Canadian telly's lack of impact in Britain

[George White]

Partly owned by  Radio Luxembourg, DIC.

[Mister Six]

God, I hated The Raccoons. What kid wants to watch some boring environmental tosh about a married couple and their dipshit roommate? What kid even knows about roommates? It's such a weirdly grown up context for a children's cartoon.

Anyway, the one that always stuck with me was The Legend of White Fang, mostly for its overly fiddly character designs (irises on all the humans! Why?) and the weird fascination with trying to precisely lip-sync the dialogue, down to visibly curling the characters' tongues when they pronounced L's and D's.

[Pranet]

When I was a kid it always confused me when what I now realise was a Canadian tv show went on about ice hockey like it was a thing normal people did.

In the early 90s ITV showed in the early hours an interview show from Much Music, which I gather was a sort of Canadian MTV. It would have 3 interviews with bands you'd have heard of and one interview with a bearded Canadian.

Sorry if I missed it but has Lexx been mentioned yet? Mainstay of early Channel 5.

[George White]

Oh yes, but a German Brit NovaScotia copro

[sevendaughters]

Kenny Vs Spenny was pretty good and broke out

[George White]

CBC deffo had a deal with Granada. They also showed the Granada Sgt Pepper doc It was Twenty Years Ago Today .

BBC/CBC copros - The Great War (1964), The Wednesday Play/Festival - Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1964)/First Love (1964), Theatre 625 - David (1965, with Donnelly Rhodes), the Lost Peace (1965/1969), the game show Trans World Top Team (1968), The World About Us - Darwin (1968), The Life and Times of John Huston Esq (1969), the Alan Badel-starring drama The Siegfried Idyll (1969), Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, Interl productions like Gandhi's India (1969) and the Quiet Invasion (1970), the Peggy Miller presentation Tales from Muppetland - the Frog Prince (1971), Play for Today - Reddick/The Write-Off/Home (1970), the Living Arctic (1970), a 1968 doc on Maurice Bejart,
The Private Life of the Harp Seal (1975), Classic Curling (CBC curling coverage, complete with commentators like Doug Maxwell), Eric Peterson's Billy Bishop goes to War (1982), Sunday Worship - Jesus Christ - The Life of the World from the Pacific Coliseum, Vancouver (1983), Long Point (1984), Screen Two - Going Home (1986), Screen Two - Heaven on Earth (1987), the Climb (1986 - a copro with BBC Bristol), the Wonderworks/CBC/PBS drama City Boy (1994, with James Brolin), Rhodes (1995), the Children's BBC drama Lyddie (1996), the Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996), Shooting the Century (1996) Hound of the Baskervilles (2002), Wind in the Willows (2006 - hence the cameos from Codco's Mary Walsh and Michael Murphy, a Canadian resident via his marriage to Wendy Crewson)

CBC productions shown on BBC1/BBC2.
The Open Grave (1964), The Labyrinth (1964 - starring that stalwart character actor of CBC, James Doohan), Bousille and the Just (1964), The Seven Hundred Million (1964),  Montreux Festival 1965: The Silver Rose Award: The Wayne and Shuster Show (1965), Swan Lake (1968), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1968), Springhill (1973), the documentary Grey Owl (1973), To Give What We Are (1974), If Wishes Were Horses (1977), Sarah (1978, with Zoe Caldwell). Striker's Mountain (1985), Love and Hate - the Story of Colin and Joanne Thatcher (1989), Where the Spirit Lives (1989), Golden Fiddles (1991), The Bruce Curtis Story (1991), Million Dollar Babies (1994)...
 Also 90s kids shows like Little Bear,  Ace Lightning, Arthur, Noddy, Pingu, Richard Scarry,, Babar.

 
ITV showed the CBC-Thames drama Glory Enough for All (1989), the HTV/CBC  Alvin Rakoff children's ghost story A Haunting Harmony (1993)
CTV-STV's the Campbells on CITV.

ITV aired the CBC/CBS miniseries Conspiracy of Silence (1992). C4 aired the CBC TV movie Liar, Liar (1993).

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968), Tales from Muppetland - Hey Cinderella (1970, shown on ITV) and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977 - shown on ITV) and Diamonds (2009( was shown by ABC
Love and Hate (1989) and The Bruce Curtis Story  (1991) also shown by NBC.
The CBC Children's Film Festival/CBC film Miguel's Navidad (1976), Liar, Liar (1993), Million Dollar Babies (1994) and Conspiracy of Silence (1992) and Joan of Arc (1999 - straight to video in Britain) were shown by CBS.
CTV/NBC worked together on Little Gloria - Happy at Last (a C4 series here) and the ITV copro  A Man Called Intrepid (1979).

[QDRPHNC]

Nothing much to contribute to this wonderfully exhaustive thread, except the say that the point about Canada's population being exceptionally small (compared to the size of the country) and spread out is a factor in a lot of issues. And talent drain is very real, most people could easily name 10 very famous Canadians but would struggle to name 3 famous Canadian films.

Oh, also I once worked with a guy who was a child actor in the Littlest Hobo, and De Grassi Street is in my neighbourhood.

[George White]

Uncanny Valley Arthur Lowe

Note the utter shitty OB VT A Gift to Last is shot on. No wonder nobody in the UK took it (but Telly Eireann did). Though it does have an Irish-born actor in Gerry Parkes (Doc in the North American/Irish Fraggle Rock).

Parkes again in what appears to be the even cheaper Canadian version of the Sullivans.

Another came to mind - CBC's the Amateur Natural with Gerald Durrell was on early Channel 4.

[Glebe]

I imagine the National Film Board of Canada have been mentioned already, there was one animated short that was screened on RTE before the evening news or summit back in the '80s that always stuck in my head and I found it on YT awhile ago:

RE: The Beachcomers, a Canadian Facebook friend was amazed to discover that it screened in Ireland!

[George White]

Jonathan Miller's The Body in Question was a BBC/CBC coproduction but shown in a graveyard morning slot, presumably for schools usage .https://broadcasting-history.com/programming/television/body-question
Who is Maurice Bejart was actually one of a series of profiles known  in the Uk as 'Who is...' but in Canada as Creative Persons.

Christ the CSO/video effects here in 1990s Canadian TVM Lifeline to Victory.

CITV regular Matt and Jenny started on Global but was rerun on CBC.

[Bently Sheds]

A fair few kids shows made it over here - Jacob Two Two, Ultimate Book of Spells, Mona the Vampire, Splatalot (with Dick & Dom presenting), League of Super Evil and Yvon of the Yukon spring to mind...

[George White]

Yes, but I mentioned animations.
And a lot of those YTVshows bar Yvon were  vaguely fauxmerican.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Sorry if I missed it but has Lexx been mentioned yet? Mainstay of early Channel 5.

It was all up on Amazon Prime, looks lie it's on Freevee now.

[Norton Canes]

Canadian producer Sydney Newman came over to the UK from Canada to work at ABC (later Thames) and the BBC, and had a big impact.

[George White]

Yes, and many of his Canadian plays were shown by the BBC as Canadian TV Theatre.

[Hobo With A Shit Pun]

I'm now on series two of a "Slings and Arrows" binge, initiated by a love of Mark McKinney.
My God, it's good. No idea why it never made it onto UK screens.

[Swift]

I remember RTE airing a couple of Canadian shows in the early 2000s at ridiculous hours, like 1 or 2am. DaVinci's Inquest which still may be my favourite Canadian show, and also a show called Cold Squad.

I also don't know if I'm misremembering but I think You Can't Do That on Television aired in the UK/Ireland in the 90s.

Also when I was back in Ireland earlier this year, it was very weird to see Jann Arden's show on some channel there.

[George White]

I'm now on series two of a "Slings and Arrows" binge, initiated by a love of Mark McKinney.
My God, it's good. No idea why it never made it onto UK screens.

Recently found boxsets of it in a charity shop, and yes, it definitely feels like something this was overlooked.

YCDTOT was on Children's Channel.
No one's mentioned CTV's the Campbells.

CBBC showed a few of CBC's Magic Hour anthology shows.

RTE also do a lot of copros. That series Hidden Assets (featuring my  almost-cousin Kwaku Fortune) was a Canadian copro, hence why Michael Ironside suddenly turned up in an RTE show.

Talking of Ironside, the Canadian cable-Central TV-Showtime production Murder in Space!

[thenoise]

Kenny Vs Spenny

Was this shown on British TV? I've watched it all on YouTube but never heard of it at the time.

It's very 00s in a Jackass/South Park way. Gets silly/stale eventually (around the time the two 'best friends' start clearly hating each others guts).

[sevendaughters]

Was this shown on British TV? I've watched it all on YouTube but never heard of it at the time.

It's very 00s in a Jackass/South Park way. Gets silly/stale eventually (around the time the two 'best friends' start clearly hating each others guts).

feel like it was on MTV/MTV2?

[George White]

CBC  showed BBC's Tender is the Night, BBC/ABC Aussie serial 1915 (starring Sigrid 'Roz from Prisoner' Thornton),  Jimmy McGovern's c4 serial Hearts and Minds and Hillsborough, plus Tales of the Unexpected and All Creatures (initially in primetime and then in the early 80s as daytime filler).
Space 1999 seems to have been weirdly the most popular and rerun of their British imports.
They also showed and had some money in the World at War (Thames, 1973).


CBC originals shown on UK TV - Gerald Durrell's series like Ark on the Move and The Amateur Naturalist and Vietnam -the Ten Thousand Day War (shown by NBC), and the early 90s Canadian WW2 docudrama The Valor and the Horror. Tales of the Klondike (1981) was a coproduction.
Adventures of Tintin (shown on C4) was made for Global TV.

[George White]

Spirit Rider (1993), 1993 CBC/PBS Wonderworks drama, apparently a BBC coproduction.

Other CBC kids one offs shown by CBBC included Magic Hour -  The Prom (1990), the 3 part Magic Hour Tom Alone (1990, with Nick Mancuso and Ned Beatty)  and Family Pictures - Paper Route and Dark Horse (1990)

ITV showed the PBS/CBC kids drama Hockey Night (1984) in a late night slot, and then throughout the 90s as a post-CITV holiday filler, the 1990 CBC/PBS kids drama The Little Kidnappers (1990), remake of the 50s Scottish film, with Charlton Heston as Duncan Macrae.
C4 showed the CBC/Wonderworks/PBS drama Looking for Miracles  (1989) and the more adult (also by Kevin Sullivan) CBC drama Butterbox Babies (1994).

Sky showed the Wonderworks PBS/CBC drama Lantern Hill.

BBC showed the comedy-drama from CBC, Getting Married in Buffalo Jump (1990) and the CBC TVM Mother Trucker: the Diana Kilmury Story (1996).

Premiere TV showed Charlie Grant's War (1984).


Nickelodeon showed the CBC Max Glick series.

 RTE showed By Way of the Stars (shown in UK on Family Channel alongside Avonlea), ANOTHER CBC/Sullivan series though coproduced with ZDF, who showed it as one of their Weihnachtsserie, like such dubbed BBC filler as Silas, Timm Thaler, Patrik Pacard.




RTE showed the HTV/CBC anthology Classics Dark and Dangerous, including the two Canadian made eps the Mannikin and the Ugly Little Boy that ITV never carried.

CTV series shwon on the BBC - To Catch A Killer (1992), Black Death (an NBC coproduction, 1990) and the 2002 BBC/CTV coproduction AKA Albert Walker.


CBC's cable channel, Showcase coproduced No Night is Too Long (2002), a BBC Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine set in the Alaskan wastes.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

There has to be a better shorthand for co-production than copro

[George White]

I used to say coprod.

[George White]

BBC Sunday serials The Magician's House (a CTV coproduftion shot in Vancouver) and I Was A Rat (a CBC copro shot in Ontario)

[George White]

The CBC showed all the eps of the 1978 BBC docudrama series  Life at Stake, not a CBC copro, but two of the eps were set in Canada (though I think faked in Britain, one set in the Yukon, the other in Quebec).

CBC's World TV Showcase networked To Build A Fire (1969) made in Canada but a BBC production.

World TV Showcase also showed Granada's the Sinners, some eps of the Main Chance, and BBC's Doomwatch..

BBC showed CBC's miniseries cut of 1990's Bethune with Donald Sutherland c.1992.

Sky showed the CTV Hugh Grant series Champagne Charlie and Global's Spearfield's Daughter.

[Des Wigwam]

Ahem...

Wow - for something I only remember one rung down from vaguely that was a bit of sense-memory a blast from the past. I remember the lady bottom left often cropped up as an American in Brit things in the days before you could look things up and go "oh, turns out they're actually Canadian". Was she also in Brookside?

I will now read that rest of the thread as it looks really interesting. Will also look up Spatz.

[George White]

The World According to Nicholas/Fraidy Cats - part of a CBC kids show anthology called Just Down the Street aired on both ITV and RTE.

[George White]

CBC Radio Canada's Ovide and his Gang (1987-1989) was shown on CBBC.

The BBC aired the CBC telefilm the Megantic Outlaw (1970).

CBC teen sitcom Our Hero (2000) was on C5.

ITV showed CBC/HBO Henson copro Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas (1977).

STV /ITV showed Tommy Tompkins - Bushman (1970), McQueen (1969) and various one off sfrom the likes of For the Record as Firesign Theatre.

Canadian comedy on British telly according to the Radio Times comedy guide.
Aargh the Mr. Hell Show (Comedy Channel/BBC), Big Wolf on Campus (YTV/BBC), Tugboat Annie (ITV), Bizarre (CTV/ITV), Four on the Floor (1980s - CBC/C4), I Love Mummy  (YTV/BBC), the Kids in the Hall (CBC/C4), The New Addams Family (YTV/ITV), Our Hero (CBC/C5), the Ray Stevens Show (CTV/NBC/BBC), The Wayne and Shuster Hour (CBC/BBC/ITV/C4).

Lewisohn left out the Cinemax SCTV special about Bobby Bittman that BBC showed in the late 80s.

[shoulders]

Sorry, what/who is Canadia?