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Just For Laughs has asked me to do another audition for this year’s festival.

If you count the Montreal Homegrown Comic Competition (won by Claire), this will be my third JFL audition. Here’s hoping third time’s the charm… (not that I believe I’m ready for the festival yet, but it’s nice to be in the company of funny and seasoned comics that are also showcasing like this guy).

Yippee-ki-yay. Happy Friday. (Spotted over at Kung Fu Monkey.)

As I first wrote about here, Jeanne and I pitched a new radio series to CBC Radio back in December. Early in 2007 we got the go-ahead to produce a demo with Frank Opolko that we sent up the CBC Radio chain-of-command earlier in April.

And then we waited.

Today the CBC spoke. And there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the unscripted realness of the concept sort of frightens them. (Frankly it frightened us a bit too.) Overall, although they liked the way the demo sounded, the process of putting it all together was too unpredictable and time consuming for them and it would be too expensive to produce the show if we actually started getting paid for each hour of work. (If I sat down to figure out what our hourly wage for the demo was, I’d be surprised if we cracked into loonie territory.)

The good news is that they like us. Tom Anniko still wants us to do something for the CBC and Frank Opolko wants to keep working with us. So its back to the drawing board, but this time it’s gonna be scripted. Which is definitely fine with me. It’s (supposedly) what I do best.

We’ve already begun on the concept, but its too early for details. Watch this space for updates and thanks for listening.

There are a couple of TV and film writers out there that maintain great blogs, but the best one that deals specifically with the Canadian television business is Dead Things On Sticks.

It was over on Denis McGrath’s blog that I first heard about the Banff Television Festival’s Global Television Writers Apprentice Award. From the Banff site:

The Writers Apprentice offers an emerging Canadian writer with the unprecedented opportunity to gain significant experience by completing a four-week internship in the story department of a prime-time series.

Sounds great right? I thought so and applied for the internship on the 20th. As part of the application, I submitted an original one page(ish) scene from one of my favourite TV shows.

Read my super-brief Battlestar Galactica spec script below the fold…
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Do y’all watch 30 Rock? Well you should. And one of the reasons is this guy: Jack McBrayer.

Listen to a great half-hour interview with McBrayer over at Jesse Thorn’s Sound of Young America. Funny stuff. You just might pee yourself.

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Katrna VandenHeuvel, editor of The Nation magazine did a great job on The Colbert Report the other night, but I still walk away from this clip marvelling at the performance of Stephen Colbert.

(Ever wonder what he’s gonna do when/if this character-based gig of his ever ends?)

Here’s the “what’s it going to sound like” demo for the new CBC radio series that Jeanne and I pitched to the network back in December.

Over the course of a few weeks, Jeanne and I worked with a variety of microphones, locations, friends and family (thanks to Massimo, DeAnne, Joanne, Graham, George and Beryl). With audio in-hand, the Jeanster and I then huddled together in the bowels of the CBC Montreal mothership with CBC producer Frank Opolko (an all around great guy and comedy radio legend who produced Radio One’s most popular comedy show ever “Madly Off in all Directions”).

The demo has been sent off to Tom Anniko, CBC’s radio ‘decider’. We should hear back by the end of April.

In the meantime, we’d really appreciate hearing what you think about the demo. You can leave your comments right here on this post.

(As always, iTunes users can subscribe to the irregularly updated SDtSU podcast by clicking here. If you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the podfeed by copying this link into your podcast player.)

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I’ve isolated myself up north to get a big chunk of writing done with no distractions. It’s snowing and quiet (except for the sound of a brown dog snoring) and I’m… procrastinating.

So, really quickly, I recently became a member of the Writers Guild of Canada and I wanted to share this story that comes from them…

The History Channel in Canada is granted a broadcasting licence by the CRTC to:

… provide a national English-language specialty service consisting of historical documentaries, movies, mini-series and history programs which embrace both current events and past history, with a special emphasis on documentary and dramatic programs related to Canada’s past.

That mandate seemed to be pretty clear to the History Channel, until some eagle-eyed folks at the WGC noticed that the History Channel had begun broadcasting CSI: New York several times a week.

What does CSI: New York have to do with Canada or, you know, history you might ask? Well that’s what the WGC wondered too. They sent a letter to Atlantis Alliance (owner of the History Channel) and the CRTC asking that same question.

Turns out that Atlantis felt that CSI: New York was a historical show because it takes place in New York a historical city where 9/11 took place.

Say wha? Really? You sure that’s the best thing you could come up with? I’ve seen yoga instructors who can’t pull off that kind of a stretch.

The CRTC recently came down with a ruling and not surprisingly, they’ve asked History Television to stick to, uh, history. From their decision:

the mere fact that the drama is set in a city which was victim to a significant historical event is not a sufficient justification for broadcasting the program on a service that is mandated to be devoted to history programs.

Nice work WGC. And speaking of work, I’d better get back to it…

Back in December I pointed to a great Slate article that talked about how the U.S. Supreme Court was going to be deciding what powers the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency has with regards to regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Turns out that despite decisions made by the previous government, George W. and his administration felt that CO2 was not a gas that the E.P.A. had jurisdiction over. They fought against the EPA’s authority to regulate it. From the Slate piece:

Section 202 of the Clean Air Act empowers the federal government to regulate “any air pollutant” that may “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In 1998, during Clinton’s presidency, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that the CAA gave it the authority to regulate carbon dioxide. In 1999, environmentalist groups petitioned the agency to regulate CO₂ emissions from new cars and trucks, because they contribute to global warming. But in 2003, now under the Bush administration, the EPA denied this request, arguing, among other things, that it lacked authority to regulate greenhouse gases because they aren’t “air pollutants” as defined by the statute. The EPA also said it wouldn’t regulate CO₂ emissions because of the “scientific uncertainty” of their effect on climate change.

So, back in November, both sides marched off to the Supreme Court.

And now, a couple of months later, the Supreme Court judges have weighed in with a decision that kicks Geoge W. right in the pills.

From the NYT piece:

The Supreme Court ruled today, in what amounts to a rebuke of the Bush administration, that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from automobile emissions, and that it has shirked its duty in not doing so.

Seems like sanity is being brought to George Bush’s Whitehouse one legal decision at a time.

Does the Montreal Gazette’s opinion page editor want you to believe that global warming isn’t happening? (And why?)

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a dodgy opinion piece that the Gazette printed called “Is Recycling Really Worth It?”. The Gazette didn’t publish my letter, but my thoughts did elicit a response from the article’s author Barry Cooper (more on that in a future post).

Today’s Gazette features an opinion piece with the unwieldy title “Documentaries are trendy, but only the sexiest - or most alarmist - survive” by Meghan Daum. The Gazette-chosen subhead reads “Al Gore’s film wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation with good lighting.”

Meghan Daum’s article is full of contradictions and errors, however, as with the recycling article, what bothers me most about the 800 word screed is why the Gazette’s Opinion-Page Editor Wayne Lowrie would choose to publish re-publish it in the first place.

Daum’s article was first printed in the L.A. times over two weeks ago under the headline, “Documentaries or Propaganda?” The piece argues that while documentaries are shedding their “elitist reputation”, today’s most popular documentary directors “don’t know the difference between hammering us with their opinions and laying out the evidence so that we can decide.”

Who are the offending film makers in Daum’s opinion? Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Al Gore.

I’m only going to deal with what Daum says about Al Gore, specifically this part:

Recently, there have been rumblings from the scientific community about Gore’s grasp of the details [of Global Warming].

This is simply not true.

No respected member of the scientific community is arguing that Al Gore doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Even William J. Broad’s hatchet job on Al Gore (well debunked here) includes this graf:

“[Al Gore] has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen … director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

I think Daum’s opinion piece is actually about her discomfort with documentaries that tackle “big issues” like obesity, global warming and the Iraq War. Each of the docs that Daum lists as favourites (Capturing the Friedmans, Grizzly Man, The Staircase) deal with much smaller topics. Topics that don’t demand that their viewers do much about what they’ve just seen. That’s fine. Change can be scary. And changing your mind can be terrifying.

And while I don’t think I’ll be heading over to Daum’s place for movie night anytime soon, what bothers me most is why the Gazette would publish this article at all. Don’t we have enough homegrown opinion in Montreal? Is the Gazette is forced to buy stale L.A. Times castoffs? Articles that weren’t even that good when they were fresh? Articles that cast doubt on the science behind global warming?

You might think I’m being nit picky, but this is how denialism works. It’s sneaky. It slips under the radar with its slimy truthiness.

If you think that some well-accepted bit of science is wrong there’s one surefire way to fight it: better science. If, on the other hand, you know that the science is sound but you don’t like what is says, the way you fight it is to introduce doubt. The tobacco industry taught us that.

All of this has me wondering what the Gazette’s Opinion-Page Editor Wayne Lowrie thinks about global warming… I’m going to drop him a line and find out.