Today we’re doing something new and exciting: How About This and The Metropolitan are doing an essay exchange! Tobias of The Metropolitan has submitted the following wonderful essay where he talks about how he was influenced by Canada.
Here’s Tobias!
Revisiting my favourite TV show: Sawing for Teens
I always maintain that the only TV ad campaign that ever worked on me were the Air Canada ads from the late 80s.
More than making me want to travel to Canada, they made me yearn for it, the way one yearns for a fictional country in a children’s book. Canada became my Narnia, a fantastical place that one could only ever dream of visiting. A country locked in an eternal winter, where a queen in a sleigh would feed me poutine.
Admittedly, I was already primed for Canada.
When I was small, my mother subscribed to a series of educational records and books called The 3, 4, 5 Club, which taught me, inexplicably, a song about the Ogopogo, a cryptid that lives in Okanagan Lake in British Columbia.
Looking for the Ogopogo,
Funny little Ogopogo,
His mother was an earwig,
His father was a whale,
If you ever see him, put salt on his tail.
I had a children’s book of tall tales about the tall lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, full of fur trappers and the northern woods. My sisters became obsessed with Anne of Green Gables. Canadian expat neighbours bought me a year’s subscription to some kind of National Geographic Kids-like magazine dedicated to Canada, a year of ice sculptures and Haida totem poles, moose and mounties.
Canada kept intruding into my suburban British world, always odd and unexpected. But I have always had a taste for the odd and unexpected. I am one of those awful people who likes an obscure fact, who seeks out the things of which no one else has heard and abandons them the moment they become popular. Canada was my kind of place.
And it kept intruding.
There was the unimpeachable 1979 pop music genius of Echo Beach, for instance, by Toronto’s Martha and the Muffins. A spiky, icy slice of nervy New Wave, with a brilliantly hooky little riff, deadpan vocals and a saxophone solo that marked it out, to my childish ears, as somehow distinctively North American.
It's a song that sounds grey. Not a dull, woolly grey, but a sleek, chilly grey. The french grey of concrete, wintry skyscrapers on the edge of a Great Lake, the steel grey of a fast vehicle, sodium street lights reflecting on a chrome cowling, the melancholy grey of pebbles, of icy waves, of a December day, of gulls and rain and loneliness.
Not a bit like the other pop offering from the Dominions in 1979. Australian Joe Dolce’s unforgivable Shaddap You Face, a comic song in cod-Italian, a boisterous party sing-along for sunburnt berks, full of fizzy lager and violent bonhomie.
Unforgivable because it kept another drizzly bit of New Wave off the top of the charts: Ultravox’ histrionic Vienna. The Canadian sensibility of Echo Beach - intelligent, twitchy, hipstery - felt more my speed than the leaden halfwitttery from Oz.
Throughout the 80s we were treated to all manner of low-end Australian ‘entertainment’, from the hideous tabloid sensibilities of Rupert Murdoch to the pastel nowhere of Neighbours. But the Canadian contributions remained thankfully weird.
BBC2 started filling odd corners of its schedules with animations for the National Film Board of Canada, shorts like 1985’s wonderful The Big Snit, a surreal, wobbly little story of Scrabble, a TV show called Sawing for Teens and nuclear annihilation.
It fitted in perfectly with the other animations they showed, like Joanna Quinn or Bill Plympton, The Brothers Quay or Jan Švankmajer, and a world away from the mainstream TV cartoons.
1985 was also the year that The Transformers launched, an American show animated in South Korea that was essentially one long advertisement for toys, toys that were themselves cobbled together out of several disparate Japanese franchises. Glib, cheap and dominated by ruthless commercialism and simplistic morality, Transformers couldn’t have been more 80s USA. This was the country of Reagan, of nuclear brinkmanship and economic rapacity under the guise of aw-shucks cowboy swaggering.
Canada, on the other hand, was a country whose National Film Board put out things like The Big Snit and The Cat Came Back, delirious, dark, daft things, this was their nation, the character they chose to broadcast to the world. This was evidently my kind of place.
It got harder and harder to ignore that slick American greed as the eighties went on, sleeves rolled up and phones got mobile. Even stop-motion, tweedy old Britain became a country of boxy shoulder pads and primary coloured computer graphics.
So it was a relief when a friend discovered (I still don’t know how - possibly a Canadian relative) the LP of Bob and Doug McKenzie’s Great White North. It was seven or eight years old by then, but we didn’t know that. We could just about tell from the cover that one of them was Rick Moranis but beyond that it was a mystery. We’d never heard of them, seen them, dreamt that such a thing could exist. All we knew was that we loved it. We played it over and over, marvelling at it.
It was the perfect antidote to that late 80s moment in Britain, a decade that had seen the glamourisation of the barrow boy City spivs and ‘OK yah’ Sloane Rangers. These shambling, half-assed plaid clad idiots were a glorious riposte to the polished and professional 80s and we fell on them like Canadians on back bacon.
It helped that we were already dressed like them in lumberjack shirts and ancient jeans, already lived like them, in unrehearsed, pre-grunge scruffiness, already behaved like them, surviving on beer and doughnuts; we were already their children.
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas’ hilarious, ramshackle performances represented an approach to comedy that matched the garage post-punk music that we loved, and the laid back indie movies we watched. This was an alternative comedy that was different to the Friday Night Live politics and fireworks of Ben Elton or Alexei Sayle. This was stupid, low key and friendly in a Britain that was increasingly brash and businesslike.
Through all these strange visions, I was piecing together an image of Canada out of scraps, like the impressionistic montage of the Air Canada advert. Not the loud-mouthed, cheerily dangerous Australian jock, not the shiny-suited, lethally smooth American cool guy, not the minted, voweled British toff, but something a little different, a little weirder. It’s an image of a country that’s on the edge of culture as it is of the map, that contains vast unexplored hinterlands beyond it’s quietly approachable public face, the quiet kid, who pursues his own weird hobbies unnoticed by everyone else but who turns out to be not a serial killer (that would be too American) but a brilliant - if a little off-kilter - musician, or animator, or comedian.
The kind of kid, in other words, that I always hoped I would be.
I wasn’t, but that’s probably because I wasn’t Canadian.
* * *
Of course, the advert may have worked, but there’s no way I can go to Canada now. There’s no way it can ever measure up to that image I have of it. Far better to hold it in my imagination like that fictional wonderland it always seemed to be, a country to fantasise about. To dream of.
In the meantime, I shall just put on my NFB hoodie, open a box of Timbits, cue up some Leonard Cohen and settle down to reread some Robertson Davies. Or maybe rewatch a Cronenberg film. Or maybe Don McKellar’s Last Night. I loved that movie at the time. I wonder if it’s still good. David Cronenberg’s actually in that. So’s Sandra Oh. And Callum Keith Rennie. You can’t get more Canadian than Callum Keith Rennie.
Come to that, maybe I’ll just rewatch Due South.
Oh, Canada.
Mark here once again. Thanks to Tobias and the wonderful team at The Metropolitan for this great essay, do check them out!
You can read my essay at The Metropolitan here, about a secret nine point plan that has never been revealed until now!
A really great read! Have just subscribed to The Metropolitan - I enjoyed your guest post over there too, Mark!
LOVED SCTV and, especially, the McKenzie Brothers. I remember wanting to visit Canada after reading the old Alpha Flight comic and, eventually made it! Nice post! :)