The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 25

SECTION NMENT I I 1 is en JUlN I Comics C5 Arts Entertainment Editor Bart Jackson 732-21 20 FAX 732-2521 The Vancouver Sun Monday, December 23, 1 996 26 33 B4 27 25 THURSDAY TODAY FRIDAY WEDNESDAY TUESDAY WORTH CORONATION STREET 35TH ANNIVERSARY by Kerry Gold DAME EDNA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL WA TCHING Sun television critic Alex Strachan picks the best programs coming up over the next five days ELMO SAVES CHRISTMAS 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. WTVS-PBS Tickle me, Elmo! When Elmo frees Santa (Charles Durnlng) from the chimney, he is rewarded with a magic snow globe that will make his fondest wishes come true. Narrated by Maya Angelou and featuring Harvey Fierstein as the Easter Bunny. ED SULLIVAN 6 p.m.

MuchMusic Musical memories from The Ed Sullivan Show include Sullivan's ageless intro-! duction of the Beatles to America, as well as performances by Bill Haley and His Comets, Buddy Holly, James Brown, the An-i imals, the Young Ras-: cals, the Four Tops and Herman's Her-i mits. MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS 8 p.m. Bravo! A barber who's afraid to cut hair blurts out his secret dream of becoming a lumberjack. Features the legendary "Lumberjack Song" I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, I sleep all night and I work all day;" chorus: "He's a lumberjack and he's okay, he sleeps all night and he works all Jazz and blues nonprofit promoters are scrambling to do damage control after a fast-moving fire Friday wiped out the Glass Slipper club and all the bookings 10 p.m. Bravo! Dame Edna Everage, the queen of spat, srts down for a yule-tide face-to-face with Brit chatterboxes Roger Moore, Lulu, Dennis Healey and Sir Les Patterson.

Quick, hide the 2 p.m. CBC The milestone is celebrated with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the popular British serial and interviews with cast and crew, including Angela Griffin, Sarah Lancashire, Kevin Kennedy, William Roach, Bill Tarmey and Helen Worth. television STAN TO AIR the players New licence will define the way Vancouver sees itself ALEX STRACHAN with it. Board members for the Pacific Bluegrass and Heritage Society held an emergency meeting Friday night to re-book events for upcoming months. Jim McNulty says he was on the phone as soon as he learned of the disaster, which means the loss of a much-loved night spot for musicians.

The Glass Slipper, behind the Biltmore Hotel, was a no fuss, no frills kind of club, serving up jazz and blues for a long-time legion of hardcore fans; one fan called it Vancouver's "jazz cathedral." But nobody is cancelling their gigs yet. McNulty wants fans to mark the following changes on their calendars: the society's next jam session will be held Jan. 6 at The Friends Meeting Hall at 1090 W. 70th Ave. (the group is on the look-out for a permanent jam space, so if you've got one, let him know) The Warrior River Boys play the WISE Hall Jan.

20 and The Music of Bill Monroe, with John Reischman and Friends happens at the same place Feb. 18. That event sold out last year, so get your tickets early. For questions about Bluegrass events, call their hotline at 215-0779. The Coastal Jazz Blues Society hasn't got new venues confirmed yet, but they're not jamming out on anybody either.

"We're com- mitted to doing our concerts," said organizer John Orysik. Orysik is searching for another cool community-oriented night spot (versus something commercially driven) and hopes that a fund raiser will be held to get the Glass Slipper and the Musart Cultural Society that runs it back up and running. "I think everybody is still in a state of shock." Orysik had booked Justine, an eclectic all-female band from Montreal Jan. 24 at the Glass Slipper, and a CD release concert for Vancouver band Talking Pictures Jan. 25.

As well, he had bands from Toronto and Quebec City lined up for February. He's looking at re-booking those gigs at the Western Front on E. 8th Ave. near Main. Call 682-0706 to confirm upcoming concerts.

First Night celebrations are funct, so the improv comics known as the TheatreSports League are starting a New Year's tradition of their own, called Last Night. At 8 p.m., 9:30 p.m. and 11 p.m., the people with the most nerve-racking occupations around take a look back at the year that was. Performances take place at the Arts Club Revue Stage on Granville Island, Dec. 31.

Tickets are 10, available through TicketMaster at 280-4444 or the Arts Club, at 687-1644. views on what the station should look and sound like, the five players agree on one point: There is an urgent need for another, homegrown voice in Vancouver. There are just three conventional, over-the-air English-language stations in Vancouver: CBUT (CBC), CHAN-BCTV (CTV) and (Global). Victoria is served by just one station, CHEK (BCTV-CTV). A fifth station, Bellingham, KVOS, broadcasts in the Lower Mainland and views Vancouver as its primary market (Bellingham being too small to support a station on its own).

The last television licence was granted in Vancouver more than 20 years ago, in 1974. In that time, the population has exploded, the economy has mush roomed into one of the most vibrant centres on the Pacific Rim, and the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley is the fastest growing region in Canada. Ironically, a 1977 CRTC study, as reported at the time in the Vancouver Sun, predicted the number of Vancouver-based television stations would jump to 11 by the year 2001, based on projections that the population of Greater Vancouver would exceed 2.2 million by the dawn of the new millennium. (That same study predicted the number of people whose mother tongue was neither English nor French would double but would remain at 16.8 per cent of the total population. Please see Stations, C3 Sun Television Critic They also serve who standby and wait.

Five companies, representing the most powerful names in Canadian broadcasting, are vying for the opportunity to establish Vancouver's fourth television station. When the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission rules on which, if any, of the five applicants is worthy of a licence, the new station will have the potential to change the way Lower Mainland residents view their environs. A decision is expected in late January. The new station, if approved, will be on the air in September. Despite some wildly varying J-'' VI.

Oi JT 11 w. 169 jobs Moses Znaimer's "new-style" guerilla television is tailor-made for Vancouver's energetic street scene and arts communities. Znaimer's model Citytv, which averages a 10- to 11- per cent share of Toronto's crowded field, leans toward real-time newscasts, minute-by-minute, street-level video verite and a storefront production studio that encourages neighborhood participation. "The problem is not too much television," Znaimer says: "It's too much of the same television." That's music to the ears of disenchanted Lower Mainland viewers, 25-per-cent of whom tune to U.S. stations on any given night the highest ratio of any major centre in Canada.

Znaimer favors a storefront downtown location and down-town-revitalization groups are singing his praises as a result. Vtv's entertainment programming emphasizes long-form Canadian films (CHUM has the rights to more than 150) and locally produced TV movies over Hollywood-style series. Vtv's bid is supported by the Taiwanese Canadian Cultural Society, Chief Leonard George, authors Douglas Coupland and Peter C. Newman, musician Leon Bibb, film-makers Stephen Hegyes (Double Happiness) and Elvira Lount Samuel Lount), Vancouver International Film Festival director Alan Franey, Music West president Maureen Jack, Simon Fraser University commu-nications professor Martin Laba who was swayed by Vtv's commitment to media-literacy programming and, in a controversial move, Premier Glen Clark. Of all applicants, this differs most from what is already on the air.

If approved, it will have an instant impact on the local broadcasting scene. Verdict: This critic's choice. CrVTVancouver Television (Baton Broadcasting) 118 jobs A respectable, broad-based station (Baton is CTVs majority shareholder) that would combine mainstream, English-language, B.C.-based TV series and longform productions with ethnic and multicultural programming. Please see Players, C2 mm tf iTi1-- .6 f1 tl "i lI' M'-''h Two morons escape in pointless odyssey BEAMS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA Directed by and starring the voice of Mike Judge. years.

PETER BIRN1E Sun Movie Critic Beneath Beavis and Butt-head on the evolutionary scale lies nothing but blue-green algae, but don't let that stop you from suffering 76 minutes of their peculiarly endearing brand of anarchy. Beavis is a nose-picker driven by his tics, while Butt-head slurs his words through braces. Together these extrusions from MTV and MuchMusic embody another oddly popular part of our mania for anti-establishment escapism. Whether it's catharsis for recalcitrant teenagers caught in a fajita-flipping culture, or pure and simple interstate nihilism, is moot What Beavis Butt-head Do America does represent is current North American culture as laid bare by a pair of morons. With fewer brain cells between them than Bill and Ted, only one catastrophe a Wn, i.

r. tt. fT A -Hi I Pnoio musiration oy lES LiNFOOTvancouver Sun A compilation cf r.ml stuff by Alex Strachan uuiu (iiuii runci na aiuf lucai iccuugci 3, the id kids of the video generation, off the couch in their totally trailer-park 1 The TV set, centre of their universe, has been stolen, and so our anti-heroes set off to scrape their knuckles in search of a new one. Not since Wayne's World have such vid-iots, the kind of guys who couldn't get dates at a camel market, been given such licence to kill comedy, that they don't quite succeed is a miracle of seasonal propor-. tions.

As toilet jokes and references to" breasts compete for space, Beavis and. Butt-head head-butt their way through a lot of low-brow laughs that often work. Criss-crossing the continent on what's become a spy caper, they meet the Red Hot titles for the Nova Scotia-based DOES ANYBODY HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THAT? Lower Mainland viewers will finally get to see Politically Incorrect, comedian-philospher Bill Maher's sarcastic, often scathing roundtable discussion of news events and entertainment trends. The often testy test-of-wills some of Politically lncorrects discussion groups make The McLaughlin Group look like a Christmas telethon will make the jump from pay cable to U.S. network television some time in January, where it will follow Nightline weeknights on KOMO-ABC.

One 1993 panel, featuring Andrea Martin, William Kunstler, Bob Guccione Jr. and Roger Stone, debated whether was time for Santa Claus to retire that these days if a big fat old dude in a red suit actually broke into a house from the roof, there are five-year-olds who'd know where to go get a gun and shoot Last summer, Maher parlayed his favorite expression into a collection of essays, Does Anybody Have a Problem With That? (Villard, "America is the only country in the world that's still in the business of making bombs that can end the world," Maher said once, "and TV shows that make it seem like a good idea." SETTING THE SCENE: Those cold blue breakers foaming against blue-black rocks in the opening followed a familiar pattern in the U.S., where ER, Seinfeld, Monday Night Football, Friends, Suddenly Susan, Home Improvement The Single Guy and Touched by an Angel lured viewers to their screens like flies to sugar. A slightly different picture emerged in Canada, where Nielsen Media Research electronic people meters in Toronto and Hamilton showed that Canadian viewers tuned, in order of preference, to TheX-Files, Frasier, Seinfeld, CybUl, NYPD Blue, ER, Chicago Hope and Millenni-um. Viewers in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland area will finally be hooked up to people meters some time in the coming year. Electronic metering offers a more accurate picture of who's watching what than the antiquated diary system currently being used.

The downside is the suspicion from some quarters that the relatively small sample groups used the so-called "Nielsen homes" don't accurately reflect the tastes of most viewers. The system's critics say it is a little like calling an election based strictly on exit polls. Nothing's perfect -not even in the world of television. SOUND BITE: "If this turkey was any colder, a good vet could save it" Private school headmaster (Paxton Whitehead) saws his way through holiday dinner on Frasier house band, a kindly senior with enough nrAcrrint-inn mAruyrn trt CAnH Rpavic Black Harbour (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. on CBC) are true to me show's Maritime setting.

But the opening sequence one of several striking openings in prime today was produced by a Vancouver company, Eclipse Productions. Eclipse director Glenn Patterson designed Black Harboufs opening titles on storyboards, filmed the sequence off Nova Scotia's rocky South Shore last summer, then edited the footage in Vancouver. Eclipse has designed the tide sequences for some of Canada's most prominent prime-time TV shows, including North of 60, Due South and Taking the Falls. IT'S All DM THE NUMBERS: November sweeps into orbit, and a federal agent (the voice' of Robert Stack) with a mania for full cavity searches. With cheap animation and a storyline somewhere between Russ Meyer and a Matt Helm movie, this thing should be rated 14 years the other way around don't attend without juvenile supervision.

Capitol, Esplanade, Richmond Centre, Station Square, Eagle Ridge, Willowbrook, Abbotsford. INSIDE: New look at old pornographer C2 Television listings C4 i.