For CBC fans, TV history is just out of reach

In the first years of Canadian television, the CBC relied heavily on programming imported from the United States to fill its schedule. Radio-Canada, on the other hand, had no easy source of French-language material and began quickly creating its own. La famille Plouffe, Canada’s first téléroman, is one of the early documents in the history of Quebec’s distinctive popular culture.

The show, about a working-class family in Montreal, aired from 1953 to 1957, but because it was performed and broadcast live, little record remains: The CBC has a grand total of eight episodes in its archives.

Those episodes will be preserved for future viewers as part of a $15-million, five-year digitization project that CBC/Radio-Canada announced last month, boasting it will convert more than a million audio and video recordings and films. But don’t expect to be visiting with Théophile and Joséphine Plouffe any time soon: Despite this push, public access to old CBC shows is going to remain very limited.

The digital project is primarily a preservation effort aimed to save old news and current-affairs material for the benefit of in-house programmers and journalists; CBC will digitize 720,000 assets, mainly old magnetic audio and videotapes, while Radio-Canada, whose collection also includes some film, will preserve another 650,000.

It’s a necessary initiative – “A lot of the material is coming close to what we call the last play,” CBC archivist Marc Lefebvre told me – but it also underlines how few old CBC shows are currently available. The public might justly feel it had already paid the public broadcaster for The Beachcombers (1972-1990), Street Legal (1987-1994), Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998-2005), Canada: A People’s History (2000) or Intelligence (2005-2007), but you won’t find those shows on CBC websites.

The CBC archives’ web pages feature lots of historical news and entertainment clips, from the Queen signing the new Canadian constitution in 1982 to a high-school interview with a promising singer named Alanis Morissette, but not full programs. Meanwhile, the CBC’s online player, watch.cbc.ca, is mainly devoted to current shows but does offer a few more recent programs that are no longer on the air; the oldest is The Kids in the Hall and there are also episodes of Being Erica, Republic of Doyle and the short-lived Strange Empire. Considering the cultural riches squirrelled away in CBC vaults, the offerings seem paltry.

One problem is that the CBC doesn’t have the money to offer old shows to the public: “While we’d love to add all our classic programs (like The Beachcombers) to our online player, the costs are often prohibitive and must be measured against our mandate to invest in creating new original programming for Canadians,” CBC public-affairs manager Emma Bédard wrote in an e-mail.

There’s the cost of preparing the shows for the player but also the larger issue of clearing the rights, which can be intensely bureaucratic and time-consuming for older programs. After the CBC outsourced most of its drama and comedy production in the 1980s, it lost control of its programs’ after-lives to the independent producers who now made them. Today, contracts spell out exactly how long a broadcaster can use the program online and when those digital rights revert to producers – who, these days, might hope to license them to Netflix. This is one of the largest differences between the CBC and the National Film Board of Canada, which is usually its own producer and has made digital public access to its archives through nfb.ca a top priority.

Still, these impediments don’t explain why a show such as The Beachcombers – 361 videotaped episodes, most of them already digitized – can’t be seen at watch.cbc.ca but pops up all over YouTube, where it generates a lively debate about whether the material is bemoaned or beloved. Too bad CBC can’t get in on the action.

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