Source : Vancouver Sun

A lot of shows 'just aren't worth your time' -- Daryl Duke

You could call Daryl Duke our town's 'Mr. Television'.

After all, the Vancouver director/producer/broadcaster launched two television stations in our city -- one private, the other public.

In 1950, whippersnapper Duke was plucked from obscurity by a senior producer, impressed by the visual aspects of the recent UBC graduate's poetry, to work for the local National Film Board.

Three years later, fresh from editing and directing duties at the NFB, Duke hopped over to the CBC to become one of its first local producers.

On Dec. 15, 1953, he was part of a small, elite group in the control room of the Corp.'s new studio (a former Pierce Arrow showroom) at Georgia and Bute and took the cues for the first TV signal issued out for television station CBUT.

Duke remembers a huge crowd in the main floor studio for the opening ceremonies where the mayor and cabinet ministers celebrated the historic event.

"A lot of people drinking too much," he recalls with a smile.

A small film he'd made about Vancouver was aired that night.

(Years later, on Sept. 6, 1976, Duke again oversaw the opening of a Vancouver television station, this time as founder, chairman and major shareholder of the new independent TV station, CKVU-TV (now CityTv), which became known for its innovative, live, two-hour weekday evening news and entertainment program, The Vancouver Show.)

In 1958, CBC transferred Duke to Toronto to work on its documentary series, Close-Up (which allowed him to travel the world, producing stories on the likes of Bertrand Russell and presidents Tito of Yugoslavia and Nasser of Egypt).

He also worked on Quest, a series of contemporary dramas, music and documentaries, the drama, Wojeck, and the revered public affairs show, This Hour Has Seven Days.

He produced the first Henry Miller play for television and another show The Times They Are A-Changin', featuring an upstart folk singer named Bob Dylan.

Then America called.

Duke headed to Hollywood to produce and direct The Steve Allen Show for Westinghouse Broadcasting and to New York for ABC's The Les Crane Show.

"I did 250 90-minute shows," he says reeling at the memory.

He has also worked for NBC, CBS and for most of the major movie studios in Los Angeles.

In fact, he won an Emmy Award for a peacock network show in 1971 -- Best Director of a dramatic program for the episode The Day the Lion Died for the series, The Senator, and as a result, became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

That same year, Duke's feature directorial debut, Payday, shot in Alabama and starring Rip Torn as a bad-ass country-and-western singer, won the National Society of Film Critics Award and was accepted into the Cannes, Edinburgh and London Film Festivals.

Duke next returned to Vancouver Island to shoot I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a 90-minute special drama starring Tom Courtenay and Dean Jagger, which won a Christopher Award.

In 1977, his Toronto-shot crime thriller, The Silent Partner, starring Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer and Susannah York won him a Canadian Film Awards (now called the Genie Awards) Best Director statuette.

But the best was yet to come.

The Thorn Birds, the 1983 ABC miniseries from the Colleen McCullough best-seller, starring Richard Chamberlain, Barbara Stanwyck and Rachel Ward, with rural California doubling as the Australian outback, is one of the most watched dramas in television history.

For that he received best director nominations from the Emmys and the Directors Guild of America.

His epic drama, TaiPan, in 1986, produced by Dino de Laurentiis, based on the best-selling novel by Vancouver author James Clavell and starring Bryan Brown and Joan Chen was the first western theatrical feature film to be shot in China.

Duke's kudos are countless, and include a recent induction into the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Broadcast Hall of Fame and a Directors Guild of Canada Lifetime Achievement Award, an outstanding achievement Leo Award, and a plaque on the B.C Entertainment Hall of Fame's Starwalk on Granville Street.

But, since Duke's glory days, the so-called golden age of television, the medium, in general, seems to have become a wasteland.

In the past dozen years, the industry has changed. South of the border, networks' ratings and market share have declined, with cable becoming the dominant force and the industry as a whole experimenting with emerging technologies (the Internet, for one), creating new opportunities and challenges, such as the so-called reality-based television.

Duke admits he watches little North American television. It's too depressing. And he's barely heard of Survivor, Temptation Island, Fear Factor, Blind Date, Joe Millionaire, The Bachelor, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, American Idol and Big Brother.

"I wish I could say I watched more, but I don't. ... there are a lot of shows that just aren't worth your time. Not that one wants to be a snob about one's time, but if you're going to get other things done ... "

Occasionally, he tunes into BBC World Service for its news and documentaries, "stories that you'll never see anywhere else," he explains, such as former U.S. president Clinton addressing the Indian parliament, which never did make it on to the tube in the U.S.

He also likes CNN International, "because they don't get into all this propaganda, glorifying the 'war', as they call it."

Duke abhors the lowering of standards in North American television.

"We're becoming more and more enshrined within the American orbit. It was heading that way ever since they started to be able to think of news as entertainment, rather than as fact and as information. Once that started to happen, then the road to all those reality-based shows was wide open."

But does it really matter that info-tainment now rules and folks are enthralled with whether or not Trista loves Ryan?

"I'm going to get real heavy," he warns. "If the future of this country matters, then the future of what we're talking about matters, and if the future of TV matters, then the future of Canada matters.

"We can either have a trivialized TV, where they don't put any money into research, writing, acting, choreographers, dancers -- nobody gets hired, all of it gets swept away and they go for what's most immediate and they want something that can be thought of and shot in a week and bang, it's on the air.

"It also means that the concentration of ownership, as the stations become more and more concentrated and as we get, instead of a half-a-dozen owners, we get maybe four or five, and they are aiming for the same bag of marbles, it doesn't matter who's got them. It doesn't matter if CanWest or CTV or Corus is financing it."

Duke longs for the halcyon days of television in our town when programming celebrated local people, and talent and gave us identity.

He recalls a birthday party held for late broadcaster Jack Webster in the studio at CKVU back in the 1980s.

"Those are our 'memories', that's what people remember from 10 years of The Vancouver Show. I still get people coming up and asking if I'm going to do another Vancouver Show. And why? Because it's the story of their city.

"Local shows are absolutely vital. If we shortchange our 'memories' we have nothing. It's like those stone cairns that the Eskimos left crossing the wilderness.

"The only way you knew a human being had gone by was those little piles of rocks."

© Vancouver Sun