RICHARD STURSBERG CAN be a polarizing figure. He knows he rubs some people the wrong way (and I think he kinda likes being the thorn in some sides).
You can read that personality throughout his recent book, Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC. He admits as much on many pages, calling himself “arrogant”, “insouciant” and “insubordinate” and reading through some of what he describes about his time at the Corp., it’s hard not to disagree with his self-assessment.
Stursberg was actually my first interview when I started covering the electronic media industry in 1997. At the time he was the head of the Canadian Cable Television Association (from there he would go on to Star Choice, Telefilm Canada, then the CBC and now is a senior advisor at Telus). Back then he was gracious, helpful, and a bit imperious.
He’s a smart, engaging fellow whose experience runs the gamut and is a fun interview. He’s not afraid to throw punches, but often in a very erudite, disarming manner. Yup, the guy is charming. Anyhow, with the release of his book, which we reviewed two weeks ago, we also sat down with Stursberg to ask why he said what he said – and what he thinks is still wrong (and right) with the nation’s public broadcaster. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Why do you believe TV is an art form in the same way that ballet and opera are art forms?
Richard Stursberg: It's just a great, popular art form. It's very funny, you know. There's a line in the book somewhere that goes like this. It asks why something on a stage is art, and when it's on a soundstage, it's not? It's exactly the same thing. You have to write, you have to direct, you have to act. How's it different? It's not different, except it's bigger, it's more expensive, and it's more beautiful.
GOB: But I think you sort of distilled part of it in the book, the way people think about TV as not a form of high art, and the fans of so-called high art tend to look down on TV.
RS: Yeah, well, the fans of high art once looked down on Shakespeare, who was essentially a popular writer… I don't know why it is that television all these years has been sort of put to one side. Movies? Art, right? Ballet? Art. Novels? Art. TV? Not. Why? Why is it separated out?
If you look at the quality of the writing, the quality of the acting, the direction production in terms of TV drama right now, it's beautiful. It's better than movies. Way better than movies, and in many cases, way better than lots of the novels that are being written. What it is, frankly, is a sort of snobbiness because it's a popular medium. Canadians watch TV 26 hours a week, so if it's that popular, then for all of the tall foreheads, it must somehow or another be a low thing.
GOB: Let's divide it a little further then and look at the different genres and apply a value to it, if you want to. Within that genre of TV as art, there's The World's Scariest Police Chases, there's CSI, there's Little Mosque on the Prairie, and then there's Opening Night (CBC’s long-cancelled TV series which aired items like opera and ballet). How do you classify all those different shows within “art”.
RS: I don't. I think you treat them on their own merits, so that for example, if you're talking about a situation comedy like Little Mosque, you compare it to other situation comedies. Some situation comedies are good, some are not so good. Take a drama, compare it to drama. Comparing it to something like Opening Night is a bit like comparing a novel to a song. It's not a terribly helpful comparison because they're trying to do different things. So everything should be judged on the same terms.
It's like the distinction between high and low art, quality art or crap art. To me, I think this is weird. Some operas are terrible. Some ballets are just rubbish, right? Some reality shows are terrible and some are brilliant. So you have to respect each of these forms for its own self and judge them within the terms of their own conventions.
GOB: I don't know if you saw what we've written in the past while on the CBC or not addressing the hubris or arrogance that sometimes filters down from someplace – not always the CBC – that we're making Canadian content programming that's good for you that Canadians should want to watch. There’s an attitude that says “We're not making this sit-commy reality show stuff” and I find that attitude when I encounter it, offensive. It says that only the great unwashed watches the World's Scariest Police Chases. Well, that may be the majority of Canadians…
RS: It's snobby, and it's silly, and it's untrue to suggest that the average Canadian is dimmer, stupider, something like that. I just think it's just totally and utterly wrong. And apart from that, the fact of the matter is, it's all those average Canadians paying for the CBC and they're the people that are actually watching TV. So why would you make TV for people who are not even very interested in TV, let alone a very narrow slice of the population. It seems to me very odd.
If people want to go see a live play, they should go see a play. Now, I think you can do things like we decided to do an opera, and you may recall in the book…
GOB: The Mulroney opera… was it ever aired?
RS: No, it wasn't aired. CBC walked away from it. Why'd they do that? I do not know.
GOB: So where is it?
RS: Mulroney, The Opera, had a theatrical run, and I don't know who owns it now for television. Anyhow, the idea was what we'd make an opera that we would shoot, not on a stage, but like a movie, so it was shot in the way that we'd make an opera friendly for television, not going down and shooting an opera that's on a stage. Our general idea at the time was we wanted to then get it theatrically released. We would have promoted it on CBC, and once it finished the theatrical run, it would have come to television.
GOB: Why did you write this book? There have been a lot of people in and out of the CBC, none of whom have chosen to write a book like this on their time there. What gave you the drive to want to write this?
RS: I thought to myself a couple of things. One is I was lucky enough to have this fantastic job for six years, and everybody in Canada feels really, really strongly about the CBC. So I thought I have a unique view of this, and it mattered to me a great deal and thought “why not let people have a look and see what it looks like from the inside”. I wrote it also – I like to quote Churchill, who said, "I wanted history to be kind to me, so I thought I'd write the history myself."
GOB: From the few people I know who have read the book or looked into the book I guess, they've said, "Oh, this is just really the gospel according to Richard." I’ve said, "Well, his name's on the book. Of course it is."
RS: If they want to write another book about the CBC, God bless 'em.
GOB: In the book you seemed to me to be particularly interested in the people talking about the CBC. You mentioned the commentariat, the chatterati, the pundits, all that. Why were you so concerned with what people were saying about the CBC and whether or not you got credit for changing things or making better programming than it typically had made?
RS: It's all part and parcel to try to manage the overall image of the Corporation. If people are saying, "Oh, this is all rubbish and stupid," then why would people want to come and watch if they read that kind of thing in the press? That's not fair. They don't want to watch something that's rubbish and stupid.
GOB: So how do you battle that, though, as the head of English services? How do you take what John Doyle says or whoever else says and try to get people to look past that?
RS: There's a limit to what you can do, and there's a limit to the extent in which we were successful in doing that. I think at the end of the day, we were not particularly successful in convincing people like John Doyle or Bill Brioux that the direction we were on was a good direction. But on the other hand, John can console himself with the thought that at least Canadians liked it since they watched it in much larger numbers and listened to the radio in much larger numbers. And at the end of the day, the only judgment that ultimately counts was the people who own the CBC.
GOB: Meaning the great unwashed masses, the rest of us.
RS: Exactly. You and me. But the other thing that was striking to me was just how negative a lot of the commentary was.
GOB: There really does seem sometimes to be a real hate on from some people for the CBC no matter what it does.
RS: There was a (Toronto Life) profile on Kirstine (Stewart), my successor, and there's a part in it where they say – well, I've forgotten exactly how it goes, but something like people shouldn't be fooled. She may seem nicer than Richard, but then Khrushchev looked good after Stalin. And I thought, "Really? You want to compare me to one of the 20th century's greatest mass murderers?" What exactly did I did that was so bad? Tried to make some shows Canadians wanted to watch?” A lot of the rhetoric was just completely over the top like that. It was very strange.
GOB: I remember when you started and the lockout happened right away – I mean, the rhetoric then was pretty bad… and there was an appearance you made on the picket lines I think at one point where I remember people thought, "If he does that again, he's going to end up in the hospital." That was a bit much.
RS: But you know what? It wasn't so everywhere. I was in Vancouver during the lockout at one point having coffee with a producer at Starbucks, and the people on the picket line heard that I was there, so about 60 or 100 of them who were picketing and whatnot came marching over. So we were sitting outside at Starbucks, and the producer looked alarmed… but I got up to have a conversation with them and it was interesting.
So we started to talk about the issues… and then some people at the back started shouting, "He's a jerk. Get rid of him." Blah, blah, blah, and the producer told them "Wait a minute. Slow down. He's sitting here, he's talking to us; we're talking to him. Slow down.” So in Vancouver and other places, people were actually much more civil, I thought. It wasn't uniform.
GOB: One of the other aspects of the book that struck me is why so many surveys and consultants and studies to figure out what the CBC should be doing, what news should be doing, what the mandate and mission should be? There seemed to be so much of that sort of thing.
RS: It depends on which ones you're talking about. I'm a big believer that if you're going to do something, you should do your research. You should be very clear as to what it is that Canadians actually watch and what they want. You can only know that if you've actually done the work for it. So I was very big on research of all varieties. On consultants, we were criticized for bringing in Magid, which is probably North America's most experienced news consultants… and what was interesting to me is after Magid – there was a certain resistance when they first came – but after, people saw what they could do, that they just had vast databases of research, and they were very good at everything from technical operations in newsrooms to makeup. Somebody said, "They're here. They're a resource. They're here for you, right? They're here to help you deal with and retrain your staff in whatever way you need." And they did. Then, of course, they became very popular, and people were very pleased.
GOB: But, you end up getting dismissed – by those pundits again as – well, the only change that was made was Peter Mansbridge was standing up instead of sitting down.
RS: Right. Even though we changed everything from all the sets and all the editorial strategy and all the shows and all the internal operations.
GOB: And got more efficient on the news-gathering front, too. Because I remember going to some press conferences years ago where you look behind you, and there's CBC, CBC Radio, the French CBC, all at the same thing.
RS: Very bad. I think it's better, but I don't think it's all the way there yet. It could be better if they had a more effective integration of the operation.
GOB: You quoted Trina McQueen saying in the book that you had a tin ear for public broadcasting, or the language of public broadcasting. How much of your struggles at the CBC – and you even mentioned this yourself – were about having a tin ear for opinions other than yours? You talked about having a certain arrogance and showing the people who had been there a long time, and “the constituency” and that sort of thing you knew what to do.
RS: It depended who I was talking about. Some of the people were enormously gifted and very inventive, so I tried to listen really hard to those people. In other cases, there was just a lot of… apologies for failure or willful misunderstandings of circumstances.
There's a part of the book where I'm talking to the news department and asking why don’t we do well in the local shows? And they said, "Well, it's because Global and CTV have more resources than we do." I say, "Really? How do you know that?" And they say, "Well, everybody knows that." So I think, all right. I'll do a study. I'll go count what they have and compare it to what we have. So I count; they have less. So I have two problems now. One is, what I've been told is untrue. Not because they were willfully lying to me. It was because they didn't know.
GOB: That was the accepted wisdom.
RS: And two, this is very tricky now because… if you have enough resources but you're not doing well, then you have a problem with management and strategy. It's not a culture that was particularly fact-based… and so did I have to speak to people about stuff like that? Yeah, sure.
GOB: I found it funny in the book where you mention certain things that you did or memos that were sent, how quickly they leaked into the media and were spun in ways to try to make you or your ideas look foolish.
RS: That went on for the first two or three years I was there but after that, once things started to go better for the CBC, it stopped. We polled the people inside the CBC and asked them about how they were feeling about overall direction and stuff and what was interesting to me is that the more successful the shows became, the happier the people became… and leaking stuff to the press to try to tear down management stopped.
GOB: It loses its effectiveness when the management-led changes go in the right direction.
RS: People were generally pleased in the sense that suddenly people were talking about the shows and you'd go to the barber, you'd go on the bus, and people are talking about the shows. And the competitors over at CTV and Global started watching the shows and started watching CBC news again and started going, "Uh-oh."
So when you're getting good feedback from people you know and the shows are appearing on the front page of the entertainment sections and your rivals at Global are going, "Oh, that news is looking a lot better," you feel good and you're happy because you're proud you're doing better.
GOB: How deep are the problems there still? The thought of “mandate programming” – even Mr. Lacroix said in an interview with me last year that ratings aren't the only thing that matters.
RS: Ratings are the only thing that matters. Everything else is self-indulgent because pooh-poohing the ratings is a way of pooh-poohing Canadians. It's a way of saying, "Well, I should make what I want to make as opposed to making the people who pay my salary what they want." First of all, how's that right? And second of all, it's disrespectful on a certain level. Beyond that then, what's the real standard? If you say to yourself “oh, well, the show was a (ratings) failure, but it was a high quality, so it was a success.” Nobody watched it when it was a success because it was beautiful I don't know about that.
GOB: That's where you wrote the line that people at CBC felt like superior losers when you came on board.
RS: Yes. I thought it was really important to have a really clear, simple benchmark for success. Interestingly, what also happened is they would poll Canadian's attitudes towards the CBC. As the audiences improved, Canadian's perceptions of the CBC improved. They thought it was a better quality, it was more distinctly Canadian, it was more essential to their lives, etcetera.
Even the BBC said, "Okay. If it's not about ratings, what's it about?" Well, it's about quality. Okay. Well, how do you measure that? Who decides? The BBC's answer is the public decides if it's of good quality or not. Who else could decide? And they would measure them on those metrics. If you say the decision about what's good quality is left to the people who make the shows…
GOB: You have a show that's liked very well by whoever made it, but not necessarily by anybody else.
RS: His mother.
GOB: What do you make of the direct cutbacks that the CBC is being forced to make now?
RS: It has to be put in a context, which is we cut 800 jobs out of the corporation in 2009 during the recession. None of the other big cultural agencies faced any cuts then because they didn't have any private revenue. What's happened is the CBC has been cut twice really. It's a double funded thing, right? CBC Television's funding is 60% private. So when the private revenues collapse, you have a big problem. So that was dealt with in 2009 and now the other half, the public revenue, is being attacked.
But this is all happening at a time when the audience for primetime CBC television is probably the best and the audiences for radio are the best in 75 years. So what's going on here? The public clearly is saying, "Directionally, I'm much happier with where the CBC is now because I'm listening to it and watching it more than I was before." So then to turn around and cut the CBC at precisely the same time as the public's saying, "I think they're on the right track," is tough.
GOB: Is it time for them to start thinking a bit farther out of the box? You mentioned in the book the CBC needs to be a content company, so they're going to close most of the TV transmission towers as a start. What about going even further and saying, "Okay, we do local TV news, the 6 o’clock newscast in the big markets already served by all of these other private broadcasters." Why not take those resources, put them all into digital, still cover the big markets, but do something else at 6 p.m. on TV?
RS: Maybe… but the bigger problem is it's very hard to determine what to do about the CBC going forward until they figure out some really simple, sensible stuff. What do you want? Do you want elite ballet dancing on TV, or do you want a big, popular drama and comedy? You can't have both. You don't have the money for it. And they pull in opposite directions.
The first and most fundamental thing is for the government… to stand up and say, "Okay, here's what we want from the CBC. We want it to be big and popular." Maybe they don't. Then you can say the opposite. That's okay, too. But just come clean. Be clear. We want local shows that service all the remote little areas of the country but not the big cities. Okay, then say it. Or say no.
The place is riddled with these contradictions and at some point, the most important thing is for the government to say, "This is what we want." All right. Having said that, the question is, what does it cost to deliver? The way they do it in Britain, which I think is a really good model, is the government and the BBC sign a contract, a transparent contract… it's called the Royal Charter and Agreement. They have a big conversation about what should the BBC being doing, what are the costs to fund it, then they sign a contract. And it's all preceded with studies and hearings and parliamentary committee looks so that everybody gets a chance to get it all in and all the facts are on the table. Completely transparent in terms of the conversations. But then it's also clear, and they actually say, "This is what it's going to be, here's the funding, it's yours for 10 years. We'll see it for seven, and we'll start the conversation again. In the meantime, get on with it.
GOB: If you were still at the CBC, what would you be telling (NHL Commissioner) Gary Bettman right now?
RS: I'd say, "Gary, change plans for dinner." If I were still there, I'd be talking to Gary right now for sure. Talking about what can we do to strengthen our relationship and to maintain a great partnership. What do they need from their point of view, aside from money, and what could we do to accommodate that and would help to grow the NHL brand and the Hockey Night In Canada brand. So I think that's the kind of conversation we'd have to have. The issue, I think, will be with what TSN is doing and what the big sports networks are doing. They can now get as big an audience for sports as the CBC, so if the NHL goes to TSN, their numbers are going up where they were at the CBC.
So now they can get the advertising revenue plus the cable fee. CBC can't put the public subsidy into buying professional sports, so it's only got the advertising revenue. If that's the case, you know that potentially (the private broadcasters) have the opportunity to outbid you. So you say, “well all right, if they were in a position to outbid us, what is it that we could do with the NHL over and above pure money to make this relationship of value to them?” That's the way the conversation needs to be playing. But that's a tricky conversation.
GOB: Is there enough there for the CBC to retain those rights after the 2014 season?
RS: I'm doubtful. It'll be very difficult for them because not only do the competitors have two revenue streams out of which to bid for the NHL rights, but also they're very preoccupied with sports rights because of the parents. Everybody thinks sports are the most important property because they're a real-time property. So when (Rogers and Bell) bought MLSE, they paid a lot of money for it. And they're prepared to spend a lot of money because they want to make sure that they have access to these rights for their other platforms. CBC, of course, doesn't have any other platforms in the same sense. So for reasons of overall strategy, plus they’re being better-heeled, I think that's going to be tough for the CBC to retain it.
GOB: With that facing the CBC, a CBC with no vertically integrated partners, no specialty services, facing cutbacks, if they don't get NHL rights, they have many millions of dollars less coming in. So what's on the air in 2015 on a Saturday night?
RS: It's a problem. You've got to fill 400 to 450 hours a year of primetime Canadian programming. They can't afford to put in new dramas and new comedies into those vacated slots, so I don't know what they're going to do. They may have to do a Repeat Night In Canada. It's a very, very difficult dilemma for them and a very tough situation.
GOB: Let's say you're offered the job of CBC president. First of all, do you take it? And if you do, what do you do?
RS: Whoever the next president of the CBC is, it won't be me. But whoever it is needs to have an understanding with the government as to what they want – not that the government should be involved in programming or journalism or anything like that, but it just really needs to say directionally the president and the government are comfortable with each other.
So if they want a big popular CBC, then hire somebody as a president who believes in a big, popular CBC and who knows how to do it. If they don't want that and they want a much more elite CBC, then hire a president who believes in that and knows how to do that. But if you don't have a clear conversation to make sure that everybody's on the same wavelength, it's a recipe for confusion and hard feelings.
GOB: There never has been, though, a clear recent conversation with the current or any of the recent preceding governments on what the CBC should be. There has never been that, and on top of that, it shocked me to hear in your book that Mr. Lacroix had never spoken to the PMO or the Heritage Minister before he was hired.
RS: My only thought for whoever is going to be the next – whoever is approached to take the job, they have to ensure that they have this conversation and that they are on the same wavelength as the government. Otherwise, it gets unworkable.
GOB: The last quarter of the book talked about “the plan” you and the other senior people were creating, and if you weren’t on the team and behind the plan, then you’d have to go. So that plan has come out as “Everyone, Every Way”. What do you think of what you've seen?
RS: As far as I can make out, the plan says is they'll have some signature events. I don't know what that means. They'll invest more in digital. Okay, that's fine. And that (the CBC) believes in regional broadcasting. Okay. The problem is that it still doesn't deal with the contradictions. Do you want to be big and popular? Do you want to be elite? Do you want to serve tiny little underserved places or have local services for the largest markets? What do you want? Do you believe that you should migrate into being a content company? Do you believe it should be a content company? What does that actually mean? What is it you want? If you had more money, what would you do?
If you were to do a plan, it would look almost like a prospectus for a business. Let's say you would come and invest in my business. You're going to say to me, "Okay, what's the business? Why do you have a competitive advantage and why does it matter? What are your rivals going to do? And what do you think you need to do to be successful, and how much money do you need to do that?"
That's a plan – and I think that's what we need for the CBC. You’ve got to be able to say, "Should CBC be in news? Why? There's lots of other people who are in news.” Surely you don't want the CBC doing things that the privates are prepared to do. But if they should be in news, then you have to define it with actual rules. Like the BBC, what's required is something that’s very clear, very transparent, actionable. But that's the way I kind of feel on this.
GOB: Do you see the current plan as more slogan than actual plan?
RS: I don't know what the current plan actually is… Like I said, if I asked you to invest money in my business – we ask the Canadian public every year to invest roughly a billion dollars in CBC. Then you would say to me, "Okay, so what's your business? Explain it to me. Explain to me why you should do that, why the privates won't do that. Explain to me where the rivalries are. Explain to me what the revenue streams are. Explain to me what the investments are that you need to be successful in the future. Explain to me how much that's going to cost. Explain to me how I'm going to keep you accountable for that." What I had hoped was that we would get to a plan like that, that would look like a plan like any other company asking people to invest significant money in. So we could keep it accountable.
GOB: What do you think of the thesis that we had in our study the CBC which said… now that we’ve got all these different ways to get content… this new media world helps the CBC get closer to its mandate of being all things to all Canadians?
RS: Well, I don't think its mandate should be all things to all Canadians because it can't be. That's impossible. That's why I keep saying what they have to do is be clear to what things they're going to be for Canadians. That's number one. Number two, is it easier to get to Canadians with all these new platforms? Absolutely. It's great.
If you're visiting from Yellowknife and you want to know what's going on. Bang, you're sitting here in Toronto, you're listening to CBC Yellowknife. Fabulous. I totally agree that's extraordinarily helpful in allowing the CBC to get out there, but it's not as though it reduces the cost of making shows. In some sense, the cost of making shows can get even more expensive when you have to be able to make them in such a way that they're going to fit to every format…
GOB: When I got to the end of the book, it left me with a sense that you still thought there was a ton of unfinished business that you wished you could go back and deal with.
RS: Oh, yeah. Sure there is. I didn't feel like I was finished. I didn't want to go. I liked where I was and wanted to keep doing what we were doing and doing more of it. All these things push you more in the direction of building a content company, strengthening further our entertainment stuff, deepening the news, exploring more of the old-fashioned French/English relations. All these things. Absolutely.
GOB: It's funny when went to Mr. Lacroix's office in Montreal, there was that costume of Bobino in there. And when I was reading through your passages about the constituency and fighting against that, I thought in my head that you should've recognized right away that he could be a card-carrying member with that particular decoration in his office.
RS: I know, I know. I'm a slow learner on these things.
