Flashback: The truth about wrestling
"No one wishes wrestling was fake more than I do. Unfortunately, it's not."
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Far from an average Joe
A legend of Canadian comedy died earlier this month at 82. Joe Flaherty — whose characters on SCTV included Guy Caballero, Sammy Maudlin and Floyd Robertson — was originally from Pittsburgh, according to CBC News.
When the show ended after six seasons, Flaherty got some of the old gang together in 1986 for an anthology series called Really Weird Tales. He told a CBC reporter it was "a funny Twilight Zone" that reassembled part of the SCTV cast.
"One of the jobs of a producer, I found out, is to deliver people," he explained. "Catherine [O'Hara], Marty Short and John Candy were good names ... I could get backing, financial backing, for this thing if I could deliver those people."
Pinning down the truth
Wrestling may be having a moment. Earlier this month, CBC Radio's Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud addressed the return of Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson to WrestleMania, and CBC Arts looked at The Death Tour, a documentary about the players on the "gruelling" wrestling circuit in northern Manitoba last year.
In 1994, Jonathan Torrens sought to understand wrestling's popularity for the CBC News program 1st Edition in Halifax. He said his grasp of the sport was "nil" until he saw it for himself. Enter wrestlers Bret (The Hitman) Hart and Jeff Jarrett.
"No one wishes wrestling was fake more than I do," Hart said, addressing a question backstage from Torrens. "Unfortunately, it's not."
The Empathizer
Last week, CBC Arts writer Radheyan Simonpillai spoke to the co-creator of the new HBO Original series The Sympathizer, which he called "a loopy, thorny and altogether audacious comedy about a Vietnamese double agent."
Canada's Don McKellar, who created the series with Park Chan-wook, has a long list of stage and screen credits. He talked to host Laurie Brown in 1998, for the CBC show On the Arts, about writing Twitch City, a sitcom he created for CBC-TV.
"I have a kind of empathy with my characters," he said. "I always like my characters, and particularly in Twitch City where all the characters are pretty flawed."
Learning to fly
Two acrobats who were schooled in the circus arts in the Soviet Union but defected to Canada in 1992
are still performing, reports CBC News. In 1968, reporter David Halton got a glimpse of some of the training methods for acrobats in Moscow.
Grape question
Why does Canadian wine often cost as much as, or more than, a bottle from Europe? It's an evergreen question: CBC News asked it last weekend, and a reporter on CBC's The National asked it in 1984. But a sommelier says Canadian wine is better this time.
Green scene
"We're going to be focusing [on] ... the whole series of ways that we are destroying the world that some of us really want to live in 30 years from now." —Denis Hayes, founder of Earth Day, when he spoke to CBC-TV in 1970 upon the event's beginning that year. Hayes spoke with CBC Radio's What On Earth again on Earth Day this year.
Hockey flight
Last week, CBC reporter Karen Pauls told readers about a hockey fan in Phoenix, Ariz. who said losing the city's NHL team felt like being "kicked in the teeth." Winnipeggers who experienced something similar in 1996 might know that feeling well.
