Today in history: In 1983, British Columbia NDP leader Dave Barrett is dragged bodily from the legislature after an argument with the acting speaker went sour.
Tomorrow in history: In 1958, police and firefighters walk off the job for 16 hours in Montreal ("Canada's metropolis"), and calamity ensues. Next Tuesday in history: In 2002, the Queen, and I quote, "takes a look at the CBC Archives website during her visit to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation." Oh, and some unpleasantness with the FLQ in 1970. But let's get back to the Queen.
The CBC covered the event, of course, and now the clip is in the Archives, at archives.cbc.ca. There she is, in the bright atrium at CBC broadcasting headquarters in Toronto, being led past cordoned-off throngs of colonial well-wishers. Peter Mansbridge mumbles commentary in the background.
Eventually she comes to a bank of flat-panel monitors and leans in with practised interest while staff show her a clip of her inaugural Canadian visit in 1957. Are you keeping score here? Thanks to footage from a CBC special about the Queen visiting the CBC, the CBC Archives has a clip in which the Queen watches a CBC Archives clip of the Queen. God bless the CBC. It only manages to be head-exploding when it doesn't mean to.
But in fairness, while the CBC Archives website isn't mind-blowing just yet, it's growing into a fantastic grab bag of Canadian history -- or something like it. The site features carefully chosen archival TV and radio clips by the hundreds, grouping them around topics that range from the Rolling Stones' visits to Canada to the Halifax explosion of 1917. For each topic, there are a handful of broadcast clips spanning the years -- for the Halifax explosion, say, eight television clips and four radio clips. And for each individual clip, a little box off to the side displays contextual information, which is usually thorough and interesting. It all piles up: There's enough material to lose a history fetishist in there for days. (And the collection of clips on the evolution of computers and the Internet is just terrific.)
But wait, says the attentive reader: Halifax was flattened in 1917, well before the CBC was established. Just what archives are they using? The answer conceals one of the site's great strengths, as well as its mighty quirk. The CBC Archives don't just feature clips broadcast the day of the subject at hand, but segments from shows recorded decades later, where experts reflect on Canadian history. To explain the rescue efforts after the 1917 explosion, you'll hear an interview conducted in 1977, on the CBC Radio show Between Ourselves.
And here we are again, stuck in this funny vortex, listening to an archival clip of a history show describing even more history. It's hard not to notice how a CBC Radio interview from 1977 sounds exactly like a CBC Radio interview from 2006: The hosts are thoughtful and the guests are tweedy. The television side doesn't fare so well on the immutability front, having gone from insufferably earnest to George Stromboulopoulous in a few short decades, but that's another matter.
In fact, the more you watch, the more you realize that for all the Cancon, the CBC Archives site isn't about Canada; it's about the CBC itself. It might be a distinction that the Corporation encourages people to blur, but it does exist. This isn't a definitive historical collection, but an intriguing documentary of a broadcaster's evolution.
And there's nothing wrong with that -- heck, it's their website. But it doesn't need to be this way. Consider the BBC's own archival site. (CBC versus BBC comparisons are odious, I know, but bear with me.) The BBC archives (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday) are built around the "This day in history" model, but the critical difference between their site and ours is that their archival stories are mainly written transcriptions. Video and sound clips are available off to the side, but they're almost afterthoughts. By focusing on the voice of the news writer, the BBC pushes history into the foreground.
But the rich multimedia that the CBC uses draws focus to the broadcaster itself: the characters of the interviewers pop out, the faces of the anchors, the quaint title cards of the news broadcasts. The medium ends up crowding out the message. Here is a site to make a Canadiana fetishist go week in the knees, yet as we celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Queen's viewing of the CBC Archives website, this might be something to keep in mind.webseven@globeandmail.com
