Captain Crozier), Ciaran Hinds (Franklin), Tobias Menzies (James Fitzjames)

This Minute was brought to you by...

The latest Heritage Minute is a heartstring-tugger about the Vietnamese migration to Canada in 1979-80.

It  works, but it also renews an old concern about the Heritage Minutes. The Minutes are expensive, and some years ago Historica, which now runs the Minutes project, began seeking public funding for them.  Well, it's the Canadian way. But there began to be conditions: that the minutes met public policy objectives.

So during the Harper years, the Minutes tended to be about war, or hockey, or war and hockey, plus a couple of political ones for the anniversary years. Now the government has changed, and the new minute is about diversity and Canada as a national welcoming immigrants.What began as quirky Canadiana begins to look like PR for the messaging of whatever government is in power.

A million years ago I wrote a little piece about the early Minutes inspired by broadcaster Patrick Watson and produced by the Bronfman Foundation. Those minutes had agendas too, but enough of them were nicely offbeat and even a little bit oppositional -- spunky women confronting patriarchy, like that.

Some Minutes put a lump in your throat, but many are not reverential at all. There's a scene with Queen Victoria that makes a jokey reference to a tea commercial -- pity! Kate Nelligan, playing a very glamorous Emily Murphy, sketches out the Persons Case with sophisticated sarcasm. And the Minute on McLuhan -- imagine them doing him! -- hints at his ideas without closing off the possibility he may have been a bit of a loony too. For Minutes like these, one can forgive the earnestness of the St Louis de Riel Minute or the corporate backpatting of some others.

Not sure we will see that style in the Minutes again.

History of "But it's so important for the kids!"

 Canada: Story of Us:  "Here's a shocker: Loyalist Laura Secord was born in the US."

John Doyle of the Globe and Mail looks at the CBC's Canada150 project "Canada: the Story of Us," and sighs:

An opportunity has been missed with this glossy, featherweight, politically correct concoction.

...What we create in art, popular or lowbrow, is actually the real “story” of us. But for grown-ups, which Canada: The Story of Us clearly is not.

The best the CBC can do for history during Canada150 is the local franchise of an international project that has previously done American and Australian version.  I had some glancing contacts with some of the local staff in 2015, and, though they were well-intentioned (and constrained), I was not left eager for more involvement. ('Course I was pretty sceptical of "Canada: A People's History" too, and was rather pleasantly surprised.)

"Canada: The Story of Us" premieres Sunday night on the CBC Newwork. Doyle does notice that there are a lot of actors and not many historians of Canada in the program, but if critical reaction follows his, it will be "historians" who take the rap, most likely.

CBC Filming CanHist

One hears the CBC is planning a new television history of Canada, broadcast target 2017. Canadianists, you may be getting calls.

Word is it may be a Canadian franchise of an international product. An American series called "America the story of us" aired a few years ago. It was all filmed in South Africa (!) but it did good business for the American network History.  More recently the BBC presented "Andrew Marr's History of the World," also filmed in South Africa (!) with a British political journalist hosting.  

Image:  Youtube, from Canada: A People's History (2000-1)

Dreaming about Champlain, Dreamy Champlain, Champlain's Dream

I've been intermittently watching Le Rêve de Champlain on TFO, the French-language TVOntario (the program is also online from their website, and Champlain tweets, too, I understand).

I'd say I'm entertained. It moves fast; it's lively and modern. The reenactments are brief and not forced to carry too much freight. There's lots of digital display, and lively interactive maps.  The talking heads are brief, and lots of the narrative is carried by hip young "correspondents" who stand in attractively shot modern landscapes (Honfleur -- I wanna go) to describe what Champlain did here 400 years ago. So Vincent Leclerc -- correspondent: Ontario -- stands in the parking lot of a Syracuse, NY, shopping centre and explains why it occupies the same space as the Onondaga fortified village Champlain and the Huron attacked in 1615.  Quebec City never looked better, and nor did the rapids of the Mattawa or the French River.

The program's strength is also its weakness: it has a strong hero, which makes for a strong narrative line.  But for the rest of us, it's pretty great-mannish, based on David Hackett Fischer's dream of Champlain the humanist who only came to Canada so that Europeans and Amerindians would live together. Nah.  I wish someone could capture that moment as a handful of European aliens on an Amerindian planet, and make the First Nations more than supporting castmembers and arquebus-fodder.

And 'tseems they are skipping entirely the recently found baptismal certificate that seems to fix Champlain's birthdate at August 1674.  That date makes even more completely impossible the never plausible whimsy that Champlain might have been the son of Henri IV, which the program and Fischer both play happily with.

But I'm still watching.

Image: TFO.

Canada's Vietnam

No, not the ISIS campaign, not yet anyway.

April will mark the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.  And next week, Thursday, March 26, CBC's Doz Zone presents "Vietnam: Canada's Shadow War,"  a new film directed by Andy Blicq about "Canada’s role in the Vietnam conflict, and its relationship with the United States throughout this decade long war."  

At the onset of the Vietnam War, a cautious Canadian government led by Lester B. Pearson settled for what some have called a policy of “quiet complicity”. But over the course of the conflict, influenced by what they were seeing on television, the music of the era and the arrival of young people escaping military service, young Canadians demanded change.  During the Vietnam decade, Canada celebrated its Centennial, elected a sexy new Prime Minister, distanced itself from the British Empire and consolidated its independent identity. Faced with being either “servile or sovereign,” by the end of the war, Canada chose sovereignty. 

Update:  Chris Raible:

Has anyone ever studied the role of Canadian volunteers who fought for the US in that war?
I seem to recall hearing, some years back, that there were something like 30,000 -
a number somewhat comparable to the number of Americans who sought refuge in Canada.

You could start with this CBC Digital Archives piece on the subject  Scholarly study?...

Champlain sur le petit ecran

TFO, the Ontario French-language public television network, launches on Monday at 9 pm "Le Reve de Champlain," a three-hour six-part dramatized television documentary (a "docu-fiction" they call it) based on David Hackett Fischer's 2008 biography Champlain's Dream.

Champlain is played by the Quebec actor Maxime Le Figuais, who may be the hunkiest Champlain ever, but apparently there is also a substantial participation by historians and Champlain scholars, including Fischer. I see no word on the program's online availability or any broadcast outside TFO's Ontario range, but apparently a one-hour English-language version is imminent. TFO has a substantial website/Facebook/Android presence supporting the broadcast, starting here.

Media History of Camp X

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.  And the truth is so precious, it needs to be guarded by a bodyguard of lies. And...

Anyway, tonight CBC-TV launches a new drama series, X Company, with the press duly repeating all the usual announcements about Canadians' lamentable ignorance of all the great stories from our history that historians have kept from us, but which will now be revealed by these groundbreaking filmmakers

The real history lesson behind X Company will be telling Canadians that this spy camp existed. “It’s a national treasure,” says Morgenstern, “and our best kept secret.”

'Course, most of the secret that has been kept from us is legend. There was a Camp X east of Toronto, at which some North American intelligence officers did some preliminary training between 1941 and 1943. But most of the Camp X legend is drawn from the largely fictional A Man Called Intrepid, in which pretty much everything that happened during the Second World War was attributed to the secret heroics of a Canadian-born British liaison officer in New York, William Stephenson.

The Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Camp X notes the popular account and calmly says of it: "Most of this is untrue." Realistic appraisals of Camp X are available, as in Camp X: SOE and the American Connection (1986) by historian David Stafford,  But promotion and press reports on the television series suggest Stafford's sober account is not going to set the tone, not when all this great stuff is around, and it's such fun to diss the moronic historians who have never told us.

So expect the usual: a fictional drama attended by loud statements about how important it is for Canadians to know their history.

The CBC says

CBC's new drama series, X Company, may do for a secret Canadian spy training camp what the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game did for Britain's code breaking centre Bletchley Park  

Now that sounds about right.  The Imitation Game ain't exactly a documentary, either.

History of another corner of the field

Having been cable-cutting a bit lately, we don't actually get Al Jazeera English TV chez nous, but this does sound kinda interesting, not least as an antidote to all the relentlessly uplifting WW1 commemoration that seems to be in the air here.  Update: online here, you techno-peasant.

World War One through Arab Eyes 

In this series, Producer Journalist Malek Al Tureiki, provides a political and cultural reading into World War I from an Arab and Islamic perspective, citing the commencement date of the war as November 14^th 2014, when Arabs were involved in the “jihad” against the Allied troops upon the call of the Mufti of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. This is in juxtaposition to the date Britain commemorates the war on August 4^th, 2014 – the day it entered the war. The series sheds light on how colonized nations, which had no say in their own fate, ended up being forced into wars which resulted in enormous sacrifices. As a result of this, the number of victims within the Ottoman population, including Arabs, is in fact much higher than that of the Europeans. While the percentage of victims in Germany was 9% and 11% in France, it reached between 14-25 % in Turkey and the Levant.

I was reading a little about "Chanak" recently, the incident in 1922 when Britain wanted Canada to help it maintain the "neutral zone,"  namely, its occupation of Constantinople and the straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, so as to "keep the Turk out of Europe."

Update, November 19:  Meanwhile, in other news of Middle Eastern perspectives on history, Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan has announced that Muslims preceded Christopher Columbus to the Americas.  Well, maybe, but Erdogan works from the statement that Columbus saw a mosque in Cuba on his first voyage. That seems to depend on this passage from the record of that voyage:

Remarking on the position of the river and port, to which he gave the name of San Salvador, he describes its mountains as lofty and beautiful, like the Pena de las Enamoradas, and one of them has another little hill on its summit, like a graceful mosque. The other river and port, in which he now was, has two round mountains to the S.W., and a fine low cape running out to the W.S.W.

So, maybe not proven

(H/T Jason Colavito, who has a little history of the claim's origins.)

History of the Cosmos; Cosmos as History

History guy

I noticed the other night:  Neil de Grasse Tyson's remake of the Carl Sagan big science classic Cosmos ... is really a history documentary.

The first program was built around on Giordano Bruno (science confronts religious authority).  The second focussed on Charles Darwin (science unhinges faith-based misunderstandings). The third was all about Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton (science predicts better than mysticism).  Fun, btw, to see a Fox Channel program bashing all the things Fox usually raises money from.

Sure, Tyson has this fancy spaceship thingee and he zooms all over the universe, but the backbone of the show is a tour of the standard topics of a History of Science lecture, with a big emphasis on the Western European Renaissance and Enlightenment periods so far. And the space tours are all super-CGI but the history stuff is very simple animation.

Not that I am complaining.  But it would not get so much buzz if they marketed it as a history doc instead of Science. And some commentators think the science is cool but the history is a bit simple:

The story of Edmond Halley sticking by his downtrodden pal and standing up to those idiots at the Royal Society who spent all of their money on 'The History of Fishes' (!) makes for good television. But Tyson is good at teasing out the nuances and complexities in complicated ideas, and I wish there was more of that in his treatment of history. Also, can we please talk about The History of Fishes?

Just a Minute

The new Heritage Minute on John A and confederation (it doesn't seem to be embedding, but you can find it here) has not amused Rick Salutin, who takes it on in a minute of his own at the Toronto Star

He thinks the Minutes (there's another on George-Etienne Cartier) are too full of praise for leaders and elites and too eager to make history "colourful" at all costs.  He doubts the whole idea of doing history in a minute.

(Disclosure: I consulted briefly on the development of these minutes – for a fee – but dropped out fairly early. There were way too many advisors sticking their oars in, and I felt most of us were just getting in the way for the filmmaker who actually had to find the story about which he could make a film. So, fair warning, I'm conflicted all over the place. I don’t feel any much ownership of them, but I like ‘em well enough. And I do think the director overcame the too-many-cooks challenge.)

Salutin is mistaken to declare the Minutes are inevitably preachy and hero-worshipping. Years ago, the historian John Thompson, an advisor on the early minutes, mostly made with Charles Bronfman’s money (plus some corporate sponsorship) -- but with a strong creative team --  told me there were “four, no, five Minutes that feature spunky young women confronting hidebound old men." -- hardly radical stuff, but with a nice sense of irreverence, and kinda anti-elitist, as I recall.

But Salutin is right about the official history status of the new series of Minutes from Historica. They are commissioned and funded by the federal government to cover specific topics – as were the two previous War of 1812 minutes made in 2012. They all hew closely to the historical themes the Harper government wants to fund -- another factor in my inclination to drift away.

Funny thing about Salutin’s take: he doubts you can do history in a minute. But The Star gets him to put his own point of view down in a minute and 22 seconds – and it’s cogent, vivid and strong.

TV history this week: campaigns and lighthouses.

CPAC, the Cable Public Access Channel, launches "The Campaigns," a series of documentaries on notable Canadian political campaigns, starting Sunday 9 pm ET with the 1988 Free Trade election.  Ray Argyle emails us:

A heads-up that CPAC-TV (Canadian Public Affairs Cable) will be airing a series, CAMPAIGN, based in part on my book "Turning Points: The Campaigns That Changed Canada". Episode 1 kicks off Sunday, Nov. 24 at 9 pm with a show on the 1968 "Great Free Trade Election," followed on Dec. 1 by the 1917 vote, "Blood and the Ballot." I appear in the next two shows, Dec. 8, the 1945 election "The Gentle Revolution," and Dec. 15, the 1968 election, "The Changing of the Guard." If you care to watch, you'll find CPAC at the upper end of your cable dial.

Meanwhile, Land and Sea at noon on Nov 24 has "Lighthouses," on the history and current status of Canadian lighthouses.

Ontario's Visual Heritage: War of 1812 on TV

The Ontario Visual Heritage Project, committed to the idea that:

Local history has the power to enable connections between people and the places they live, work and visit. In order for people to care about these places, they must know the ingenuity, hard-work and determination that created their community, their way of life, or their business. They must know the forces of nature that for millions of years carved the lake, grew the forest, or created the natural resource that they use daily. We believe the best way to do this is through the personal narrative - through stories. 

is putting one of its films up on TVOntario on Saturday, October 5 at 9:00 pm.  The film is "A Desert Between Us and Them," about raiders and rebels on Upper Canada's western frontier during the War of 1812.

New telly dons

On History Television tonight, archaeologist Ron Williamson, growing into his role negotiating the lurid and the serious in Canadian history and archaeology, presents a lively version of his excavation of  hanged men buried in the backyard of Toronto's old Don Jail -- including George Bennett, killer of confederation maker George Brown:  The Hangman's Graveyard.  A rebroadcast actually, but I missed it first time, so it's news to me.

And on TVO tonight, historian Helen Castor takes her shot at TV celebrity with She-Wolves, a series of docs on the early queens of England.  This one's news to me because demon publicist Alyssa Schimmel of acornmedia made it her business to bring it to my attention.