Hesitant Anticipation For Jimmy MacDonald's Canada

This could either be the greatest thing ever on Cdn TV, or just more shitty Air Farce bullshit. I don't recognize any of the names involved.

CBC ‘superstar’ from the 1960s rediscovered as old shows get new airing
By John McKay
TORONTO (CP) — Way back in the early 1960s, Jimmy MacDonald was the biggest thing on Canadian television.
His weekly CBC show, on which he ranted about social topics of the day, drew 10 million viewers to his far-right views on everything from the monarchy to hippies.
Then, suddenly, something happened. MacDonald had a meltdown, right on camera, and soon disappeared from the airwaves, taking all the tapes of his show with him into obscurity.
But recently eight of the tapes were uncovered, found to be in excellent condition, and the CBC has decided to run them again, beginning Sunday night under the title Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada.
But here’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone, OK?
Jimmy MacDonald never existed. He’s a figment of the imagination of CBC’s retro production department, a team that has been combing through the public broadcaster’s vast video archives and came up with the idea of a mockumentary to run many of the old feature clips they found.
“I’m hoping that there are people who believe Jimmy existed,” says actor Richard Waugh, who developed Jimmy as a meshing of several on-air personalities of the era, from Norman DePoe to Larry Henderson to J. Frank Willis.
Writer/director Greig Dymond says he likes the idea of people trying to figure out if it’s authentic or a spoof.
“I want people to go ‘Is Jimmy real?’ ” Dymond explains. “Did Jimmy have this supernova career? He was plucked from obscurity, then he became a top star, then disappeared so quickly.”
Adds Waugh: “Only in Canada could someone be a huge star, disappear, and Canadians can’t remember if he really existed or not.”
In order to match the old black-and-white video, the producers shot an introduction in the same manner as the real material, deliberately washing out the picture and adding a few scratches and pops to give it an authentic look.
Jimmy himself is an entirely humourless personality, uncomfortable at first in front of the camera. But as he develops a grasp of the medium, he becomes increasingly cranky at the way Canadian society is evolving from the staid 1950s into the more liberated ’60s with their sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. He seems to embody the schizophrenia that existed within the CBC itself in those Diefenbaker-Pearson days, with the broadcaster often accused of being pinko and yet filled with ultra-conservatives who railed at the socialist evolution in society.
“Greig and I would every so often go ‘Are we pushing this too far? Are we showing our hand that this is a parody?”’ Waugh says. “And then we’d look at some of the archival stuff and go ‘Nope, we’re matching, we’re actually matching.”’
Dymond and company found and employed real clips from old CBC public affairs shows. There’s ’60s Vancouver mayor Tom Campbell, for example, unleashing invective on the city’s hippie community. In another, an ultra-staid CBC reporter visits a music store, straps on an electric guitar, plucks a few chords and proclaims dismissively that it’s easy to be a rock star.
Dymond recalls other great kitsch content in those archives that didn’t (yet) make it into Jimmy MacDonald’s Canada.
“Eddie Shack was on an arts show called The Umbrella and he had this fantasy sequence, kind of a Fellini sequence, and Barbara Amiel is in this wearing a gingham bikini.”
Waugh, who bears a passing resemblance to Saturday Night Live comic Chris Parnell, got help creating Jimmy from the CBC props and graphics departments.
They found him some appropriate period eyeglasses after he discovered a pair of his own father’s reading specs but couldn’t use them.
“By the time we actually got to shooting, my children had got at the glasses and they were all scratched.”
Waugh was also offered some old suits from the wardrobe department and found one with Tommy Hunter’s name stitched inside. There’s also the pencil-thin moustache, the ever-present smouldering cigarette and those famous minimalist CBC studio sets to help round out the picture.
But if Jimmy is fake, the latter-day personalities roped into doing on-camera tributes to him aren’t.
Viewers will see Jimmy fondly “remembered” by Prime Minister Paul Martin, Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson (who did appear on the CBC show Take 30 in those days), Pamela Wallin, Lloyd Robertson, Joe Clark, Don Cherry and the late Pierre Berton.
“Considering this character didn’t exist in reality, everyone was fairly keen to participate and provide their glowing reminiscences,” says Dymond. “I thought they all did very well.”