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The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC

by Richard Stursberg

In 2004, when Richard Stursberg accepted the position as head of CBC’s English-language television services (he took over radio and online responsibilities in 2008), he inherited a once venerable cultural institution in the late stages of a long decline. Government funding had been cut for more than a decade, ratings for the network’s arts programming were hitting historic lows, and the stable of news offerings, once the pride of the Mother Corp, was losing massive audience shares to rivals CTV and Global. 

Stursberg, a long-time cultural bureaucrat who had recently served as executive director of Telefilm Canada, also found an insular corporate culture that measured success solely by its ability to adhere to and fulfill a vaguely worded mandate to produce uniquely Canadian content of high quality. Ratings be damned, the philosophy had it: the CBC was here to serve Canadian viewers and listeners, even if those audiences didn’t seem to care all that much.

This dire summation – no doubt accurate on many counts – is what Stursberg would have readers believe in The Tower of Babble, his tell-all memoir covering six controversial years at the CBC, culminating in his firing in 2010. If the book is anything to go by, Stursberg sees the world largely in terms of irreconcilable dichotomies, with himself inevitably on the winning, or at least best-intentioned, side.

He has a lot of points to make and scores to settle regarding his tenure at the CBC, where he instituted a series of radical and controversial changes, including redirecting substantial resources to the creation of prime-time sitcoms, reality shows, and crime dramas that could compete with their counterparts on private American and Canadian networks.

As Stursberg outlines in the opening chapters, the strategy was part of a self-imposed mandate to rescue the public broadcaster from its determination to “occupy the sunlit uplands of high culture, where programming choices were based on nothing but artistic and intellectual merit,” and start producing programs that “Canadians might actually want to watch” – i.e., popular entertainment (though with a distinct Canadian orientation and voice). To that end, he cut “high arts” television programs like Opening Night, dismembered the all-classical format at Radio 2, and axed the CBC’s radio orchestra, the last of its kind in North America.

Stursberg’s attempts to sell his new strategy to management, staff, and the CBC’s government-appointed board were met with scorn, protest, and acrimony on all sides. Media commentators were also divided. The pro-change camp, cheering on Stursberg’s efforts, were opposed by the defenders of the old CBC, whom Stursberg caricatures as popular-culture-hating elitists or “chatterati.”

In the book’s early stages, Stursberg tends to live down to the portrait his enemies paint of him as a faux populist, high-culture-hating Philistine – a picture that, as the book’s middle and later chapters demonstrate, is clearly not accurate. He genuinely cares about the CBC as an institution and champions the government’s role in helping to create and sustain a distinctly Canadian English-language culture comparable to the francophone culture in French Canada.

Where he falters is in overstating the dichotomy between the highbrow, “quality” programming supposedly championed by out-of-touch cultural elites and pure “entertainment” that appeals to the red-blooded Canadian masses. He cites the BBC as an example of a public broadcaster that consistently produces popular shows, but conveniently overlooks the intellectual sophistication of the best of those offerings (The Office, Little Britain, Sherlock, and North and South).

Unfortunately, Stursberg sets the bar for quality TV no higher than CSI, Law & Order, and Desperate Housewives, a series he describes as “beautifully realized, well written, well directed and well produced.” These shows are certainly well made, but are audiences best served by having the CBC imitate them? Stursberg is so sure the answer is yes that he never gives the question a serious airing.

The book greatly improves when Stursberg reins in the rhetoric and focuses on recounting his attempts – at times misguided, at others savvy – to drag the Mother Corp into the digital 21st century, a process that every media organization has faced with varying degrees of success.

The sections on the caustic union negotiations that led to the CBC employee strike in 2005, though often one-sided, also make for good reading. Stursberg was faced with the task of imposing budget cuts and a radical new programming model on a workforce constrained by rigid seniority rules, inefficient staffing and equipment protocols, and antiquated retraining policies. 

In the end, many readers will likely wish that Stursberg had set aside the personal vendettas and concentrated on entertaining his reader with the inherent drama of one of Canada’s last cultural institutions.

 

Reviewer: James Grainger

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

DETAILS

Price: $32.95

Page Count: 340 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-92681-273-1

Released: April

Issue Date: 2012-6

Categories: Politics & Current Affairs