WINNIPEG BABYSITTER
Curated and presented by Daniel Barrow. Wed, Jan 16 (7pm). Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel)

When you think of TV in the 1980s, if you’re old enough to remember, you probably don’t think of the programming in that era as culturally relevant. What do we have to thank television in the 1980s for, anyhow? Miami Vice? Knight Rider? The rise of pretty-boy synth bands who finally had a medium for disseminating their photogenic cheekbones?

But TV in the 1980s did look different to some people. Artist/archivist Daniel Barrow fondly recalls the nurturing boob tube of his Winnipeg childhood—specifically the local public access cable channel which, as part of its broadcasting mandate, allowed anyone with an idea to come and produce their own programming.

“From what I understand, you just applied and you were given studio time with technicians,” Barrow says. “Some people did preproduction, but most people didn’t. Most people showed up with guests or whoever, quickly rearranged the sets and just went for it, and this was the general spirit of public access television. Most of it was pretty improvised.”

With the advent of 1990s-style media consolidation, larger cable companies gobbled up smaller ones and the free-for-all taking place on Videon’s Channel 11 in Winnipeg came to an end. What’s more, Barrow says, Videon’s archive of locally produced content was destroyed by its new owners. A few years back, while serving as distribution co-ordinator at Winnipeg’s artist-run Videopool co-op, Barrow decided to save that era of Winnipeg’s cultural splendour from oblivion.

“I started to think about ways to retrieve it and it occurred to me that the only way this would happen would be to approach all the original producers of all those shows and ask them if they had kept VHS copies of their own programs. In most cases they had, which was great. I just became more and more interested in the material and started to think about putting together a local screening of the material. So I did that and it was hugely successful and I really had the suspicion that this work had an appeal that extended beyond local boundaries.”

Taking his collection of excerpts from Winnipeg’s public access glory days on the road confirmed Barrow’s intuitions about the universality of its appeal, so he worked up a touring compendium of Channel 11’s greatest moments with annotation based on his own research. Barrow brings the resulting presentation, Winnipeg Babysitter, to Metro Cinema for a one-night-only Wednesday-night performance.

While the show has been whittled down from hours of footage he secured from its creators, Barrow says Winnipeg Babysitter is really curated from his childhood memories. “As a kid I watched a lot of television—like, more than most kids today, even—and in a few cases my imagination was really shaped by certain public access programs, principally The Pollock & Pollock Gossip Show, which at the time I started the project was really the centrepiece.”

Hosted by “Rockin” Ron Pollock and his bodacious sister “Nifty” Natalie, the program started in 1985 as a forum for civic politics. “Gradually it moved into this crazy free-spirited gossip program where they would invite anyone to come on the show and gossip about their own lives,” Barrow says. “And when that inevitably became boring, they would throw on a Eurythmics album and pass out tinsel wigs and start dancing—but, like, crazy dancing. They had a real knack for finding unusual people to bring on their show. Everyone in Winnipeg was watching it.”

Other highlights from Winnipeg’s public access past include The Glen Meadmore Show, in which the host would sit silently and pick his zits for the program’s half-hour duration. Prior to their respective careers as arthouse darling and South Park writer, Guy Maddin and Kyle McCullough took part in Survival, a mock reality show where masked paramilitary survivalists discussed their plans for outlasting the impending collapse of society. Various savants, including many seniors, took to the airwaves to share their eccentric expertise in math, heavy metal, cooking, crafts and cat-fancy. Barrow says these ad hoc TV stars were pleased to have their work resurrected.

“Every single person [I contacted] was very keen and really into the project and really happy that someone remembered and had taken an interest again. Some people still wanted their show back. Some people expressed reluctance, but never enough to hold back footage.”

In addition to the 90-minute compilation of excerpts spanning 19 programs, Barrow provides live annotation via his perennial canvas, the overhead projector. “One of the things I wanted to maintain in Winnipeg Babysitter was the formalism of the ’80s, so I didn’t want to interpose video text using contemporary video editing systems. I had this idea to use the overheads like a layer of vellum in a museum transposed on the video image intermittently, that would act like a pop-up screen to explain the history of the show, who the producers of the show were, what the aims of the show were, like that.”

As to why Winnipeg in the ’80s was such a hotbed of untutored avant-garde broadcasting, Barrow is hard-pressed to provide an explanation. “I’m only really familiar with Winnipeg’s public access history,” he says, “but I’ve shown it in many other cities and, yeah, I guess my conclusion is that it’s a pretty unique and interesting and particular history, because audiences are kind of crazy about it wherever I show it.”