FOR A SWINGIN’ RIDE, CATCH THE CAB

Without Cab Calloway, it is hard to imagine there would have been a  Michael Jackson or a Prince or hip-hop moves. If that sounds like hyperbole, tune in to PBS’ “Cab Calloway: Sketches,” an “American
Masters” presentation airing Friday, March 2 on KCTS. Calloway, for those who have not had the pleasure, was the ultimate entertainer. He was an orchestra leader, singer, dancer and actor with unparalleled flair. Calloway had that elusive X-factor; it was impossible to not watch him when he was onstage. Maybe it was the million-watt smile, for when he smiled this huge, wraparound-the-face smile, you had to smile back. It could have been that he had a sound like no other: a melding of jazz with the plaintive wailings found in Jewish liturgical music. Watching him perform is to watch someone filled with joy, and he can’t help but spread it. For those who need documentaries that explain when and where people were born and what experiences forged them into whom they became, this will not satisfy. This is, as the title references, a sketch. “I have made a number of ‘American Masters,’ and I tend to feel the life is the essence of the guy — not to say the dates and when they were born is not important. I talked about Baltimore and Blanche,” filmmaker Gail Levin says, referring to Calloway’s hometown and his older sister who preceded him in show business. One of the devices in the documentary is to watch an artist sketch, then paint Calloway, and ultimately that fi gure becomes animated. “I wanted him to feel present again,” Levin says. “I didn’t
want it to be about an old, dead guy. I wanted to try and make him feel present, which is the whole reason for the animation. I wanted him to dance again. It was a conscious decision not to make the traditional biographical benchmarks, the places to stop.  It is more the spirit and the essence of him, and the glamour of him and the irrepressibility of him as the focus.”
Calloway was an irrepressible force. He continued performing until his death at 86 in 1994. Seeing him in person was the sort of treat people revel in years later. He must have performed some songs 10,000 times, yet when he sang one of his huge hits, such as “The Reefer Man,” it was still funny and fresh — even when he was in his 80s. Watching Calloway as a young man, in his tails and floppy hair, and as an old
man, in his tails and fl oppy hair, as he performed in Europe, became a star in the Cotton Club and then on Broadway, notably in “Porgy and Bess,” is to see pure genius. The film includes Max Fleischer’s famous
1930’s cartoons, which completely captured Calloway’s essence, and other animation. “I wanted to surprise you in the end,” Levin says. “I wanted him to dance again. I wanted him to be alive again and be a
subject and be helpful and present. I like a nimation as a concept. I like it when it is not a gimmick in the story. Here is a caricaturist and artist drawing the guy. The other thing is, and I find it to be amazing about Cab, who do you know that is a cartoon character in his lifetime at the same time being rendered, and children are getting the same songs, singing drug songs?”
Calloway’s signature song,  “Minnie the Moocher,” had audiences singing its chorus, “Hi de hi de hi de ho,” for decades. Millions have seen him perform that in the 1980 film “The Blues Brothers.”
Interviews in the documentary include some of the film’s musicians, Steve Cropper, Lou Marini and Donald “Duck” Dunne. Calloway impressed all of them. Matthew Rushing, a choreographer and principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance  Theater, talks about how the freedom of Calloway’s hip-swaying, looselimbed jive moves led to how people dance today. Interspersed are interviews with Calloway including reminiscences about Harlem in the 1920s. “For us, Harlem was the capital of the world and we loved it,” he says. A fun graphic in the film shows Harlem hot spots from the 1920s, including the Savoy
Ballroom, “where I bombed with my first band,” he says in the voice-over. Calloway’s children recall their dad. “He was really very tall, very imposing, just a beautiful, beautiful creature,” his oldest daughter, Camay, says. “And he had this odor about him. It was sort of like something you only smelled when you go backstage — all these mixtures of perfume, cigarettes, the makeup. All of those kind of things were an aura.” There was an elegance and a dignity to Calloway but also a hipness that no one else came close to — possibly ever. Calloway moved with the ease of someone for whom the spotlight was his natural habitat. “I always feel, a little bit, certain people will come to the film because they do know him,” Levin says. “And the ones who come who don’t know him, I like to give them something rounder than straight biography. They will watch this doc and know they’ve met a real American hero.” w

WIZ OFF BROADWAY

It may not be the Great White Way, but for a troupe of amateur performers, the Yellow Brick Road is close enough. With “Way Off Broadway,” debuting Friday, March 2, on Bravo! Canada, viewers will  get a glimpse of 21 ordinary Canadians living through their own real-life version of “Smash.” The show follows director-choreographer Sarina Condello and her amateur troupe as they stage the classic “The Wizard of Oz.” “We worked day and night to pull this off,” she says.
Condello took a group of ordinary Canadians that included a retired grandmother, a dentist, a yoga instructor, a psychiatrist, some students, a few teachers and a greenhouse manager who immigrated from
Ghana. In eight weeks, they rehearsed and staged “The Wizard of Oz” for an audience of 1,100 at Toronto’s historic Danforth Music Hall. The show is the latest in a string of six amateur musical theater productions that Condello began staging four years ago with a cabaret show of songs from Broadway musicals.
“We got a community of 30 adults between the ages of 30 and 60 and put on a musical,” she says. “I didn’t think it was going to work, but tickets sold out in 48 hours. Like 1,100 tickets. “Everyone was flabbergasted. Then we did it again, and again, and again.”
For the TV show, she says, the process was “shortened and intensified” for dramatic effect. “To do it in eight weeks! I’ve never done that before. This was a massive challenge for me and for my musical
director, Sheila Philcox.” Condello grew up in Winnipeg, where she got her start in theater and dance, became an educator, and studied mime with her uncle, Giuseppe Condello. Condello’s mother, a visual artist and costume designer, put her in dance classes when she was still a toddler. And her father is former professional wrestler and promoter “Torpedo” Tony Condello — who is best known for his “Death Tour,”
which brings independent Canadian wrestlers to Inuit and First Nations communities in northern Manitoba every year. He appears in “Way Off Broadway” as one of the masters Condello brings in to “inspire the troops.” He coordinates the battle between the Wicked Witch’s army of Winkies and Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. “It was a great opportunity to work with my father,” Condello says. “It was always a dream to do something creative with him. And I thought it would add an edgy aspect to the show. I wanted to create a version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ that was absolutely different from any other.  ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is so predictable, and I wanted to add a note of spontaneity and big surprise for the audience. That’s why I brought my dad in to choreograph the fight scene. It’s actually pretty hilarious.”
Other experts who appear on the show to work with the cast include actress Sheila McCarthy (“Little Mosque on the Prairie”), singer-songwriter Amy Sky and vocal coach Elaine Overholt. Condello
says directing such amateur shows as “The Wizard of Oz” is “a very small part of my life, a sliver of what I do.” With four degrees, including a Ph.D. in education from the University of Toronto, Condello has taught at venues ranging from York University to arts camps on First Nations reserves. She is founder and director of Big Little Caravan of Joy, a charitable organization that brings arts education to orphans in Africa. The proceeds from “The Wizard of Oz” went to help fund the organization. “I was in university for 13 years,” she says. “I focused on a scholarly approach, trying to understand the importance and relevance of art in our lives — especially in children’s lives.”
Condello has worked as a choreographer and movement coach on such TV series as “Battle of the Blades, “Popstars” and “Big Voice.” She has also made a couple of documentaries about dance, one of which, “Thank You Tanzania,” is about an arts camp Condello and her three daughters ran in Africa in 2007. She says she got the idea for “Way Off Broadway” one day when she was waiting on a Toronto street corner for
the light to change. She got to thinking about the amateur shows and the work they were helping to fund, and she realized that the stage in Toronto and the camps in Africa were doing the same work: using art to
open people up. “The process and the unleashing of creative spirit is so fascinating,” she says. “Especially for Canadian adults. To watch a 50-year-old man, who is married and has kids, standing in the middle
of stage, dancing his heart out — and at the end of that dance, he cries tears of joy. “It’s just incredible.” w

CANADA’S GOT TALENT

Attention, please: In this first season of “Canada’s Got Talent,” the role of Simon Cowell will not be played by Martin Short. Or anyone else, for that matter. Short says a lot of people are asking which “roles” he and the other two judges, Measha Brueggergosman and Stephan Moccio, will be playing in the new Canadian version of the hit international talent show, which premieres Sunday, March 4, on Citytv. “The main difference would be that the judges are all individuals,” Short says. “The question I am asked a lot is, ‘Oh,
which one is going to be the Simon Cowell?’ but I don’t think any of us have fallen into any of that. I certainly didn’t want to. I thought, ‘Gee, I’d really rather be Martin Short.’    On the new series, host Dina Pugliese  welcomes some of our most noteworthy acts, who take center stage before the judges and a live audience to prove they are the top performer. The winner takes home a substantial grand prize package, including a new car.  Many viewers already are familiar with the basic format of the series from “Britain’s Got Talent” and “America’s Got Talent.” In each Monday’s results show, two semifinalists — one selected by viewers and one by the judges — will advance to further competition. Additionally, the highest vote getter of the top 20 acts from what the show is calling the “YouTube Last Chance Auditions” will be revealed in the first live results show on April 3.    The first few weeks viewers will see highlights from the
extensive auditions the three judges attended in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Winnipeg and Montreal, and Short is confident viewers will be impressed by the talent on display, such as the airport employee who blew away the crowd with a rendition of the Puccini aria “Nessun Dorma,” the same tune
that helped propel English tenor Paul Potts to global stardom a few years ago on “Britain’s Got Talent.” “We had one guy do a Shakespearean soliloquy. At first people were skeptical, but he really blew the house away,” Short says. “We had a 7-year-old fiddler in Calgary that blew everyone away. You’re always amazed at the level of beat-boxers and dance groups and really original, interesting people.”
  But then, after years in show business, Short has grown used to people in other countries asking him what’s going on in Canada that, with its small population, produces such diversity in  talent, Short
says. “My first response would be, ‘Oh, no, artistry has no nationalism.’ But then I started seeing more people like Mike Myers and Kids in the Hall, and you kind of go, ‘Hmm, maybe it is.’” w

GOOD CHRISTIAN BITCHES…

They say you can’t go home again — and that’s partly because you’re just going to keep running into the people who never left in the first place. That’s the comic premise behind “GCB,” the hilarious new sitcom premiering Sunday, March 4, on ctv. Created and written by Robert
Harling, a Southerner who drew from his family’s life for “Steel Magnolias,” the show opens as widowed Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb) is forced by scandal to move with her teen kids from Southern California back to a conservative and affluent Dallas suburb, where they’ll share the posh home of her controlling mom, Gigi (Annie Potts, “Designing Women”).    If Amanda thought her biggest issue would be mom, she’s in for a rude awakening when her homecoming ruffles the feathers of neighbor Carlene Cockburn (Emmy winner Kristin Chenoweth), whom Amanda tortured during their high-school years.    Since then, Carlene has
shed a ton of weight, become besties with her cosmetic surgeon and
reinvented herself as the community’s queen bee — or perhaps that
should be “Queen B.”
  Which brings us to the show’s title. Harling adapted the series
from “Good Christian Bitches,” a comic novel by Dallas native Kim
Gatlin. Bibb says she loved that provocative first working title — “I
told my manager, ‘Send it over, stat!’ ” the actress recalls, laughing
— but Chenoweth, a self-avowed Christian herself, was pretty sure it
never would see the light of day. “I laughed, but I thought, ‘Yeah,
that’s not gonna happen,’ ” she says. “And the show just doesn’t
represent that to me. It’s so much more than that title.”
  Predictably, that original title ignited a firestorm among people
of faith, an obvious problem on a network owned by the family-friendly
Walt Disney Corporation. After a brief flirtation with the softer but
irrelevant “Good Christian Belles,” Harling ultimately decided to go
with the three-letter production logo for the show. “I just got
attached to that notion of certain letters informing who we are, in
this day of ‘LOL’ and ‘ROFL’ and ‘BTW,’ ” he explains. “It seemed kind
of cool and hip. And I think the original title is a mislead because
of what it ultimately is. Like in ‘Steel Magnolias,’ you’re dealing
with very vibrant, acerbic, witty women, and I could easily understand
why there would be a reluctance to use that word in television. As
long as I have breath and am writing it, these women never are going
to be reflected as simply bitchy or evil, or their Christianity be
used in some derogatory or demeaning way. It’s more a celebration of a
bunch of women bound together in a faith-based society.” w

ROSSIF SUTHERLAND…

“You’re getting my morning brain,” Rossif Sutherland says in the  halting cadences of someone searching for words. Sutherland has joined the cast of the crime drama series “King” — in its second season Wednesdays on Showcase — as Detective Pen Martin, a hippie-raised, laid-back, Zen investigator who is fascinated with human nature. So he’s been working long days and sleeping short nights, which he
describes as something of a shock to his system.    ‘King’ is very different from anything I’ve done,” he says. “It’s a six-month stretch, with the character being written as we go. That’s a completely different from what I’m used to.” Aside from a recurring role on “ER” in 2003-04, Sutherland’s work has been confined to films and guest roles in TV series — which he describes as stepping in and out of a character that has been “created from beginning to end.” His film credits include “The Con Artist” with his father, Donald; Clement Virgo’s boxing film “Poor Boy’s Game” opposite Danny Glover; and “High Life,” which earned him a Genie nomination in 2009.    With “King,” Sutherland is cast opposite Amy Price-Francis, who established herself in the title role in Season 1 as a sort of ultrachic Columbo, a blend of allure and menace that can be fascinating to watch. “Amy is fantastic to work with,” Sutherland says. “She works every day, nonstop, six months straight.”
  In the series, which also stars Alan Van Sprang. Gabriel Hogan and Karen Robinson, Sutherland is playing a cool counterbalance to King’s heat — which is good, Sutherland says, because he’s the type of actor who tends to stay in character when he’s working. “This guy’s easy to live with. He’s a lovely guy, so it’s easy to take him home with me. “He’s a smart man who became a police officer because he has a fascination with people. Otherwise, he would have become a shrink; he certainly has the brains. And he lives with his mother.”
  The son of Donald Sutherland and his third wife, Quebecoise actress Francine Racette, Sutherland, 33, is part of a Canadian acting dynasty. His older half brother is Kiefer Sutherland, whose mother, Sutherland’s second wife, is the revered stage actress Shirley Douglas. And as if that weren’t enough, younger brother Angus is getting his feet wet with TV guest spots and short films.   Sutherland was born in Vancouver and lived in California and New York before the family settled in Paris. “My mother figured since my father was working all the time, he had to take a plane to find us wherever we were,” he says. “So let’s make him take a plane to Paris.”
  The legend goes that his mother flew north because she wanted her son to be born in Canada. “The real story is even more beautiful,” Sutherland says. “My father was working on a job in Vancouver, and he
was expecting to be released so he could attend the birth, but they were running over, and he couldn’t leave.It’s against the law to fly when you’re that pregnant. But my mother’s skinny, and she put on a
big coat, and they didn’t discover she was pregnant until they were in the air. So I was born in Vancouver. I’m the only one of my brothers born in Canada.”    Though he set out to be a singersongwriter, and he
still works on his music, Sutherland literally fell into acting while he was studying philosophy at Princeton University. He was directing a short film, and when the lead actor dropped out, he had to take over the role himself. When his father saw the film, he suggested Rossif try his hand at acting. “It’s thanks to my father that I eventually became an actor.” w

OSCAR ODD COUPLE RETURN FOR THE 84TH

No introduction is necessary: Billy Crystal and Oscar already know each other quite well.
The actor-filmmaker-comedian has hosted the Academy Awards eight times, and he’s now on deck for his ninth. He’ll preside over the movie industry’s 84th annual ceremony Sunday, Feb. 26, on CTV … and given this year’s nominees, don’t be surprised if he goes silent like an “Artist,” shows some iron in the guise of a former prime minister or sports a dragon tattoo.
Crystal agreed to return after originally scheduled host Eddie Murphy exited, following the departure of initially set producer Brett Ratner (replaced by Brian Grazer, who now is producing the event with award-show veteran Don Mischer). In other ways as well, Crystal felt the timing was right for him to take the job again, as he explained to this writer.
Q: Have you kept up with this year’s nominated movies?
A: I’ve seen pretty much everything. There were certain performances I hadn’t seen that I went back and looked at to see if a joke might be made, because whoever that person is will now be in the audience. We’d been developing things, but when the nominations came out, that’s when we really started grinding for four or five weeks.
Q: You’ve acknowledged that a lot of expectation comes with your return to host the Oscars. Are you managing that well?
A: Well, I don’t know how well I manage anything! Anxiety can be a very healthy thing, too. In the past, I’ve always tried to top myself in what we’ve done on the show, and we’re going to try to do that again. People seem happy that I’m coming back, and I’m happy that I’m coming back, so I want to give them the best show I can. With that comes pressure to make it as good as you can.
Q: When people anticipate you’ll insert yourself into clips from the past year’s movies and do your musical satire “It’s a Wonderful Night for Oscar,” how do you work with or against that to stay surprising?
A: What I like to do and what the audience wants me to do can be two different things. In my mind, I’m not going to do certain things they want … then you start thinking about it and go, “Well, maybe I should.” I’m just looking to have a good time and hopefully, the audience will, too.
Q: After things fell apart with the original hosting plans for this year, it seemed you got on board pretty quickly.
A: Yeah, it took one day. I was in Atlanta finishing up a movie that’s coming out in November — “Parental Guidance,” with Bette Midler and Marisa Tomei, something I’d really been struggling to get made for the last five years — and that’s where I’d spent most of my energy, besides my Broadway show and touring.
We were 2 1/2 weeks from finishing that when (the Oscar plans) started to unravel, and I had a feeling they were going to come to me. Then Brian called and said, “I want you,” and I said, “Let me think about it.” And when I hung up, I actually was angry. I was like, “I’m finishing up a passion project that’s been going great. I don’t want to be thinking about this now.”
Q: What changed your mind?
A: I woke up at 3 in the morning in the hotel, and I had an idea that I thought was funny, and I wrote it down. And it made me laugh, and I couldn’t sleep. Then I had another idea and another, and I said to myself, “OK, try to fall asleep again. If you wake up with a smile, then you’ll do it.”
When I woke up, I called my wife, Janice. In 41 years of marriage, we’ve made every decision together, right from the beginning. I said, “What do you think?” She said, “Are you smiling?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Then do it.” And I called Brian, and I said, “OK.”
Q: Your relatively brief appearance at last year’s Academy Awards got a huge response. How far did that go toward your decision about this year?
A: That was a big part of it. That moment took my breath away, and I’m somebody who’s not usually at a loss for words. It was very warm and loving, and it got me a little itchy. This will be my ninth time, second only to Bob Hope in the number of times someone has hosted the Oscars, and being welcomed back in that way made me think about doing it again.
Q: Do you reflect much about often being mentioned with Bob Hope and Johnny Carson as the best Oscar hosts?
A: In those quiet moments, you say to yourself, “Wow. Look at these guys I’m with.” I grew up watching them, especially Bob; when I first became aware of the Academy Awards, it was his show, and I always thought he was so great. Johnny was great, too, and when you see your name with theirs, it’s incredibly satisfying and humbling.
The best moment I’ve ever had with the Oscars actually happened the morning after one of the shows, when Johnny called me. He couldn’t have been more kind and congratulatory. He just said so many beautiful things to me, I hung up and said to myself, “I don’t ever have to do this again.”
Q: Since you are doing it again, what are your hopes for the unexpected to happen, as with the night your “City Slickers” co-star Jack Palance won best supporting actor and started doing push-ups onstage?
A: You hope something like that happens … and also that you’re out there for it. Last year, they had me backstage in a freezing little storage room so no one knew I’d be coming out, and I was watching the show on a monitor. I saw Kirk Douglas come out and play around, then Melissa Leo dropped the F-bomb. Those are the moments when you go, “I want to be there!” w

‘FAMILY COOK OFF’ SIZZLES IN LEG-IN-BOOT SQUARE

The knives are out, the skillets are sizzling, and the kitchen is heating up as intergenerational families vie to join the ranks of Canada’s best home cooks. Which family has the cooking savvy, creativity and teamwork to win Canada’s ultimate food fight? The fun, twelve-episode, half-hour series ‘Family Cook Off’ (shot in False Creek South’s Leg-In-Boot Square and produced by our very own Force Four Entertainment Inc.) premieres at 9pm on Thursday, March 1 on Food Net, with two episodes airing back-to-back each week.
  Each team is represented by four of the family’s most enthusiastic and skilled cooks, any combination of siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents, young kids or in-laws. All participants – from the oldest competitor at age 67 to exuberant nine-year-old twins – are eager to whip up their favourite dishes, and come together as a family in hopes of winning the coveted Golden Frying Pan and $1,000 worth of groceries.
  Hosted by Entertainment Tonight Canada’s Kim D’Eon, each episode of Family Cook Off features two Canadian families going head-to-head in an over-the-top, outdoor home cooking extravaganza. Their challenge is to prepare their favourite family fare in two rounds: Main Entreés and Desserts. The teams are given a mandatory ingredient they must incorporate into their recipes to create tasty dishes and impress the judges. With only 20 minutes per round to prep, cook and plate a complete dish and accompaniments, they must be organized and work fast to avoid chaos.
  Celebrity chefs and cookbook authors Anthony Sedlak (The Main) and Trish Magwood (Party Dish) bring years of culinary experience to their roles as judges. They evaluate each family’s creations, awarding points for taste, presentation and style.  A total of 24 families demonstrate their talents in Family Cook Off, from the lively Boyes family who already has their own annual family cook-off, to the enormous Silver family whose family meals often comprise of up to 200 people.

PLANES ON DISCOVERY

When you’ve got a monster international hit like the Canadian-grown documentary series “Mighty Ships,” you don’t argue with that success.
You look for ways to replicate it. That’s one of the reasons Discovery Canada is taking to the
skies with a six-episode thrill ride called “Mighty Planes,” premiering Sunday, Feb. 26. Once again, the same team that delivered smooth sailing with “Ships” has unsnarled miles of bureaucratic and corporate red tape to secure unprecedented access to some of today’s most amazing aircraft, starting with backto-back episodes devoted to a flying hospital and the world’s largest seaplane, which now is devoted to fighting fires. And access is indeed the key to it all, explains executive producer
Kathryn Oughtred.
“I knew, having launched the ‘Ships’ show, that this (new series) was going to be a tricky one,
because aviation generally is just a lot harder to tackle technically,” she explains. “Storywise, being on a plane as opposed to a large ship
that could present many storylines was something else we had to think about. But just getting the access to large companies like Lufthansa and the Airbus and the U.S. military, big huge entities with which we had to establish trust quickly so we could move along and hopefully get in and get the show we were hoping to get, was a big challenge.”
One obvious hurdle was that security in commercial airports has become exponentially tougher in the years since 9/11, much more
so than issues the team faced with ports while filming “Mighty Ships.” “It was like nailing jelly to a wall for the first few months, but our associate producers/researchers are fantastic and, I think, can talk themselves into just about anything now, so we were able to get access to
some of the most amazing planes doing most amazing jobs. Some of them, like Orbis, were cautious as anyone would be at the start, but
they realized that what was good for us was also good for them in terms of showcasing the good works they do in the world.”
Orbis, the world’s only flying “eye hospital,” is in the spotlight for the series opener, which follows the plane’s team of pilots, technicians
and doctors as they prepare to fly from Dubai to Mongolia to provide urgent ocular medical care to Third World patients. Bearing state-ofthe-
art medical equipment and internationally respected staff, Orbis travels to a designated airfield, where patients struggling with near blindness receive sight-restoring surgeries as local physicians watch via an onboard screening system that trains them in follow-up procedures so they can treat the patients after Orbis departs. The program gets unexpected drama for the episode because, due to unexpected circumstances, the aircraft had been sitting on a tarmac in Dubai for 90 days before departing
for Mongolia, and the desert weather conditions had taken their toll on the engine, resulting in some white-knuckle technical issues during
the flight. “It was completely a fluke, the
engine trouble,” Oughtred says. “Everything that happened really happened. We don’t manufacture anything just for the sake of drama. That isn’t normal for them, though. Normally, they can get a mission off without a lot of issues .” w

SUZUKI SEES TRAGEDY & HOPE

 A year ago, the Tohoku region of Japan was shaken by three catastrophic events: two natural and one man-made. More than 13,000 people died in the first two short disasters. There was the magnitude 9 offshore earthquake, which shook more than half the country. Then there were the resulting tsunamis, which rolled onto the eastern shore of Honshu, rising as high as 40 meters. Near Sendai, the hardest-hit city, they traveled inland as far as 10 kilometers.
As for the third disaster, the meltdown of the Fukushima reactors, as David Suzuki found out, the extent is still mostly unknown.
In “Journey to the Disaster Zone: Japan 3-11,” airing Thursday, Feb. 23, on CBC Television’s “The Nature of Things,” Suzuki drops the protective camouflage of series host and takes on the role of reporter. He returns to the land of his forebears to see whether things are beginning to return to normal and to find out exactly what normal is these days in the badly shaken country.
“It’s astonishing,” Suzuki says. “Every area we went to that was demolished by the waves was still absolutely flat.
“There wasn’t any sign in any of the villages we went to, of rebuilding.”
Everywhere, he says, there are giant piles of debris being sorted and carried off or burned — and dozens and dozens of temporary shelters. The shelters and the destruction may conjure up visions of Hurricane Katrina taken to a higher level, but that’s where the resemblance ends, Suzuki says.
Japan is not a society in which people take things into their own hands, but neither is it one that easily falls into disorder.
“This is the thing that is going to be the thrust of the film,” Suzuki says. “The great strength of that society is this tremendous sense of social cohesion that results from conformity and fitting in.”
Suzuki and his crew went to Japan in December and spent 2 1/2 weeks touring the country — a week looking at ground zero and the rest of the time exploring the Japanese response to the three disasters.
“We were looking at both the impact of the earthquake and tsunami around Sendai,” Suzuki says. “But we also went to areas like Tokyo, where we interviewed several scientists. And we went to areas on the other coast, where there are people working on things like tidal power and so on.”
It’s not surprising that the disaster that preoccupies people the most is the nuclear meltdown — because it’s still going on, and no one really knows its impact yet.
“What was interesting is that we visited a number of people who are under the radar,” Suzuki says. “They’re looking at other ways of living.”
One of the things he says he found is a growing interest in decentralizing the power grid so that it isn’t so dependent on big industry. Another is an almost limitless source of power literally lying at the feet of the Japanese people, but which they have barely begun to exploit.
“We visited a community in which they showed us that barely 150 meters down, they tap into steam, or superheated water, that just comes gushing out,” Suzuki says. “The community is completely heated by this, and they use it to run turbines — which is what nuclear power is all about. You generate electricity by producing steam.”
As Suzuki says, it seems strange that the Japanese would opt for nuclear power when they’re sitting on one of the most seismically active areas in the world, the Pacific Ring of Fire. On the one hand, the instability of the area makes nuclear power a disaster waiting to happen. On the other, there is enormous free power lying just a few hundred feet below the surface of the Earth, in the form of hot springs.
“This is a country that is so seismically active, for whom hot springs — onsen — are almost sacred,”
Suzuki says. “They’ve got lots of hot water there. Why would they opt for such complex, dangerous technology?”
If anything good comes out of the earthquake, Suzuki says, it may be another of the sudden social transformations for which the Japanese are so famous.
The country went from feudal isolation to world power in a little more than a generation. And it emerged overnight from postwar devastation to become one of the most technologically and economically advanced countries in the world.
Similarly, Suzuki says, Japan could come out of this disaster as a world leader in solar, wind and geothermal technology. The Japanese already export some of the world’s most advanced geothermal technology; they just haven’t put it to work at home yet. Suzuki says, “For me, this film is about a crisis that is a tragedy but also an opportunity.” w

DEGRASSI BACK WITH CLASS OF 2012

Don’t try to reconcile it with the calendar on your own wall, but a new school year is starting as “Degrassi” continues its 11th season starting with a special one-hour episode Friday, Feb. 24, on Much-Music. As at any high school, that means some fresh faces in the hallways and a realignment of the pecking order, as new students in grade nine enter, and last year’s juniors move up. “Thematically, overall we look at ‘season 11-B’ as being one of new beginnings,” says executive producer Linda Schuyler, the former high-school teacher who co-created “Degrassi” more than three decades ago when she thought there wasn’t enough programming that really connected with adolescents.
“We just graduated a whole class, so now Eli and Drew and Bianca [Munro Chambers, Luke Bilyk, Alicia Josipovic] are all the top dogs, and they have to be thinking about where they are going to be going next to university. We also introduce a whole new class at the ninth-grade level.”
To their credit, the “Degrassi” writers and producers strive to let the characters drive the stories instead of clubbing viewers over the head with an “issue of the week” agenda.
One dramatic case in point involves actress Jordan Todosey, who joined the series last season in a groundbreaking role as Adam Torres, who is Dave Turner’s (Jahmil French) co-host on the school radio show — and a female-to-male transgender teen.
An episode focusing on Adam, titled “My Body Is a Cage,” won “Degrassi” its first Peabody Award, the oldest electronic-media award in the world, which is presented to recognize excellence, distinguished achievement and meritorious public service. Todosey admits she was a little nervous when she took on a role that she knew could be a flashpoint for controversy, although the feedback she has received personally has been overwhelmingly positive, she adds.
“Just joining such a well-known TV series was intimidating, and every character on the show speaks to somebody out there,” the actress says. “I wanted to portray the character to the best of my abilities, and Adam is such an awesome guy that I just wanted to do him justice.” w

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