The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 39

POOR QUALITY ORIGINAL 1 i Ji A )) I ill rt It i Pages C1-C14 Books Country music Classical records The Citizen, Ottawa Saturday. In It i 3 il 1 I 1 i i i i II i I August 24, 1985, tfcfeJ kw-Afemdi Xi Hxfiw. fit, Wbjutti kAuhi ibMiall tt ta.n ti ft I A 1 iv i 1 Derek Oliver, Citizen Above, Roger Price with cast members Christine McGlade, Lisa Ruddy, Alisdair Gillis and Stephanie Chow. Right, Gillis gets hit with the show's trademark green slime "I I i-'i. tt.

7M Li LI lj stow 11 rf "i rN TN r1 tTN i You Can't Do That On Television is made in Ottawa with Ottawa talent, but it's Americans who are watching it By Noel Taylor Citizen staff writer Sourteen-year-old TV host Alasdair Gillis is gaze stray to tne nuge dox oi leuers in me next office. Most of them are addressed to find entertaining and which makes them feel better about themselves." In other words fun, like dollops of green slime, one of the show's trademarks. Pause here to go downstairs to catch up on the skit Price has been watching on a monitor while phoning in corrections like "tell Vanessa (one of the children on the show) not to call it a Americans call it a studio." In the chilly studio, standing on a plastic sheet, 12-year-old Dougie Ptolemy is wearing baggy shorts, stick-on styrofoam angel wings and a curly blond wig, and trying hard not to look up at the bucket a studiohand is dangling over his head. Dougie has just used the trigger phrase "I don't know" after a dressing-down from the show's regular male adult symbol, Les Lye. Like a sinner on the scaffold, he is waiting for retribution.

Because this is television, there's a pause while a director does a countdown, "five, four, three Then, Whoosh. The slime is day-glow green, and plentiful. Apart from shampoo no one knows what it contains. It happens twice a show, and, Price assures the watcher, is harmless. Besides, he adds, they pay the victim an extra $50 each sloshing, "for the inconvenience." Back upstairs Price, who is simultaneously working on another production for cable TV, called Turkey Television, which is being made partly in Ottawa, Toronto, New York and Lousiville, talks about where he gets his players.

They're all from Ottawa schools. "If they'd been brought up in Hollywood, they'd all be big stars by Then U.S. cable TV got interested, and now its "internationalized," which is great for exposure, but has taken away the local color. Price, who came from Britain to do the show here, is big in children's TV. He produced the top children's show in Britain, Tomorrow's People, and while we were talking took a call from PBS in the States to talk about an hour-long children's movie he is working on.

You Can 't Do That On Television, he says, has "an average two Nielsen" rating for cable TV in the U.S., which he explains as reaching two per cent of households with television in that country. Dallas, by comparison, has a 30 Nielsen. (In New York a Nickelodeon spokesman would not go into ratings but pointed out Nickelodeon reaches 26 million homes). As for Canadian viewing figures, Price says he hasn't checked lately. He has heard of a four in Hamilton, and in Ottawa when the show started it was about five to seven per cent.

Price does not seem too surprised at the lack of interest here. In Ottawa the show appears at 9 a.m. on Saturdays. In the States it gets shown for two half-hours daily, at 4 and 7 p.m. He offers the schedule with a wry grin.

So why is You Can't Do That, with its basic skit format, raw juvenile humor, whacky sketches and surprisingly low budget (around a show), so successful on cable TV? Price is academic on that point. "Nearly all television for kids starts from the premise how can we educate them or improve them, or stop them from being the people they want to be, and make them the people we want them to be. I want a show they now." Price obviously means it, but cringes at the suggestion of any 'stars' in his show. What he wants from his performers are the right kind of parents. These he defines as "allowing no compromise in wanting what is best for their child, and supporting them in every endeavor." What he gets from his team of 12 is enthusiasm, the kind you give up school vacations for.

They come mainly from after-school drama classes run by CJOH and the Ottawa Board of Education, a couple came from the Ottawa Children's Theatre and one by writing to Price and persuading him that he was right for the part. They are replaced when they get "horrendously large." That doesn't necessarily mean physical stature, or even age, one is left to assume, but something to do with egos. In Gillis's case, he hints, it might have something to do with his feet, which are now size 11. (Asked about this, Gillis insists they are actually 9Vi). Gillis, he recalls, saw the cast together at a local restaurant one day when he was 10 and decided that's what he wanted to do.

One year later, he belonged. This season is his first as host. By now Alasdair Gillis is quite sure that entertainment is going to be his career. At 14, he is polite, self-assured and unfazed by fan-mag questions like "What kind of girls do you like?" (Answer: "Someone with a good sense of humor, who's fun to be Price only has one problem with him: "He's hard for me to write for, in some ways, because he's such a nice kid. Comedy comes from having shortcomings, you know, and he doesn't have very many." him.

And they're nearly all from fans in the States "about 200 a week," he says matter-of-faetly. But hardly any are from Canada, although his show You Can't Do That On Television, made in the CJOH studio in Ottawa, is seen in Canada too. At school, at St Pius in Ottawa, though they know he's a TV regular, no one asks for an autograph. In the States, he's something of a TV celebrity. That morning he had just been talking to USA Today, the million-plus circulation national paper, doing another interview.

His publicity files are full of interviews with U.S. teen magazines and TV publications. You Can't Do That On Television, the brainchild of writer-producer Roger Price, father of five and an eloquent advocate of kids' rights, is something of a television phenomenon. But not here, mainly on U.S. cable TV (the American name for pay-TV) and specifically on the children's channel, Nickelodeon.

For anyone looking for further evidence of the old Canadian complaint about having to go the States to make a hit in the entertainment business, the show is a prime exhibit. You Can't Do That On Television started at CJOH in 1979, and for a couple of years was firmly "Otta-wa-ized" (Price's description). It was aimed at an Ottawa audience. He sees humor of being blind Be daring in flick picks at fest By Tonda MacCharles Citizen staff writer By Noel Taylor Citizen staff writer i 1 simile, Theresa Russel, who turns up at Albert Einstein's apartment one night with a bundle of toy trucks and explains the theory of relativity to him. The sequence is pure gold.

After that, anything is slightly downhill.l By 11 a.m., a quick shift downstairs to The Empty Beach, described by one reviewer as Sydney Five-O, which simplifies somewhat the private-eye appeal of its Philip Marlowe-type story. It is the most American-looking Australian movie I've seen but with an ode-to-Sydney about it (at least that part along the shore) which sets it off. The star is Breaker Morant himself, Bryan Brown, a genuine screen presence in this case with the quality of untempered steel. It's all there: beautiful people, high life, low life, ugly cops, car chases, shootouts plus high surf, white beaches and Bondi. Brown is an actor to watch and we'll probably see more of his Cliff Hardy character.

It shouldn't be in official competition, but it may be a Down Under movie easy to sell to the American market. Over to Japan for Kon Ichikawa's Ohan definitely one that will be tough to sell commercially. It's a lovely film visually, but sleep-inducing. Ohan sounds like a French farce about a young husband who walks out on the wife he loves, for another woman, then rediscovers his wife and has to make love to her in secret. No concessions here to Western audiences; the acting is stylized to the point of exaggeration and the sexism so blatant there are titters in the audience when there should be outrage.

Things happen slowly but the exterior camerawork has the quality of a water-color masterpiece. This one is in official competition too. At the end of the day, something to celebrate, a German co-production, The Year of the Quiet Sun, which quite simply has the purest and most moving romantic scenes to reach the screen for years. Made by Pole Krzystof Zanussi, it's the immediate post-war story of a lonely G.I. and his love for a Polish widow, barely surviving in the rubble of war.

It looks so dark it's almost sepia-toned, and so restrained it almost stops at times. But the emotions it portrays touch the heart. There isn't a false move in it. Scott Wilson and Maja Komorowska are superb. MONTREAL Excerpts from a World Film Festival-goer's logbook and a few tips for the Ottawa buff who picks hisher films, drives two hours and can't get a ticket.

The only place to buy these in advance is the five-cinema Parisien complex on St. Catherine's St. This weekend you may be confronted with daunting, but well-behaved lineups (movie buffs aren't like rock fans who knock down barricades and trample each other underfoot). By Friday all the special packages the $100 nine-to-five pass and the $40 10-movie coupon book were sold out. So were 30 movies.

Knowing there are about 500 available, and at least a third of them international features, may lend encouragement, except the popular 30 are probably the ones you want to see. Best advice at this point is be adventurous. There are so many categories including the official competition (which in theory should contain the cream, but this is deceptive it's really festival director Serge Losique's selection, and you may not agree). At around 9 a.m. any day there are five films to chose from, and even that early they could be full.

Apart from ticket-buyers you'll be competing for seats with 300 journalists from around the world. The people at Parisien are accommodating though: they'll let some latecomers stand at the back, and others even to sit in the aisles. This day I picked Insignificance, which in spite of its downbeat title proved to be an exhilarating festival-opener. The film is by Nicolas Roeg, a British director (Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) flirting with some of America's more durable myths. Insignficance is pure festival so pure, it may not even reach the commercial screen because Roeg eventually gets wrapped up with the atom bomb and seems at one point to be blowing the whole film up, burning bodies and all.

His direction has ideas to spare, with casting to match Tony Curtis revived as a Senator Joe McCarthy act-alike, Gary Busey as a sort of Joe Di-Maggio and a relative unknown as the Monroe fac One night seven years ago, Canadian stand-up comic Gordon Payntor was having a beer in a pub in Wales, making everyone at the table laugh, as usual, when a pinkish shade slowly descended over his vision. Confused by his loss of sight, but not wanting anyone to catch on, he continued to crack jokes. Then got up, paid his bill, and walked out. His retinas had just detached a side effect of the diabetes he's had since he was a child. It took him a long time to deal with the "hatred, anger and frustration" of going blind.

But now Payntor, 30, who appears tonight at Yuk Yuk's on Albert Street, parades his blindness in front of audiences in stand-up routines in nightclubs across Ontario. Like when he says: "Big deal, so Wayne Gretzky scored six million goals when he was in minor league: I was his goalie." And the audiences love it. "Comedy is a great tool to approach topics that people find distasteful or uncomfortable" says Payntor. Payntor uses comedy to raise the subject of physical disabilities in his own half-hour play.Gi'veu Half a Chance. The play, performed by the Rolling Thunder Theatre Company, of Payntor's hometown, Brantford, Ont.

explores how an employment agency director reacts when a cerebral palsy patient arrives for a job placement interview. Audiences who see the troupe, which includes two actors who really do have the disease, end up "laughing at things they'd never laugh at in public," says Payntor. It has been touring Ontario for three months, and will be on the road until December. Payntor is also taping 13 cable television shows in Brantford called Meeting the Challenge. He hosts the show and interviews guests on issues concerning the disabled.

Although much of his time is spent championing Bruno Schlumberger, Citizen Gordon Payntor: dealing with the anger the cause of physically disabled people, Payntor says his first and last love is comedy. "It never enters my head now that (a career in) comedy won't work- out. It's something I know I can do. It's something I'll never give up." Payntor appears once a week at Yuk Yuk's in Toronto, and regularly in clubs around London, Brantford and Peterborough. He's been coming to Ottawa as a Yuk Yuk's feature comic for more than a year.

Although the play and television series take up most of his time how, he plans to return full-time again to polishing his stand-up material..