ROLLING INTO A ‘MUSICAL PETRI DISH’

After 10 years on the road, Toronto is just another stop along the Juno journey, says producer John Brunton. This year’s Juno Awards ceremony, airing Sunday, March 27, on CTV, marks several anniversaries.
This is the 40th anniversary of the Junos and the 10th telecast since the ceremony moved to CTV and became a traveling performance. And it’s the first time the awards have been in the country’s biggest city since 2000. “We’re also working against the backdrop of this exceptional respect for Canadian music now,” Brunton adds.
As he points out, it seems as if half the genres of popular music are dominated by Canadians. Along with veteran performers Shania Twain (a Hall of Fame inductee) and Neil Young (the Humanitarian Award), the Junos will feature a host, Drake, who is one of the top draws in hip-hop; an indie group, Arcade Fire, that won album of the year at the Grammys last month; and a nominee, Justin Bieber, who is the latest preteen demigod. “Who would have thought that the hottest guy in the hip-hop and rap world would come from Canada?” Brunton says. “Who would have thought that the Grammy album of the year winners would come from Montreal? “It’s exceptional what’s happening to our scene.”
This year’s Juno show comes live from Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. Along with Drake and Arcade Fire, scheduled performers include Broken Social Scene, West Coast rockers Hedley, Toronto rap-rockers Down With Webster, country singer Johnny Reid, Montreal electro-funkster Chromeo and Sarah McLachlan.
It’s a far cry from the early years, when the Juno show was a small industry event hosted by a Toronto radio personality. In the first five years of the show, it was only carried live once — on CBC Radio.
It didn’t make it onto TV (CBC) until year six.
To show what a dearth there was of homegrown talent that stayed at home, in the first six years of the awards, Anne Murray was named best female vocalist five times, and Gordon Lightfoot was best male singer four times. Then for years, the Junos looked, as Brunton says, like all the other awards shows — “like the ‘Wheel of Fortune, a bright, garish studio, hot videotape, everything bright and shiny and kind of cheap.”
That changed with the forays to Hamilton and Vancouver in the 1990s.
“We’ve led the way in taking the music to the people,” Brunton says. “Not just in touring the show but in getting the industry off the floor and putting fans in front of the stage.”
In 2002, when the show moved to CTV from CBC, the organizers toyed with taking it on the road.
When Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin stepped in with some funding incentives, the first stop on the tour was chosen, St. John’s Mile One Stadium, hosted by the Barenaked Ladies.
“He spoke to CTV pres  Ivan Fecan,” says Susanne Boyce, ex-head of creative, content and channels. “Ivan said, ‘Could we take this on the road?’ I said, ‘Yes. Absolutely.’ “I had no idea if we could, but who cares? It fit into a bigger strategy, which is connecting Canadians.”
Justin Trudeau put a fine point on it, Boyce adds, when he came to St, John’s. “I asked him what he was doing here, and he said, ‘My father always told me to go where Canada is.’ ”
In subsequent years, the show went to Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Calgary, Vancouver and back to St. John’s. There have been high points, whimsy and drama along the way: Home team Great Big Sea kicked off the first road show in St John’s; Shania Twain hosted in Ottawa and wore NHL-themed evening gowns; k.d. lang closed the Winnipeg show with “Helpless” after Neil Young canceled because of surgery for an aneurysm.
Now the show is rolling into another great Canadian music town. As Brunton points out, Yonge Street, Yorkville and Queen Street and the performers they spawned, from the Band, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to Blue Rodeo, Tragically Hip and Feist, loom large in the world’s musical imagination.
“We have a special, unannounced performance, that will blow people away,” he says. “We’re tipping our hat to 40 years of Canadian music and Toronto. It’s one of the most dynamic petri dishes of music in the world. Toronto is a great live music city.”

CAIN’S ‘MILDRED PIERCE’ GOES BY THE BOOK

When trimming a household budget, premium cable is an easy expense to cut. Hold on to your HBO, though. Its “Mildred Pierce” miniseries, premiering March 27 and spread out over three Sundays, is worth it.
Kate Winslet turns in a sublime performance as Mildred, a complex, fiercely independent woman. Over the span of a decade during the Great Depression, she endures divorce, a horrific tragedy and financial blows. Shrewd and a hard worker, she quickly climbs from slinging hash to owning a small empire.
Based on the same character that won Joan Crawford an Oscar for her Mildred in 1946, this is not a remake. Rather it’s an unflinching account of James M. Cain’s novel of the operatic love that Mildred has for her daughter, Veda (Morgan Turner as a girl and Evan Rachel Wood as a young adult).
Winslet is raw and utterly believable.  “There were some real struggles,” Winslet says one night from Paris, where she’s shooting “Carnage.” “I would sit in the back of the car and say, ‘I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know how I am going to do this scene this day,’ just because I knew what I was facing.”
Yet for 16 weeks she did, and she’s in practically every scene of the
5 1/2-hour miniseries. Though set in the 1930s — and looking completely spot-on from drainboards to cars — this saga could easily play out today. “In 2008, when I read the book, the financial markets were tumbling,” director and co-writer Todd Haynes says, noting the similarities between that era and this one.  “By the end of the year, we were talking about how we would break it (a film) up into parts.”
As he worked, he envisioned only Winslet in the role. “I couldn’t get it out of my head,” he says. The rest of the cast is equally impressive. Recent Academy Award winner Melissa Leo plays Lucy, Mildred’s neighbor and confidante.  Mare Winningham as Ida, a waitress who befriends Mildred, and Hope Davis as the mother of one of Veda’s flings are exceptional.  Mildred’s husband and the father of her children, Bert (Brian F. O’Byrne), suffers the effects of the Depression and finds comfort in someone else’s arms. Then there is Monty, whom Guy Pearce (“The King’s Speech”) inhabits. Rich and entitled, Monty meets Mildred when he’s her last customer as a waitress. Their affair starts immediately.
He’s an effete, highly cultured layabout; she’s a blue-collar, middlebrow go-getter. In bed, they’re perfectly matched. Many people see Monty as a cad, but not Pearce. “Not to say what happens in the movie isn’t questionable,” he says referring to pivotal plot points. “I felt he’s a lovable, charming and adorable guy. He’s so calm and confident.”
Monty glides through the society Veda believes she should be in.  Even as a girl in anklets, Veda acts like a deposed princess. Mildred indulges Veda, who buys herself a mink coat at 17 without asking permission; still it’s never enough.
Nothing is for Veda, certainly not Mildred’s love, which will be forever unrequited. Though Mildred admires Veda’s musical talent, she can’t grasp the depths of her daughter’s abilities or limitations.
Under the tutelage of conductor Carlo Treviso (Ronald Guttman in a magnificent turn), Veda shoots to fame. He understands Veda and tells Mildred she is “a snake, a b…, a coloratura.” “That character almost killed me,” Wood says of Veda. “The preparation for the film was just as difficult, even with the dialect, the ’30s dialect, having to learn opera in three different languages, having to learn piano.”
Much of the dialogue is from Cain’s spare prose. Haynes laughs as he acknowledges this was the first time he wrote the word “yegg,” 1930s slang for a safecracker.  Such attention to period detail extends to each costume. Ann Roth, an Oscar-winning costume designer, breaks from working on Broadway’s upcoming “The Book of Mormon” to discuss how she tapped her warehouses of vintage clothing to outfit the cast.
“It wasn’t enough time to prepare,” she says. “It was a very, very big job. I am not sure it shows on the screen. I literally had 2,000 extras to dress.”
Everything, even undergarments, had to be historically accurate. “I have to see if the girdle was right and not a panty girdle,” she says.
 Haynes’ vision included the movie’s palette of browns and tans.
Initially, Mildred’s wardrobe, keeping with her position, was just a couple of dresses. As she succeeded, her wardrobe and house grew expansive and her life more complicated.  “One minute you think you have both hands firmly on her,” Winslet says of Mildred’s character.
“It’s absolutely within your grasp, and she reacts to something she wishes she hadn’t done. And she’s so forward thinking and forward-moving. It was a very complicated part to play because of that.
“She also is full of weakness, her personal weaknesses, and vulnerability,” Winslet says. “I really did have to show that side of her.  That was more challenging than the more obvious fearless side of her because one doesn’t like to show one’s vulnerability in life. I have not played that many characters that have an equally weak side. And to really just embrace it, and accept it, and be present in those moments called for a lot of my own stuff, and that’s not always fun.”

MONARCHY & THE PRESS

If there are two British institutions that baffle outsiders, they’re the monarchy and the press. As for the interaction between the two, that may be the strangest love/hate relationship in the world. In “Chasing the Royals,” airing Thursday, March 31, on CBC’s “Doc Zone,” filmmaker John Curtin shows how this relationship also may be one of the sickest.
The documentary is part of a double feature that unofficially kicks off the CBC’s coverage of the upcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29.  It follows “Marketing the Monarchy,”
another “Doc Zone” presentation that looks at the creation and sale of souvenir merchandise from commemorative crockery to $5,000 paperweights.
As “Chasing the Royals” shows, when the media aren’t drooling all over the royals, they’re snapping at their ankles like the Queen’s corgis.
As the film shows, there are two sides to the British press: the tabloid rabble and the gentlemen of the so-called “quality press.” And all have reporters dedicated to watching the every move of the various wards of the British state who make up the Royal Family.  “These guys are very polished and professional journalists,” Curtin says of the pack of respectful reporters who do things like follow the Queen and Prince Philip on their foreign tours.”
 As Toronto Star reporter Christopher Hume points out in the film, the Queen is just a nice “little old lady” who doesn’t give interviews and rarely makes speeches. She and Philip travel from place to place inspecting and dedicating things, accepting bouquets of flowers, and waving.
The result is a bizarre and hilarious ritual in which the Queen and her consort are trailed by a press that is covering events that are almost impossible to write about, because nothing ever really happens.
At the other end of the scale are the hacks from the tabloid press, papers such as the News of the World and the Mirror, who put huge resources into dreaming up ways to embarrass and antagonize the Royal Family.
From hacking into royal voice mail accounts to placing a reporter on the staff at Buckingham Palace, they’re constantly digging for something that will turn the front page into a collectors’ item. “The tabloid journalists are doing the digging,” Curtin says. “They’re doing the eyeballing, and they’re doing the dirty work. But it’s actually more serious journalism, not in all cases, but they’re actually investigating something. That’s the supreme irony. The tabloids, which people in the journalistic field tend to look down upon, are actually doing some very good work.”
“The really fun people are the ones who chased Diana,” Curtin says.
“Those were the golden years of the tabloid royal chasers. But Diana died, and everyone said, ‘We pushed her too hard.’ And they backed off.”
In the meantime, he adds, the media have more or less muzzled themselves to avoid embarrassing or angering the Royal Family before the wedding. They all want to avoid doing anything that could get them uninvited.

WHEN YONGE SWUNG

“Yonge Street: Toronto Rock & Roll Stories,” is an extraordinarily ambitious three-part doc airing Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, on Bravo! Directed by Bruce McDonald (“Hard Core Logo”) and masterminded by Toronto music archivist Jan Haust, “Yonge Street” looks at a little-known era in Canadian music history: the rock and R&B explosion in Toronto of the 1950s and ’60s.
“It’s such an important era not only in Toronto’s music scene but in Canadian culture,” Haust says. “Yonge Street was the main artery of what we would today call Canadian pop culture.”
Most people know the story of how Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm came up from Arkansas in 1958 and started rehearsing musicians. That led to the formation of the Hawks, who became Dylan’s backup group before setting out on their own as The Band.
What is less clear is that Hawkins and Helm were part of a latter-day Underground Railroad. Not only did musicians such as Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker and Little Richard play Toronto as the turnaround point of their tours, but a number of blues, rock and R&B performers arrived, liked the place and stayed.
“Hawkins talks about thinking this was the promised land,” McDonald says. “There were a lot of opportunities. There wasn’t a rich tradition of black music in Toronto, the rules were unwritten, and it was an amazing place to be.”
They also created a music scene that bubbled below the surface of polite Toronto society.
The parade of people interviewed for “Yonge Street” is astonishing, from Hawkins, Gordon Lightfoot, and Band guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson to such ’50s and ’60s performers as Blood, Sweat & Tears singer David Clayton Thomas, Steppenwolf leader John Kay, and Mandala frontman George Olliver.
Some of the most interesting characters are ones we’ve never heard of:
such African-American performers as Curley Bridges and Duke Edwards, who talk about bringing the sound to Toronto and fostering a generation of blue-eyed soul men including Olliver, Thomas and the Checkmates.
“The Toronto guys didn’t just get to hear the music,” McDonald points out. “They got to see how the musicians moved, how they dressed, how they performed.”
It was possible to gather all these people, McDonald says, because as a music archivist, Haust knows everybody. (He actually owns the original Basement Tapes, the holy grail for fans of Dylan and the
Band.)
“This is very much Jan’s project,” McDonald says. “He’s been moving in this direction for years and gained the trust of everybody. He just knows everything. He knows who played bass on the B-side of that Atco single that came out in ’58.”
The story of rock ’n’ roll is tied tightly to the social history of the country.
So Haust and McDonald dug up a gold mine of period film and
photography: everything from footage of the clubs of the 1950s and an eerie video of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, with a bone in his nose, singing “I put a Spell on You,” to period commercials for Red Rose tea and Black Label beer and grainy home movies of 1950s Canadian teens at a basement party, dancing to the “devil’s music.”
There also are miles of performance film of such artists as the Checkmates, Mandala, Hawkins and, perhaps most fascinating, Jackie Shane, an openly gay African-Canadian transvestite who was glam 20 years before Bowie – and was beloved by Toronto music fans.
In the end, this is a rare untold story of the early years of rock and soul. And as Haust says, it “involves motorcycles, and ne’er-do-wells and criminals, and cops.”
“What’s really interesting is that Toronto became the last outpost of the music that moved up from New Orleans, the music that moved up the Mississippi in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s to Chicago and Detroit,” he says. “Finally, this music made its way here into the city, and influenced a generation of artists that we revere to this day.”

VANCOUVER GAL HOUSES BACK FROM THE BRINK

If you think Mike Holmes’ shows can be scary, well … meet Kristi Hansen. In “Homewreckers,” debuting Tuesday, March 22, on W Net at 8:30pm, Hansen zeroes in on the real bad guys in home maintenance, the homeowners. For most of us, improving, furnishing and living in our homes takes up most of our money, and what’s left goes to the kids’ needs, other necessities of life, and luxuries and vacations.
When it comes to choosing between two weeks in Cuba and new windows for the homestead, most of us are headed for the sun faster than you can say “Varadero.”
As a result, anyone who owns a house lives in fear of the things that may be living, growing or rotting in our walls. That’s where Hansen comes in.
Couples invite her into their homes to tell them what’s wrong with them, and that can often be a pretty sobering experience.  In one episode, a couple who spent more than $20,000 and a year of Sundays renovating their kitchen find that their roof is rotten, part of the house is about to fall in, and the bathtub is playing host to a colony of black mold that is on the verge of becoming a civilization.  As Hansen points out, many homeowners focus on improvements and beautifications while ignoring little repairs that could save thousands down the road.
For example, a small split in the wood on a deck of the master bedroom could have cost around $50 to patch. But it was let go, and now water pours through the deck and into the garage and laundry room.  And dry rot has turned the wood into sponge and is running toward the main supports of the house.
Of course, the episode has a happy ending. If it didn’t, this show could scare us so badly that we’d never come back.
Kristi Hansen brings over 19 years of experience to Homewreckers and will share her no-nonsense and unintimidating approach to plumbing and construction with homeowners everywhere. As a tradesman, plumber, Class B gasfitter and mentor, this mother of two has tackled every possible type of repair project imaginable, while holding her own in the male-dominated construction trade. Kristi is also the owner/operator of the successful Vancouver plumbing and renovation company, Pretty Plumbing Co.

DANCING WITH THE STARS 12TH SEASON

Can “Dancing With the Stars” top the Bristol factor? That’s the challenge the competition now faces after the 11th season had the public marveling, not always in a complimentary way, at the staying power of contestant Bristol Palin, daughter of  Sarah Palin.  As the show’s 12th round begins Mon, March 21, it’s a real question whether any new contenders can inspire anything close to that buzz.  Among them: boxing icon Sugar Ray Leonard; actors Ralph Macchio, Kirstie Alley; Chelsea Kane; Petra Nemcova; and Kendra Wilkinson.
Also: Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward; talk show host Wendy Williams; singer-actor Romeo; WWE veteran/rock star Chris Jericho; and radio personality “Psycho” Mike Catherwood.
In terms of related water-cooler chat which hit its peak with the preceding season, which Jennifer Grey won with partner Derek Hough, DWTS has other situations in its history to point to. Here’s a look at several of them.  Season 1 (2005): Actor John O’Hurley (“Seinfeld”) had been a favorite throughout the maiden season. When “General Hospital” regular Kelly Monaco was crowned the victor, accusations of unfairness abounded, from charges of ageism to the belief ABC simply wanted one of its own stars to win.
Season 2 (2006): The judges  took issue with Jerry Rice’s continued presence, since they felt others’ performances surpassed his. The public voting process was considered a reason he remained, since phone lines were open from the start, and Rice often danced first.
Season 3 (2006): Country star Sara Evans bowed out after six weeks due  to her filing for divorce.
Also actress Willa Ford was eliminated when she had first, according to the judges’ scores.
Season 5 (2007): Marie Osmond fainted on air after performing. Osmond soon recovered, and  continued with the show.
Jane Seymour missed an episode due to food poisoning, and Mark Ballas dislocated his shoulder while doing the cha-cha. Osmond and Seymour each lost one  of their parents during the season.
Season 6 (2008): Cristian de la Fuente ruptured a tendon, and the judges based his scores on what he had done prior.
Season 7 (2008): When Julianne Hough was taken to hospital, she ended up having her appendix removed.
Season 8 (2009): Jewel and Nancy O’Dell proved they didn’t even have to step onto the floor to add drama. Both were injured enough in their rehearsals that they had to withdraw.
Shawn Johnson, who won, was caught up in drama. A stalker tailed her to the  studio, and upon his arrest, he was found to have items that suggested a potential abduction. Her family took out a restraining order against him, and he was charged on counts including felony stalking.
Season 9 (2009): Tom DeLay, a year prior to his conviction for money laundering, called it a day on “Dancing” because of stress fractures in both feet.
Season 10 (2010): Kate Gosselin became a symbol for dancers who battled with their dance partners, in her case, Tony Dovolani, who gave up on her after one argument during rehearsals.
Erin Andrews decided to do “Dancing” to prove she would not be cowed by a stalking incident in which she had been videotaped, while unclothed, through a hotel room peephole.  Andrews stated in interviews that her participation was a message to women about not being victimized.
Season 11 (2010): Controversy built because of votes that kept Bristol Palin in the competition, though many felt she didn’t fare as well as others eliminated sooner. Jennifer Grey kept up the suspense, rupturing a disk on the first night of the final performance week. She did, and she won.  Anything can happen, then, when it comes to “Dancing With the Stars.”

MILESTONE FOR SUZUKI & THE NATURE OF THINGS

When “The Nature of Things” debuted, John Diefenbaker was prime minister, Tommy Douglas was premier of Saskatchewan, and David Suzuki was working on his Ph.D.  The venerable science series has been on the air 50 years. Its host is celebrating his 75th birthday this month, and he has been with the show for a little more than three decades. In TV terms, these are eons. So it’s only natural for CBC Television to plan a couple of things to mark the dual occasions: the end of the show’s 50th season and the beginning of Suzuki’s 76th year. First is “Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie,” airing Sunday, March 13.
Then on March 24 — Suzuki’s 75th birthday — “The Nature of Things”
wraps up its 50th season with a half-century celebration show.
“Force of Nature” is a bio-doc by Sturla Gunnarsson (“Air India 182”) built around a lecture Suzuki delivered at UBC in 2009 (since published as the book “The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future”).
It blends footage of Suzuki’s current hectic schedule as a broadcaster and environmental activist with archival film of his life to illustrate the points being raised in the lecture.
“It’s not a standard biography,” Gunnarsson says. “It’s more of a biography of the ideas, the major turning points, in the evolution of David as a thinker and a scientist and environmentalist.”
The starting point is trauma: Suzuki’s internment at the age of 6 with his family and thousands of other Japanese-Canadians at the outbreak of the WWII.  Suzuki says it’s something that left him feeling like an outsider for the rest of his life. And as Gunnarsson points out, it’s a defining experience in Suzuki’s political and social outlook, which placed him on the side of the “marginalized and the disempowered.”
“I wasn’t expecting that he had been so affected by the internment.
For someone who is so accomplished and beloved by so many people, it astonished me to discover that still, to this day, one of the main things that motivates him is a need to prove himself in the eyes of Canadians; he’s still animated by that. “The ghosts are still there.”
Making the film, Gunnarsson says, he came to see Suzuki as something of a Forrest Gump — always on the scene of one life changing event or other. After the internment, Suzuki’s family settled in Ontario. He got a doctorate in zoology in 1961 from the University of Chicago and went to work as a biology researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the uranium was refined to build the atomic bombs dropped on his grandparents’ homeland.
He was a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley during the famous People’s Park movement to force the school to turn over derelict land to the city.
And he was in Vancouver in the 1970s when the environmental movement began to take off — a star academic with a very prestigious federal research grant who didn’t mind talking to the media.  “He became very radicalized in California,” Gunnarsson says.  “And he brought that with him to UBC. Then there is the birth of the environmental movement and Greenpeace, which has its roots in Vancouver, and he’s right in the middle of it.”
He came to CBC in 1970 with the show “Suzuki on Science” and took over “The Nature of Things” in 1979.  When his research grant ran out, Suzuki says, he found himself at a crossroads, where he had to choose between his laboratory at UBC and broadcasting. So, he says, he handed the lab over to his most promising Ph.D. student and never looked back. “There aren’t many scientists willing to put the time into television,” he says. “And I thought it was important work.”
As “Nature of Things” producer Caroline Underwood says, “For most Canadians, ‘The Nature of Things’ is David Suzuki. “Last year, we had our 30th anniversary with David. So it’s hard for people to understand that we had ‘The Nature of Things’ for 20 years before there was David. But he really is the symbol of the series.”
The “Nature of Things” episode that closes out the season on March 24 looks back to the pre-Suzuki years, when the show was hosted by the wacky duo of Patterson Hume and Donald Ivey. It also reviews the series’ work by theme, from technology to the environment, and some of the adventures the show has taken viewers on. And over most of it, as Underwood points out, looms the rather large shadow of Suzuki, something that he says he finds a little disconcerting and somewhat humbling.
“What happened from my attempt to be the messenger is that the public has empowered me,” Suzuki says. “If I call a politician or a businessperson today, chances are they’ll call back within an hour or two, not because I’m so important but because they know there are a million people who watch my programs. “I never expected to have that kind of power, and it’s something I treat with tremendous respect and gratitude.”

MARCH MADNESS

Talk to any sports fan, and he’ll tell you the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament (aka March Madness) is one of the most grueling spectacles in all of sports. Sixty-seven games over three weeks of single elimination basketball, played out on a national stage before frenzied fans, can wear down not only players and coaches but also fans, broad-casters, college officials, bar and restaurant owners, and really anyone whose livelihood depends on these high-intensity hoops.
But not one person in the bunch will complain, for it’s where they all want to be. And if you’re Jimmer Fredette, the senior point guard who led Brigham Young University to its first Tournament win in 17 years last year, the taste of success makes you only want more.
“It was just a huge burden off our backs and the whole school’s back,”
says Fredette of BYU’s 99-92 double-overtime victory over Florida in the first round, to which he contributed 37 points.
“I felt like the community was very, very excited about it, and obviously our team was extremely excited about it. And we knew that we wanted to get a win, and we knew that we could if we played well. And we played a tough opponent in Florida with a great history and a great coach and great players on the team, and we were just able to get it done. And I was very, very happy. It was one of the best games I’ve ever been a part of and one of the greatest memories I’ve had here at BYU. So it’s just a great feeling.”
The 2011 version of March Madness tips off in prime time Tuesday and Wednesday, March 15 and 16, on truTV with four first-round games, followed the next two nights by second-round action on truTV, CBS, TNT and TBS. The four broadcasters will team up to air all 67 games of this year’s tournament, with CBS, as usual, carrying the Final Four and the National Championship Game on April 2 and 4 from Houston.
For Jim Nantz, who with Clark Kellogg will form CBS’ primary in-game broadcast team, this is the busiest time of year. From the beginning of the conference tournaments in early March through the NCAA Final, Nantz was scheduled to call 18 games, after which he would shift gears and head off to the controlled, reverential atmosphere of the Masters.
And while the 51-year-old admits the “Dance” does take its toll, he also indicates his arrival at the florid Augusta National gives him a second wind. He’s been at this routine since 1986, when as a 26-year-old neophyte, he first hosted CBS’ coverage of the Final Four in Dallas with his now-deceased father present. As he rehearsed on practice day that year, Nantz noticed out of the corner of his eye his father, a few feet away, looking on in wonderment as his son readied to host a widely viewed national sports broadcast.
It’s an experience he says he’ll never forget. One that holds a tinge of regret, since the elder Nantz had to head back home that night because Jim didn’t know he could secure tickets for family.
“My director says, ‘You’re the host of the Final Four. Of course you could have gotten a ticket from somebody at CBS. It’s your father,’ ” Nantz recalls.  “And I always regretted from that very minute that my dad didn’t get to come back the next day and watch the whole thing in person …  the broadcast come to life.
But the reality is, I just didn’t know, and I didn’t ask.
And it’s a sign of the naivete of a 26-year-old, who was learning the ropes and was over-whelmed by the bigness of the event, not knowing enough to ask for a ticket for my father to the Final Four.”
“Overwhelmed” is not a word Fredette uses to describe his first appearance at the tournament. Ever the cool-headed competitor, at this writing he was the NCAA’s leading scorer as well as BYU’s co-captain and go-to guy.
He got to this point in his career in part because he loves to prove his critics wrong, such as when they say he doesn’t possess the athleticism to be a top-flight point guard.  “I’ve been hearing that my whole entire life, and I just don’t worry about it and kind of use it,” he says.  “I’ll just try to do the best I can and show them that I can do that, and I’ve been successful at that so far, and I’ll have confidence in myself that I can do it again.”
And if that confidence can drive BYU to a Final Four appearance or even a national title, Fredette will take it the way he always does, in stride. “It’s what you want to do,” he says, “You dream about that growing up as a kid, and it’s exactly the position you want to be in, and now that you’re there, you can’t really let it get to you. Just know that it’s a fun thing and it’s where you want to be as a basketball player in school, and just try to go out and play the best that you possibly can.”
Jimmer Fredette stars for Brigham Young University as the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament airs beginning Tuesday on truTV, CBS, TNT and TBS.

ENDGAME

You could say Shawn Doyle is the king of “Endgame” – the most valuable piece on the board but one that can’t move. Set and shot in Vancouver, the crime series, debuting Monday, March 14 on Showcase, has a kind of oddball premise. Doyle plays Arkady Balagan, a Russian chess grandmaster, who is more or less stranded in a hotel suite in Vancouver and has taken to solving crimes to cover his expenses. When Balagan was visiting the city, he witnessed the brutal murder of his Canadian fiancée. Now, stricken with agoraphobia, he has turned his chess master’s genius to unlocking mysteries – with his imagination.
“He’s so traumatized by what happened to his fiancée, and he feels such pain, that he spends all his energy and time trying to find distractions from that pain,” Doyle says. “This is why he takes on these crimes. As much as he needs to pay down his hotel bill, he desperately seeks entertainment and distraction from the pain that keeps him trapped.”
Since Arkady can’t go out, he has to use his imagination to re-create crimes, crime scenes and clue trails in his mind – which more or less allows him to go anywhere and in any way. “I get out of the hotel in my imagination,” Doyle says. “I can go to a mountaintop. I can get out to a street. I can go to a farm. I can go anywhere. “So I use my strategic chess mind to solve these problems, and that really opens up the show.”
One of the central plot devices is what series creator and showrunner Avrum Jacobson (“ReGenesis,” “The Listener”) calls “brain moments,”
and the show’s writers have been dreaming up ingenious ways for the audience to watch Arkady live in his head – from computer animation to re-enactments that can be as surreal or as wacky as they want to be.
“We do variations,” Jacobson says. “He imagines ‘what happens if this,’ and he sees it. And he goes, ‘Nah.’ And then he goes, ‘What happens if this?’ Just the same way you do with chess: If I make this move, what happens?”
There are strong parallels between the world of “Endgame” and the Sherlock Holmes stories – complete with loyal sidekick, motherly landlady, hostile police inspector, and a group of informers and accomplices. “Because he can’t leave the hotel, he has to rely on other people to do his legwork,” Jacobson says.
Torrance Coombs (Thomas Culpeppper on “The Tudors”) plays Arkady’s Watson, Canadian chess fan Sam Besht. Carmen Aguirre plays a Guatemalan chambermaid in whom Balagan confides, and Patrick Gallagher portrays the hotel detective, who would dearly love to toss the grandmaster out on his butt.
With Arkady’s cases ranging from murder to a stolen polar bear, Jacobson describes the show as light and entertaining, though occasionally dark. “Arkady is extremely arrogant. He’s extremely ironic, and he’s fun. But he’s a fun character with a very dark side to him.
This is how it’s written, and Shawn Doyle just lifts it off the page.
As a writer, one often writes a script, then sees it done and is disappointed. With this, I imagine the script, and Shawn Doyle makes it better.”
Doyle says one of attractions of doing the role was the chance to play around with the strange charisma of chess superstars such as Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer. “They’re people who think in a different way than we do. They have huge egos. … And have also spent years and years and years of life stuck in a room looking at these little pieces of wood on a board. So there has to be some eccentricity, even in the most well-balanced of people in that position, and I think it’s that eccentricity that draws us in.”
“Endgame” has some real-life chess masters acting as advisers, and Doyle says he’s been able to study some of these eccentricities up close. “Let’s say they have their moments,” he says slowly with a chuckle. “Let’s just leave it at that. They’ve been great, and they’ve been very, very helpful to us.”
Doyle compares the role of Arkady to that of Sir John A. Macdonald – whom he will be playing in an upcoming CBC miniseries. “This is probably the most exciting role I’ve ever played – this and Sir John A., for identical reasons,” he says. “The potential for the character is limitless in terms of what he can do from moment to moment.
(Arkady) is spontaneous and compulsive, and he is cranky, but that’s because he’s just impatient with the speed at which most people operate. He’s always the smartest guy in the room.”
As for how an agoraphobic Russian chess champion relates to our gin-swilling first prime minister and railroad builder, he says great achievements make for great ego – which is great fun to play. “They both spend a great amount of time trying to knock people off their centre, trying to surprise people, trying to do an end run, trying to bamboozle them, charm them, infuriate them, crush them. It allows me to go as wild and crazy and as big as I want – or as small as I want.”
When asked of Doyle why Vancouver was chosen as the venue, the answer was simple: “This is where the production company (Thunderbird
Productions) is located, “So that’s why we’re here!” Needless to say, Vancouver couldn’t be happier!

EVERYBODY WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER

Yeah, good luck with that! If there’s one business constant of the past 50-odd years, it’s that no one ever went broke appealing to the vanity of the baby boom generation. And now that the boomers are not-so-gracefully limping into their dotage, one of the biggest business growth areas is bound to be things that fight aging. Or as Bob McDonald would put it, one of the oldest scams is back in fashion: snake oil.
McDonald, CBC’s science reporter and host of the radio show “Quirks & Quarks,” is the tour guide for “Magical Mystery Cures,” airing Thursday, March 10, on CBC Television.  The hour long “Doc Zone” presentation is a lighthearted look at the range of cures for the common condition that are proliferating as boomers try to hang onto their youth.
Walking through an anti-aging exposition in – where else? – Las Vegas, he finds barkers shilling everything from a foot bath that supposedly draws poisons out through sweat glands to water that has somehow been re-engineered to cure cancer.
McDonald, a baby boomer himself, takes a sampling of the cures and contraptions and bounces their principles off scientists who, one by one, debunk them. Water whose molecules have been rearranged to make it easier for them to penetrate our cells?  All water is absorbed by our cells; that’s what keeps us alive.
The brown goo that floats into the water in the foot bath? That’s rust from the steel plates that transmit the electricity that “ionizes” the water. In the end, McDonald uncovers only one surefire way to fight aging: exercise and a proper diet. And he gives us that formula for free.

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