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   Tuesday, November 20, 2007

   THEY WANT YOUR EYEBALLS

The words "sexy" and "Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" aren't often used together but that's what I'm hearing at the media launch for the CBC's "winter season" beginning in January, with a batch of new shows hoping to follow The Tudors' lead in sexing up our public broadcaster.

I'm led in by women from the CBC's PR firm Media Profile. There's over a dozen attractive women in headsets, like some power-lesbian secret service, leading journalists into a large, white-draped room. I sit in the second row, behind Due South star Paul Gross. He looks better now than he did as the hot Mountie, the bastard. We watch a slick montage of trailers for 12 new shows, including MVP, a hockey soap opera clearly modeled on the saucy UK hit Footballers' Wives.

Writing for fab, I'm viewing all this with a Queer Eye, like some pink filter. I'm forced to ignore the creators of gritty drama The Border and even the very cute David Kopp, star of the new comedy jPod. No gay office mate, David? I must move on, though I do have to stop and chat with Nicholas Campbell, Canadian TV veteran (if not icon). "You mean I have to play a gay character to be in your magazine?" he asks. Pretty much, I tell him, unless you want to come out, right here. He laughs.

I go looking for the very gay Chris Hyndman and Steven Sabados, stars of their own new daytime talk show. The former Designer Guys are thrilled. "This really is a step up for us," Hyndman says, "We feel like The Jeffersons!" Any pressure from their new masters to tone down the gay? None, says Sabados: "They keep saying, 'Just be yourself.'" Hyndman laughs, "As if they’re going to hire me and ask me to play it straight! They’re going down the wrong street!" The Steven and Chris Show will have the occasional celebrity guest -— who’s topping their wish list? "Pamela Anderson!" they announce in unison.

"We just want them to be themselves," CBC programming head Kirstine Layfield later tells me. (Did they rehearse?) But I point out that the CBC's gayest show, the British sci-fi drama Torchwood, has been airing with no promotion, buried in the Friday-at-9 time slot that MVP will occupy in January. Layfield insists they’re happy with Torchwood's half-million viewers and that limited funds for ads should be spent on Canadian shows. "We try to reflect Canadians back to themselves and diversity is obviously part of that," she says, "but we want to be natural about it."

The bubbly Natalie Brown has dubbed her single-girl show Sophie a "conflamady" (conflict-drama-comedy) and agrees that including a gay character felt natural: "Really, who doesn't have a gay best friend? Why would Sophie not? I do. It's not a cliché, it's true." My Gay Agenda satisfied, I'm ultimately forced to agree with Brown when she says, "After watching all those trailers, I have to say -- CBC is looking kind of sexy."

Labels: Canada, fab, homo-a-go-go, Trawna, TV