Source : Globe & Mail

The recent clash of personalities and allegiances regarding the host of Definitely Not the Opera has highlighted the CBC's confusion over who their audience really is.

The conflict between Sook-Yin Lee and vice-president of radio Jane Chalmers is a small tempest which will probably be resolved by the time this column appears, without any damaging consequences. But it did provide some insight into what senior management's artistic values are at heart.

As Gayle MacDonald reported in yesterday's Globe, Lee wanted to act in a movie by art-film director John Cameron Mitchell, and Chalmers told her she couldn't, because the film involved nudity and a lot of sexual oddity, and such an appearance would bring disrepute on the venerable corporation.

Lee, of course, like anyone who takes the Queen's shilling and accepts a high-paying, public job, has a clause in her contract that requires her to ask permission for outside projects. But she thought this particular restriction was unreasonable, presumably because it spoke to her definition of herself as an artist, and sent out an e-mail to many artistic friends that then was forwarded to many more (it ended up in my inbox from a theatre-director friend).

The e-mail was perhaps intemperate -- it accused her boss of "making a misinformed premature decision," and she threatened to quit if she didn't get her way -- but it had its desired effect: Within days she had amassed letters of outrage, indignation and support from a variety of influential film directors, artists and writers in Canada and the United States.

The CBC has refused to share its side of the story with me or with any other writer, because at the time of this writing the two antagonists are "in negotiation", and doubtless the union and lawyers are involved. (Sources at the CBC confirm that the management's discomfort with Lee's participation in the film was indeed based on its sexual content.)

But Lee seems to be regretting the e-mail, as she asked me not to quote from it as it would jeopardize her position in these negotiations -- so obviously she's not so keen on quitting any more. (This is a classic case of e-gret: You send out an angry group e-mail asking for public support and then you're surprised when it becomes a public document, and you realize you should maybe have taken a little more care with its wording.)

Anyway, whatever the resolution, it's astounding to most people who work in media or the arts that it happened at all. Sook-Yin Lee was hired precisely because she was the kind of person who appeared in edgy underground films. One of her accomplishments was a role in the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a film made by one John Cameron Mitchell. This role is touted as one of Lee's achievements -- a delicious irony -- in her bio on the CBC's website.

She was hired because she was cool: She has been involved with all kinds of art, from conceptual video pieces to pop music. She was a singer with a band; she was a VJ on MuchMusic. She has Queen Street cred -- which is necessary on a show that, unlike most others on CBC Radio, targets people under 65.

You want an actual artist, you get someone who will take risks that most people wouldn't. You can't have it both ways.

This is classic CBC: Earnest vice-presidents think they want hip, they think they want young, they think they want urban, but they don't really know what all that means. When they see young artists actually being young artists, they say: "Whoa, we said edgy, but we didn't mean that edgy."

For years, CBC management has been caught between a serious desire to appeal to urban audiences and to keep its aging core listenership, which is rural and provincial (and quite literally dying). The more they appeal to one the more they alienate the other.

Or so they fear. In fact, I question whether the conservative audience that Jane Chalmers felt she needed to protect from unnecessary shock still exists, anywhere: Is there an audience anywhere, even in rural Saskatchewan, that will be shocked by a professional actress doing a nude scene?

We live in a world of instant pornography, even in the heartland. In the United States, an even more socially conservative place, actresses who have circulated full-fledged hard-core porn movies have been rewarded with their own TV shows -- and soaring ratings. Then they get interviewed on Oprah. Does anyone really think that Canadians are going to boycott a CBC Radio show out of discomfort with the sexiness of its host? Is CBC management really still living in the Peter Gzowski-created myth of Canada as an isolated, simple people?

Over the past couple of years, my hammering away at the middle-browing of CBC Radio has been about this issue. The only audience that is important for a publicly funded broadcaster is an intelligent one. An audience that is not interested in being challenged by new art or new ideas is easily satisfied by the commercial media; the public broadcaster does not need to appeal to them, because its primary role is to provide what those commercial outlets don't.

And the reason I hammer so constantly at the CBC is that I love it so passionately. I grew up on it: my associations with CBC Stereo theme music are Proustian in their intensity (Respighi's Ancient Airs & Dances are the tense return to school after lunch; Schumann's romances for violin and piano are empty university buildings in summer . . .).

I have been working for the CBC as an occasional freelancer since I was 16 years old, when the local Halifax TV news show hired me as a "youth" reporter. I still remember the coffee-and-linoleum smell of the CBC offices, and the big hippie beard and ponytail of the kind and gentle producer who taught me how to make stories; I remember this not just with nostalgia but with an actual tremor of the excitement I felt on entering the building. I owe the CBC -- both radio and TV -- countless formative experiences.

And now that I live in Toronto, it seems that half of my friends work there, and they are very sensitive and serious about what they do. It's one of the best things about Canada.

So I feel, like many Canadians, that it is mine. I get angry if the CBC seems to be afraid of doing what it does best, which is the most serious coverage of the most serious things in the world. It is famous for its intelligent news, for its investigative and beautiful documentaries, for intelligent discussion and intelligent music. And now it seems to be backing away from what is challenging or shocking -- not just in pop culture, but in its discussions of serious art and music on Radio Two as well -- because it is afraid of alienating the handful of old fogeys who want to keep it non-threatening, safe and easy.

The CBC has to choose: Either it's challenging, indeed occasionally difficult, or it's nothing; it has no other reason to exist.

© Globe Information Services