Why the Ads are Better than the Shows

Inside Television 518
Publication Date: 09-10-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn

One of the great advantages of book reviewing and developing good relationships with publishers is that I’m able to feed interests the newest and best-presented information. therefore, when i saw that Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant were releasing a book version of their brilliant CBC Radio program The Age of Persuasion, I immediately requested a copy.

Well worth it. For those who have not followed the series - I would always stumble across it, listening to CBC on random afternoons - what O’Reilly, as the narrative voice, does is go behind some of the great achievements or massive failures in advertising. he explains their logic, means of execution and results, and does so in a clear and entertaining manner. As well he should - both O’Reilly and Tennant are real-life MadMen when away from the radio studio.

Besides being an awful lot of fun to read, The Age of Persuasion also stimulates thought, sometimes simultaneously. For instance, a radio station came to O’Reilly asking for help in marketing itself. It was felt by advertisers that radio didn’t work any more. That’s not particularly good for the business model. So what O’Reilly came up with was a series of fake radio ads, or rather, real ads for non-existent stores and services. The eventual flood of consumer complaints was saved and used as evidence that not only did people notice radio ads, they were concentrated enough to be persuaded to seek out the business. Now that is brilliance.

The most intriguing notion presented, particularly as one digs into it, is that all advertising is in fact a sales contract between the company and the consumer. In exchange for interrupting the activity you want to be doing, the ad will inform or entertain you for your benefit. The television commercial is the obvious example. You want to be watching Jon Stewart do his baleful stare at Camera Three, but instead a man comes on to tell you how white your shirts can be. (And yes, I now have satisfaction stuck in my head.) At that moment, you had better care deeply about white shirts and how to make them whiter and/or have the message delivered by an extremely witty walking and talking toadstool or something, or else the contract is broken.

Annoyance is not allowed in the contract. And the contract extends beyond the obvious model. Consider television news as an example. Do you actually care about every story delivered on a newscast, 24 hour or evening format? Not likely, and you’re definitely not being entertained by stories of atrocity in Somalia. I believe this is why there no homely newscasters any more. The packaging must be attractive.

Similar too is the contract between a newspaper and its audience. May God bless the homes and all who cross their threshold of anyone who puts on a church tea in a village. I congratulate you and admire your skill with sandwiches. But said tea is not highly ranked on my list of eternal questions. And until the hallucinations begin, there is no Sandra Bullock-type standing out from the page and reading the stories. Therefore, the ads have to literally sell that page. The relationship between advertising and news in all of radio, TV and print can work brilliantly when symbiotic, disastrously when confrontational.

The final thought I’d like to share, is that I have wondered why it is that we look at objects as necessities when they didn’t exist ten years ago. I’ve had two conversations with people who are ripping their hair out because they can’t find - anywhere! - an iPhone 4 for under $1200, or a roughly 100% mark-up over an already dubious price. Well, wait two months and I’ll get you two for $500. We know this, but we keep on lustfully buying. We truly are spending ourselves into madness.

Why? Well, it’s an old saw that the ads are more entertaining than the programs, hah hah, but let’s look at the outcome of that. I do believe it by the way. I’m much more likely to look up from reading or writing to look at the TV when a certain ad come son than while the program I’m supposedly watching is on. Therefore, does the dull setting not make the gem shine even brighter? It is an interesting thought, I hope. Perhaps this is why the brilliant programming these days is more likely to be produced by commercial-less HBO and Showtime, because the traditional broadcasters have to dull down the product in order to make the ads look good.

You’ll enjoy The Age of Persuasion if you enjoy thinking about these kinds of media topics. Be seeing you.

How to Save the Long Form Census*

*(and make Stephen Harper Look Silly)

A responsible citizen completes his personal information

Is this a political 'dirty trick'? A prank? A thumbing of the nose at authority? A deliberate attempt at embarrassing the Prime Minister?

Well yes. Now that we have the motive out of the way, onwards.

Assumptive that you agree that the collection of reliable and complete data is necessary for government and private priorities and planning, here is something you can do.

First, go to this web page. Download and print your own copy of the 2006 Canadian census. Make photocopies and give them to friends. Take a big red marker and cross out 2006 and write in 2011. Fill in as much of the rest as you wish. Then tuck it in an envelope and mail it to your favourite Federal politician. I would suggest Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton or Gilles Duceppe. They'll like you a lot for doing it.

Mail, by the way, sent to Federal MPs is franked: no postage required. Here is the address:


Mr. John Smith (or whomever)
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6


It is then suggested that the leaders present the collected census forms en masse by dropping the bags into the  well of the House of Commons as a petition. Yes, just like Miracle on 34th Street.

Show that you care. And if you care, then share: Facebook, Twitter, email. If in one month we can get 20,000 forms sent in, I believe we'll have proven our point.

Strike a blow for freedom!

- H

Politics for Joe: Five Platform Planks You'll Never See

Five Platform Planks You’ll Never See

So the question of the week Joe, is have you ever considered just why it is we have these large territorial or national governments in the first place? There are two equal answers, although the emphasis and debate usually falls on the first. That one, is governments exist in order to do the things private interests can’t do profitably (install sewer systems or subsidize your kid’s education) or you really, really don’t want private interests to do (one wouldn’t sleep terribly well knowing protection was being provided by a Haliburton-owned mercenary army).

Very generally speaking, elections are fought, won and lost on these questions of emphasis and expenditure. Ottawa has a given number of powers and responsibilities: which are going to be pushed and altered; which are taking a back seat for the next four years; how much money will be spent on it or cut from it? There’s 90% of what the Federal parties, Provincial parties and I suspect down to the level of ward alderman are all about. How much on whom to do what?

What gets totally missed however is that second rationale for government’s exist. We don’t like to talk about it much because it’s big and scary, while placing the role of government as stern and protective parent. Government exists in order to lead (or push) private interests into doing things they would not necessarily do on their own. And, government is also of a size and strength to be able to confront enemies head-on.

An example? I can give you two very good ones. The passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the United States in 1964-65 come to mind. Were it not for his obsession with getting the “coonskin on my wall” that was Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson would be revered today for getting equal rights for Negros (sic) through a Congress that contained many a Strom Thurmond-esque Dixiecrat. This was something that private interests, state governments and the courts in achingly slow progress had not solved in the hundred years since the end of the Civil War. It also directly confronted the gigantic enemy within that to this day haunts American life: racism.

Second - and many readers will not like this example - is Pierre Trudeau’s Official Languages Act of 1969. Had private interests, provincial governments or the courts made French and English equal and equally portable within Canada? No. And Quebec - whether the government of the day was or is PQ or Liberal - would go on to shamefully attack that principle of equality in a scornful triumph of the majority. The irony has always struck me that should Quebec ever secede, everyone involved in any form of cross-border economic or public service activity would instantly have to learn English and to a much higher level of fluency than say an Anglo-Canadian’s high school French. But, despite that future attack, the Official Languages Act was leading Canada kicking and screaming in parts to this day into breaking the Two Solitudes. Despite whatever feelings one might have about corn flakes boxes, one must admit that we are a better and more unified country in the forty turbulent years since 1969, than the growing separatist urge of the previous forty.

One could throw in Voting Rights for Women as well, where the beneficiaries had de facto no political power, yet managed to achieve just that.  Or the New Deal, which yanked America forward, saved capitalism, and created the American version of the modern social welfare state. But all of the above, and there are more, were gigantic shifts in social or economic movement.

We certainly are at an historic point that requires such a giant push by the Canadian government parent. The environment demands it, as does the increasing complexity of the war against terrorism that we have dragged ourselves into. The economy is fair enough, but our conveniently located greatest trading partner (the U.S. if it isn’t obvious) is going heavily into the tank. I concur with Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times on September 3, that America requires another, bigger, focused stimulus push but there’s not a snowball’s chance that will pass a tea party terrified Congress.

Which of course is the problem itself. We are at a low water mark in the political courage rankings. How hard a question is it to keep a long-gun registry that is already in place. Yes yes, more people are killed by cars, but we have to licence them too. Yes yes, it’s expensive but name something that isn’t in its start-up and fine-tuning phases? How precisely is it doing harm?

So, although each of the following are policies that I’d like to think we know in our hearts should be done, but lack the political push to get done. The Greens might have some ogf this in their platform, but the Greens require two absolutely gaffe-free, chiming bell perfect election cycles before they’ll even supplant or combine with the NDP. Anyway, a list of five:

1) Shut Down the Tar Sands - I always figure if you’re going to piss people off, do it right away. Alberta will damn your party for two generations and dear little old ladies who over-subscribed their RIFFs in Canadian Growth Commodity Mutual Funds will hate you and there is no doubt that this is going to be an economic hit that will take five years to recover from. However, in this case the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few. Ocean levels may well rise three feet in the next five years. I invite you or any friend who is near a sea coast to go to the beach with your collapsible umbrella. Place it in the sand, stand behind it and sight back at the land from the umbrella’s tip. Look how far you can see before the land breaks that plane. The Tar Sands are a massive environmental blood clot in the lung and must be removed. No one will do it.

2) Driving Limits - Equally, since becoming a public transit user, I have looked back at my driving years with many a blush. So many unnecessary trips. So much wasted energy. But leave us face it, we enjoy our comfort. I suggest then that licence bureaus start taking the annual odometer readings seriously. Urban drivers will be limited to 20,000 kilometres a year. If it’s good enough for the car lease, it’s good enough for you. That’s tidy up a lot of downtown Toronto traffic in one hell of a hurry. Will anyone do it? Oh heck no. For one thing, it would require Federal-Provincial agreement, requiring double the number of courageous parties. Second, public sentiment is much like an old, old cartoon I remember in the  Ntaional Lampoon. A rustic holding a rifle said to a campaigning politician, “Do whatever you want, but keep yer hands off the Chevy.”

3) The Last Spike: The Next Generation -  A quick look at a road map of Canada shows in interesting thing. Our major cities tend to line up in a rough row from coast to coast, with a dip through the Golden Horseshoe; and Calgary and Edmonton as opposed in geography as they are in hockey and football. Point is, this country is absolutely made for high speed rail and we haven’t even really taken a serious look at it. At least not to the level of there being available accurate costing. Still, it would be more environmentally friendly than flying or driving, is safer, and is less land wasteful than ever-growing airports. Plus all those people laid off from the Tar Sands will need to be put back to work.

4) Ban Smoking -  Can we just get this done already? It really is about the lost tax revenue isn’t it? $4 billion to Federal and Provincial governments (source: smoke-free.ca) is a lot to replace. That does ignore the lowered health costs and the growingly accepted Grand Guignol of shunting smokers to the back of the health treatment line. (“Yes Smithers, we’ll just kill them off ... slowly.”) Everybody will have a really rough two weeks, smugglers will prosper, and please make the judicial penalties hefty fines rather than prison time. In the future, our children will look back and shake their heads as to why we thought making people stand and shiver outside of bars was attacking the problem.

5) The Third Option of Education as Foreign Policy -  I’ve already written about this, so I’ll be brief. Fold up our international military operations. Harper is right that we need to enhance out Northern presence. Take the savings into bringing in refugee students from the world’s broken places. This diaspora will be able to create change from within in Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, and some day Afghanistan.

Be seeing you.

(Be sure and visit the host for these columns: Lake Superior News - H)

99 Luftballons

Politics for Joe 2
99 Luftballons
August 25, 2010

I thought of the title for this one as I was preparing to write about the dubious practice of the trial balloon. Those who have fond memories of the pastel T-shirt with unstructured jacket era surely remember 99 Luftballons, the anthemic German-English pop song heartily sung by Nena walking through a war zone. The controversy at the time was that Nena had armpit hair. That was the 1980s. Ronald Raegan was simple-minded and so was the decade.

In some ways eras in North America are defined by the glowing aura of whomever is in the White House. The more complex the mind of the President, the more complex the era. Franklin Roosevelt is I truly do believe the one true genius ever elected as the President or Prime Minister of a major nation. Were FDR and Pierre Trudeau both at the same cocktail party, the conversation would gravitate towards the American. Plus FDR was noted as the inventor, shaker and pourer of cocktails that could bring an entire newsroom of reporters to their knees. And the problems he faced as President had an heavier mix than his planter’s punch: Depression, Fascism, Civil Rights, World War Two, a brawny and expansive Soviet Union, and the invention of the modern welfare state. He would never had found time for golf, even if he could have played.

Eisenhower however had time for golf. The old general loved simple and straight lines of attack and he had the perfect time for that strategy. Granted, developing and holding a de facto empire is not a simple thing, but America was so pre-dominant economically and militarily that it actually could hold together political and economic hegemony at that time. They are only just now realizing that time has passed.

But, to run through some of the rest quickly: Kennedy - complex (Civil Rights, Vietnam, Soviet Union, Berlin Wall, Cuba); Reagan - simple (what problems? Have a party and leave the bill for that strange little vice-president you never really liked); Obama - complex (space will not allow the listing).

Getting back to 99 Luftballons, I hadn’t realized how perfectly the lyrics fit until for curiousity’s sake I looked them up. Here, see a few lines for yourself:

99 Decision Street.

99 ministers meet.

To worry, worry, super-scurry.

Call the troops out in a hurry.

This is what we've waited for.

This is it boys, this is war.

The president is on the line

As 99 red balloons go by.

Now, Ontario is not about to go to war with anyone, but I’m noticing a disturbing trend in terms of sending out trial balloons like so many World War One zeppelins out over the cities and towns of this province and equally scaring the bejeezus out of everyone.

There has always been something about Dalton McGuinty I haven’t liked, but I’ve only been able to put my finger on it lately. I know that it stemmed from the time of the run-up to the 2003 provincial election when the then-Leader of the Opposition Liberals gave perhaps the shiftiest, dodgiest, most weaselly political interview I have seen to this day with Paula Todd, then of TVOntario’s late and sadly missed Studio 2. After it was over I emailed Paula and said, I think, ‘Well you certainly gave it your best show.’ She in turn wondered if the viewers had caught the slipperiness of the thin-lipped McGuinty. Seven years of his Premiership later, I guess not.

My first personal encounter with what I’ll call the Chicken Little style of government was through my association with TVO as a member, later vice-president of their Regional Advisory Council for Northwestern Ontario. It was in the lead-up to Greg Sorbara’s first budget as Minister of Finance. Town halls were scheduled across the province for the purpose of discussing a number of possible options, including selling TVO, selling the provincial liquor outlets, and raising fees on i.e. campsites.

If there is one thing that can get the educated portion of Ontario all in a tizzy, it is threatening TVO. At the time in 2003, TVO had over 600 members in Thunder Bay alone. That may not sound huge, but any marketer will tell you that a 0.5% return on a passive campaign is pretty good. Think about it. TVO really only does consumer marketing through its own in-house media: website and television. as obnoxious as pledge weeks can be, they certainly beat high rep commercials across other networks with Steve Paikin playing Old Spice Guy.

Now there’s a foreboding image.

I had a word with the Minister of Natural Resources, David Ramsay. It was his ill fate to be the Cabinet representative at this particular grumpy Town hall. The Cabinet must have drawn straws to see who would attend these affairs. The losers won, getting the spine-stiffening task of playing St. Sebastian in a sharp blue suit. The Thunder Bay event was well-attended - some 40 breakout tables of 9: 1 facilitator to every 8 agitators. I cornered Ramsay at the side of the stage just after the first wave of crowd was arriving.

I knew Ramsay slightly from the days when I worked at Queen’s Park, so I played the part of the cool, ‘Hey, I’m on your side babe’ Liberal. “So what the hell’s up with TVO?,” I asked in a conspiratorial whisper, complete with sideways shifting eyes. He seemed relieved that he hadn’t been attacked. “Let me put it to you this way,” he said, “There are some sacred cows in this province and TVO is one of them.” Granted, i was relieved. Granted, I’ve never really worried about a TVO sale ever since. Granted, I still don’t like how the network’s public affairs unit has been shrunk to the size of Steve Paikin’s chin.

More to the point, it told me that this entire consultative exercise was a sham. If there was no chance in hell that the Province was going to sell TVO to a Bronfman, Miss Piggy or David Radler why was that option even being discussed? I can’t even think of any rock-ribbed Tories who have seriously pushed for a TVO sale, and you’d be drummed out of the NDP caucus for even joking about it. Therefore, this was an idea generated by the government itself.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! And Chicken Little releases a pretty red helium balloon with DOOM! written on it in bright white letters. And oh look dear, isn’t that a World War One zeppelin on the horizon.

We entered the era of the trial balloon. They’d been done before McGuinty certainly. Arguably, this notion of putting out a policy option as a leak and seeing which way the wind of public opinion blows the balloon; it has been around since at least the beginning of private polling.

But McGuinty takes the thing to a whole new level which I why I find it morally corrupt, or at the very least sneaky and cynical. The story ends up with Chicken Little revealed as the hero. When everybody shrieks at the balloon, Chicken Little steps up and says, ‘Never never shall I sell TVO. Never never shall you miss a show.’ Then everybody dances and they start serving cheesecake. Why? Their government and Premier Dalton Little listens! Hoorah.

I saw that recently the spectre of TVO and the Liquor Control Board being privatized was brought up again, by the portly current Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan. I don’t believe it for a second. We’ve discussed TVO to death already, and the LCBO is a cash cow. Did nobody ever watch an episode of The Sopranos? Who on Earth is insane enough to dump a monopoly on liquor in a province whose northern half is feeling increasingly desperate?

No, it’s yet another trail balloon. And they’ve done it before in non-financial portfolios, as with the proposed education reforms last year that would have taught little Joey, age 10, how to fellate a banana. (I know there are international readers of my work who have just looked at the previous sentence and said to themselves, “Nawwww.” Oh it’s true. It’s damn true.) The Premier got to put on his Super Chicken cape and squawk that he will save us all by shooting down this heinous attack on moral values.

By the way, the announcement that Ontario will now sanction Mixed Martial Arts cards may yet prove to be a trial balloon ready for shooting down, but I rather doubt it. There will be money to be made and the Toronto and Ottawa media are mewing like happy kittens at having another event to cover, another special advertising section to sell.

The puzzlement is that it such an unnecessary, cynical habit, to rankly upset and then soothe the electorate. It seems to me abusive husbands use much the same psychological tactics to cower their spouses. And I do wonder sometimes what a good and honest public servant like Mike Gravelle thinks about all this, deep down inside. I’ll let you know if I find out.

So. I had tried to think of a new tag line for Politics for Joe, but the more I tried the more I realized that the one I’ve been using for years will do just fine. From Patrick McGoohan’s legendary series, because we’re all just living in The Village, we quote The Prisoner ... Be seeing you.

For more great reading, be sure and visit the source of this column: Lake Superior News.

Simon Cowell, Christopher Hitchens, and Celebrity Has Its Benefits

Everybody sing! "You had a bad day..."

Inside Television 516
Publication date: 8-27-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn


I recently finished reading an advance copy of the paperback release of Chris Hedges’ 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The End of Illusion. It is an immensely thoughtful book; a highly critical examination of American and by extension Western society. I recommend it to anyone who might be mildly curious regarding the near future of civilization.

The opening section delves into the modern cult of celebrity and how it is that an ever-increasing number of people are perfectly willing to go through bizarre humiliation on reality television in order to be celebrities. It is as though one is invited to a private planet on the planet where celebrities talk just with celebrities and drive celebrity cars and do celebrity things. They are richer than us, prettier than us, and most of all we want to be like them whereas they don’t want to be like us.

It’s on the whole a pretty ugly picture but the argument is well-founded and difficult to debate in opposition. It can be proven anecdotally. I would be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that at some point both you and I have thought - fantasized perhaps - about going on a reality show. One gazes around the living room and wonders how the family would look on TV. I know that ours, before recent illness, would have made Everybody Loves Raymond look like Swedish depressive cinema.

Obviously taking this beyond an inner chuckle or two is not healthy. Hedges book came out before the notorious Balloon Boy incident, but that is a sterling example. This too, I am writing just as the story has broken in the UK that Simon Cowell’s long successful X Factor talent show that he is bringing to Fox next season ... has its vocals sweetened. Not just the full performances before a rapturous live audience, which is trickier to do, but the sweetening extends to the auditions. Everybody involved with the show swears up and down that the sweetening is done in editing and the judges base their opinions on what is in the room. But that’s not the point. The point is that even the auditioners are made better than the great unwashed us. Put as bluntly as possible: we suck worse even than the people who suck on the show because their sucking was made to sound better, whereas we would just suck; A Capella.

Cowell will have a bad day or three, but surely deep down he will be musing that controversy creates cash. I will almost guarantee you that ratings will go up as more people will tune in trying to ‘spot the cheating.’ One almost wonders if Cowell’s people intentionally leaked this, just so people like me would write about it and people like you would read about it. This is television. people are capable of doing Machiavellian plots. The modern Machiavelli abandoned politics long ago for media; that is where the power is after all.

The long-time reader will know that I’ve cast spears disguised as words at the cults of celebrity and pseudo-reality TV before. I’m as on the record as the Watergate Tapes. But I’ve recently been working on a theory that absolutely everything we ingest: food, air, culture and thought alike all have both positive and negative effects. Even a reformed smoker will likely admit that he felt generally happy and more relaxed while killing himself.

And so, even the cult of celebrity and its off-shoot the celebrity confessional have their good sides. Put it this way - knowing an awful lot about someone you will likely ever meet does expand one’s range of knowledge. How many people do you know as well, in terms of triumphs and tribulations, as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or Sandra Bullock? Family, yes. Close friends, certainly. A work colleague or two. A hundred people or so would you say? Even five hundred is a tidy little village but a rather small pool from which to draw experience and wisdom on the myriad problems life presents.

I thought of this while watching Christopher Hitchens give an interview to Charlie Rose on PBS about the former’s battle with cancer of the esophagus. I know I’ve written a lot about Hitchens lately, but I don’t apologize. If in fact he is soon to be missed, he will be sorely missed. I greatly admire those who can state an opinion with confidence and style and defend that opinion with flame and passion.

Being an eloquent man, Hitchens took the time given to him by a wisely uninterrupting Charlie Rose to muse about cancer, death and what it’s like. He said that one deludes one’s self by thinking that one is in control of the situation, whereas it is the tumor which really has the initiative. One reacts to what the tumor does.

He wants to be conscious at the moment of death and hopes to be able to make an observation at the moment preceding. A reporter to the end. But he also knows that may not be possible, given the painful state that death by cancer involves. And his fear? That he will not be able to write, for that is his recreation.

His recreation. There is meaning in that, for he did not say his job, career, or means of living. I won’t dwell on it, for that is a subject for another day, but just thinking about someone describing their skill as their recreation made for a time well absorbed. So would that moment were Hitchens not a celebrity and on a talk show, discussing his personal medical crisis? Possible, but it hasn’t before. So celebrity and its membership has its benefits. Be seeing you.

Hello Joe, Waddaya Know?

Politics for Joe: Number One

Hello Joe, Waddaya Know?

For this, the first of I hope many political columns to come, I had prepared to write a quite serious piece about the Harper Government’s decision to close the prison farms from the angle that because of climate change, we are actually going to need more people who know how to run a tractor, not less. You’ll be reading, I hope, that take on a present issue quite soon.

But I stopped myself literally as I was about to write the title. This is after all the first column by me to be published by Lake Superior News, for whose back I am truly grateful to piggy. As it presents itself as Your Trusted News Service, I thought about that word Trust. It does imply an honesty of communication - no hidden motives allowed.

Therefore, as this is a political column and therefore an opinion-based beast, if you’re going to trust it, you’re going to have to know precisely who’s behind it. I say this not with the effect of: ‘If you agree with me, you’ll like this; if you don’t, you won’t.’ Disagreement, if only to sharpen the edge of one’s contrary opinion, can make for healthy reading. The best political speech I ever heard in my life was delivered by Margaret Thatcher - the admiration pretty much ends there.

More to the positive point, my belief is that you need to know the tack of my political views in order vto assess the weight of what I discuss. Put more simply, if I write that Stephen Harper is running Canada lately like a Tammany Hall Mayor, is that an exception to my usual opinion of Harper, or is is the rule?

It’s the rule. I am not an admirer of this government, although I will say that Harper fought the good fight in attempting to persuade Obama and others that putting a ‘luxury tax’ on the major banks was a punishment on the honest designed to bail out the dishonest. Well done. But in general, he’s Boss Hogg with a blow dryer and a sweater.

This does not lead me to swoony enchantment with the Liberals either. To me the most interesting thing about the dog sniffing the public is doing with Michael Ignatieff is that they have been told repeatedly that Iggy is a really brilliant and admired guy because he has all kinds of really brilliant and admired ideas - but they don’t choose to discuss those ideas because many of them are directly contrary to general Canadian public opinion. He was a hawk on the Iraq War for example, which certainly must lead to awkward pauses in the conversation on those evenings when Ignatieff and Jean Chretien share a table.

By any sensible standard I should be a New Democrat. They are the only party to take the truly crucial issues of the environment and the danger of globalization prominently. Every party in both Canada and the U.S. has a wonderfully written policy about climate change - they pull it out of the drawer when asked to present their credentials. The Soviet Union had a constitution so lovely it would make your heart sing. Its principles were ignored as well.

Still, there is a remaining and lingering aura about the NDP that makes them seem like the CFL next to the Conservative and Liberal NFL. Great time, fine players - but when the going gets tough and the tough turn pro (passim Hunter Thompson) the pros are in the two elder parties. When Bob Rae, a former NDP Premier of Ontario for God’s sake, joined the Liberals it felt like a bar mitzvah or a confirmation. He seemed all growed up finally.

So I remain a dissatisfied left-of-centre non-card carrying Liberal - which sits me with most of the country. But i will call ‘em as I see ‘em.

Lastly, I’ve decided to call this column Politics for Joe as a bit of a tribute to my late father Don O’Hearn. You can hear a brief clip of his brief career in radio news here. Otherwise, he wrote a column on provincial politics (and believe you me, politics in Ontario can certainly be provincial) for some thirty years. He always wanted to write a book called Politics for Joe, where he explained to the reader how politics, which Churchill called the only game fit for adults to play, really works.

I guess I’m going to have to write the darn book for him, column by column.

In closing, let me know your thoughts and ...

Write if you get work...and hang by your thumbs

Your New TV Stars! Ted Danson and Ric Flair!

were I really good at Photoshop I'd have put an R after the G. But I'm lousy at photoshop and Canadians would be insulted by the misspelling. So it's Gray/Grey Pride. Damn funny picture though.

Inside Television 515
Publication date: 8-20-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn

I have to admit, there is something smugly satisfying in seeing facts justify one’s suspicions. There has been a column idea tramping around in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks. You see, I also archive these columns and other articles on my web blogs. (I’m not sure it’s morally right to give myself a free ad by putting a url here. Search Google - it’s all out there.) I started this back in March.

You do get a sense of your audience this way. Google supplies a very good basic package of analytics with their free blogging service. Incredibly simple to use too. But, except for a book review of The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise that hasn’t run yet in print, far and away the most popular thing I’ve written was a largely nostalgia-based column on TV Moms.

I was surprised and kind of relieved. Here I was thinking that I was perhaps under-servicing the youth market. I’d started cutting back on allusions to yesteryear (he says looking over at Eric Dowd who does just that every week from Queen’s Park) or when I have used them I’ve tried to explain them fully. To get all puffy and sociological sounding, I feared that the common cultural vocabulary had shifted forward.

Well, what the hell do I know? Nostalgia sells. There are still people - mostly Americans and Chinese (I don’t know why either) - hitting on that June column every day. So I was seriously wondering if the TV audience was in fact aging. It would make sense. people do tend to get stuck with a technology they understand. The elderly still play their records and generally speaking were the last generation to always have someone in the family who could hammer out a few numbers on the family piano, rather than the guitar.

So on Tuesday of this week I read that the median age for the Big Four American networks is - try and guess - fifty one. 51! After all these years, I have become a key demographic point. Even Fox, the self-described ‘young’ network has a median age of 44; which also interestingly is the median age for the American Idol audience.

What does this mean? Well, quickly and superficially I’d bet the farm on Shania Twain becoming the new judge on Idol. She’s 40. She’s hot. She’s in.

For sports, TNA Impact! is undoubtedly right in dusting off Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Kevin Nash and putting them front and centre. That’s who the TV audience grew up watching. They can’t see Ken Stabler go deep to win the game in the fourth quarter any more, but they can see Flair bleed all over the place.

Advertising agencies seem calm as ohming Buddhist monks about this demographic shift. Older people do have money, after all; and needs for hair products, pee products and Viagra ads sprouting like wild wheat on Prairie fields.

And the broadcasters are sanguine about it all too. From the AP story by-lined to David Bauder:
“You hear people saying, ‘Your audiences are older now and you don’t have the young people you used to have in the 1980s,’” said David Poltrack, chief research executive at CBS. “I say, ‘Yeah, the U.S. auto companies aren’t controlling 80 per cent of the market any more, either.’ ”

But in the larger dimension, there are opportunities and problems. Knowing that the audience is the same audience craved for from 1975 to 1985, look back at what the hit shows were then and re-work them now. Please don’t just re-make them. I have this tidal wave of fear that the rolling drum and charging surfer announcing the revival of Hawaii Five-O will rapidly lead to a disaster of flood relief proportion.

The new Law & Order (if such an adjective can be applied to the ancient order) set in Los Angeles and the new Jimmy Smits legal series Outlaw could both work. Why? Seems to me that Columbo worked pretty well in L.A. as did Dragnet as did L.A. Law which had a young star named, er, Jimmy Smits. Even from this distant hinterland of North America that I live in, I can see Ted Danson affixing a hairpiece right now and saying to Mary Steenburgen, ‘we’re back in the game honey!’

In the long run, it’s not good. Television will run out of audience at about the point the world runs out of oil. Not very damn long in other words. But by then, the ad executives, the TV executives ... and the oil executives of today all will have retired. So until then - party on!

In re-reading the previous I almost thought there was a moral in there. Then I remembered: television has no morals. Party on! Be seeing you.