Mark, the writer

Ten years ago, at a friend's wedding reception, three hundred guests, most of them in publishing, media, law or business, gathered in a Toronto garden. The bride came from a theatre family, so there were several actors as well. Then a murmur rippled through the garden, and guests excitedly rushed to one corner.

"What's going on?" I asked the man next to me.

"Clarabelle!" he said. He said it in the same tone one might say "Jane Fonda!"--and dashed off to join the crowd. And so did I.

It was Alfie Scopp, the actor who had played Clarabelle the clown in The Canadian Howdy Doody Show in the 1950s. And for the next hour, all these reporters, producers, lawyers and writers of my generation--myself included--fell over one another to get a glimpse of him and shake his hand.

It was a reminder of an early, innocent sense of Canadian community on television.

Our family came to Canada in 1953, the year after CBC television started. One chose one's friends carefully. At least a couple of them had to have TVs, or one wouldn't get invited to watch Howdy Doody or Uncle Chichimus or Hockey Night in Canada.

But after Clarabelle, and Percy Saltzman's chalk, infidelity set in. Most of us lived in apartments. But some friends--the well-off ones--lived in houses, although that's not how we saw the equation. They were "well off" because they had antennas and it just happened that their parents needed to own a house to hold one up. They could catch (and the voice would drop a bit here) "American stations."

Not that the CBC didn't carry American programs. It carried Roy Rogers, Wild Bill Hickock, Our Miss Brooks and Disneyland. But for the less wholesome diet, the slightly "wicked" stuff, like Highway Patrol and the other crime shows, you had to go to the source. American shows seemed more metropolitan, and funnier. They also had more people like us--Italians, Poles, Jews and, as in The Jackie Gleason Show, bus drivers and people in tenements.

I went though the CBC Times program listings from 1952 to 1959 for this article, and I feel a little ashamed about what I've just described. The drama special I skipped for Highway Patrol was Sunshine Sketches with John Drainie and Timothy Findley. The pianist I ignored was Glenn Gould. The Big Revue was directed by Norman Jewison. I was only eight, and rarely watched Fighting Words with Nathan Cohen.

Reading those program schedules stirs my admiration for the majesty of the enterprise, for the commitment to teleplays and anthology drama. And also a sense of anger, lost opportunity and paradox.

Anger because it's obvious from the schedules that we undernourished the dawn of the television age in English Canada. The best writers and performers had been assembled, but they weren't given the capacity to develop the volume and the production values to compete.

Lost opportunity because we let the popular culture slip to the United States. Canadian television kept us together in childhood: we all knew Clarabelle. But soon after that, when we needed adventure, family comedies, characters to follow and identify with--stories about growing up, about being twelve, about teenage crushes, about having loud immigrant uncles--we had so few that we turned to the American channels.

The paradox is the different impact the advent of television had in English Canada and in Quebec.

Whenever I'm asked to speak about television at a high school or university, one set portion of my "seminar" always reduces the room to complete silence. It's a sad little interlude, and it starts like this: "Think of all the Canadian channels, public or private or specialty, that you've watched. All the thousands of hours. Now name me one, just one French Canadian who appeared outside a newscast, a public affairs show, or a sporting event. A character in a drama perhaps? Or in a sitcom? Or in a series? Name one."

It gets them every time. Of course there are answers--Scoop or Emilie in recent years on CBC--but they're so scarce they obviously haven't left an impact. The look in the students' eyes seems to say, "I never even thought about that."

I could not have asked the same question about blacks in South Africa in the apartheid era. There were black characters on the South African Broadcasting Corporation. We have, unwittingly perhaps, developed an almost airtight cultural apartheid. In fact, there are more American Hispanics than French Canadians on English Canadian television stations.

One could probably reverse the situation and ask a Quebec audience when they last saw an English Canadian outside of a newscast, with broadly similar results.

Television, the great homogenizer that is supposed to wipe out national identity and regional distinction, did not have the same effect in French Canada as in English Canada. In Quebec, it's now generally apparent, television was an empowering force that gave French Canadians an enhanced sense of themselves, their own community. We might not be facing a referendum this year had television never arrived. In English Canada, though television created unifying experiences, it was also an instrument of the continental flood. The Canadian electronic brain was never wired so it could carry French cultural currents into English Canada, and English currents into Quebec. Except for The Plouffe Family and a bilingual show called Handyman, it was hard-wired in solitudes.

The English lost their sitcom and serial ground, for lack of resources and perhaps even will. The French eventually won their popular battle with home-grown sitcoms and téléromans. The question that nags is: could we have won both battles together?