We watched a lot of American shows, but our CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) always produced TV with a very different feel to it. The other day, I was thinking about one of the most popular and longest running shows up here -- Front Page Challenge.
Each week, 4 panelists (3 regulars and 1 guest), would take turns..maybe 2 minutes each, to question a guest who stood where they couldn't see her/him. The object of the questioning was to try to identify the front page news story that the guest was associated with. Sometimes the guest was well known and the voice would be muffled in some way to hide the identity, but most of the time they didn't do that as the stories were often difficult and obscure and the challenge guest wouldn't have been identifiable. The panelists were a group of very well known veteran journalists, so they were pretty sharp and one or the other of them would usually identify the story. Really good show. I think everyone up here used to watch it.. It was just one of those things that the whole family would watch together. Probably sounds kind of nerdy, but I think it was the kind of show that helped to create an awareness of news and life in cities across Canada.
Gee, I think you got off kind of easy with CW. When I was small, I was just about as much of an insomniac as I am now. My Dad sometimes took me out for a drive around the neighbourhood as car rides made me sleepy. Then, one summer, he discovered that I would go to sleep almost immediately if he took me to a little park to ride on the carousel. So every night, we would drive over to the park, I would take one or two rides on one of the carousel horses, then come home and go to sleep. Somehow, I think watching Hill Street Blues while lying in a big brass bed would have appealed to him a little more. |
