MALCOLM PAGE
Mary Jane Miller's book is big and ambitious: an account of CBC television drama from its beginnings, and an evaluation. Here is information and comment about Festival in the sixties, about Wojeck, Quentin Durgens MP, Cariboo Country and on to recent For the Records, together with hundreds more I had forgotten or never known about. She has sections for 'experimental,' reviving faint memories of Q for Quest and Program X, and for 'what Toronto never knew,' praising work in such locations as Vancouver and St. John's. She adds a fourteen-page interview with John Kennedy, Head of CBC Drama. Miller explains that she has kept 'off-air' notes since 1969, so for the fifties and sixties she has looked at examples of what has survived--and much has not. She plans two further books, one of interviews with CBC personnel and one about 'the internal and external constraints which have shaped the programmes' (p vii). Her categories are usually logical, though La Sagouine is surprisingly discussed as a sitcom and Bethune and Nellie McClung seemed to belong in the docudrama section. The book risks being an endless series of one-paragraph commentaries on particular programmes. I admired Miller's skill in varying her approach, as she judges well when to list, when to devote two or three pages to one show and when to step back and generalize.
Her concern for quality and for distinctively Canadian productions shines throughout the study. She shows clearly that CBC television used to be more adventurous than it is now, although it still does more high-quality programmes than CTV and the American networks. We have to trust our author, as she alone has seen the programmes relatively recently and (in contrast to literary criticism) we cannot check her judgements by looking at the text ourselves. This gives her a large responsibility: she has to describe, and she has to separate description from evaluation (facts are sacred; comment is free). She usually succeeds in this, and I endorse many of her enthusiasms, for Freedom of the City, for example, though I find her too harsh to Samuel Lount. Miller may err on the side of over-estimating the memory (and age) of the reader. In the late eighties we cannot be expected to recall the issues of The Open Grave and This Hour Has Seven Days, and I am left wondering why there was 'much unnecessary controversy' about Mordecai Richler's The Bells of Heaven in 1974 (p 232).
The author announces she is using 'content analysis, contextualism, archetypal and modal criticism, and structuralism' (p 7). This sounds formidable; in fact, apart from a content-analysis approach to The Beachcombers, these tools are not seen. On the contrary, she has used commonsense, intelligence and experience, so the book is wholly accessible to non-specialists. Turn up the Contrast does not read like the work of a professor for a university press (this is intended as a compliment). She avoids the dry and academic, discussing people and drama, not reports and commissions. She displays little interest in abstraction and definition, avoiding such questions as when a television drama becomes indistinguishable from a film. The personal tone is engaging, if veering to the colloquial (Miller found Margaret Atwood's The Servant Girl [1974] 'really pretty bad' [p 2311). She even mentions the reactions of her father, mother and husband to shows.
This study has little overlap with theatre history, narrowly defined. Eleven significant television playwrights of the earlier years are listed (p 193); several of them are also important radio dramatists but none has written much for the stage. Eight authors who used television as a 'training ground' and for 'bread and butter' are named (p 190): Jack Winter, Bernard Slade, Patricia Joudry, David French, Carol Bolt, George Ryga, Judith Thompson and--odd man out---Timothy Findley. In contrast to Britain, though, most of the writers named in the book work only for television. Miller usefully describes television scripts by well-known stage writers, such as Ryga's Two Soldiers (1963), Rick Salutin's Maria (1977) and Sharon Pollock's The Larsens, a 1976 Winnipeg production. She mentions only briefly the period in the mid-seventies when, under John Hirsch's leadership, numbers of Canadian stage plays were screened, but writes at length of Morris Panych's musical, Last Call (1983), because she always welcomes departures from naturalism.
With such a valuable pioneering work, listing errors would be petty, though typos are too frequent, some indexing is one page out and footnote numbering goes awry in Chapter 8. Miller makes a curious mystery of the authorship of Nellie McClung (1978): my 'off-air' notes give it as Carolyn May. The regrettably small number of published Canadian television scripts are listed, but this omits Helen French's Charlie Who? and Angus Braid's Outport, both published in Performing Arts in Canada, Summer and Winter 1971. Nor does Miller note such published novelized scripts as those for The Newcomers and Anne Cameron's Dreamspeaker, which readers might well want to turn to after Miller has aroused their interest.
The author points out the importance of the visual in the medium, which has 'imprinted [on] the mind's eye: the Chilcotin, Gibson's Landing, the East End of Montreal, Cabbagetown before and after gentrification, huge combines in a prairie night, Elmira Raceway, Hatch's Mill, Iroquois Creek and Tamarack' (p 349). Many past successes are rescued from oblivion, distant, like The Prisoner (1962) and recent, like Jeannine Locke's Chautatiqua Girl (1984). Turn up the Contrast is a rare achievement, both the first book on its subject and the definitive study.