Canadian Chat → [Rant] TVO kills off SNAM

To be fair the show wasn't the same after Elwy Yost left the program, however TVO executives in the effort of cutting cost and reducing dependence on government funding they have decided to end Saturday Night At the Movies. While the change will supposedly save 2 million dollars, it will also put a number of people out of work. No word yet on what will fill the time slot. »www.theglobeandmail.com/ ··· 5231077/

Terrible shame. Elwy Yost was a real icon of the series and of the network back in the golden years. TVO itself dates back to the years when an enlightened Ontario government spent lavishly on post-secondary education, research, and the Ontario Educational Communications Authority. To put it in perspective, TVO could be funded for 33 years just on the money totally wasted by Dull-ton McStupid on the gas power plant fiasco.

Not only that, they shut down all analogue transmitters, leaving a lot of people without service.

Yes, they made that announcement months back, I have a feeling that after they have done that and completed their revision of programming the letter T in TVO will stand only for Toronto.

Ground breaking in its day, but bypassed now that there are networks exclusively for movies. Taxpayer dollars saved are better used elsewhere.

SNAM was never about just the movies.

Though, to be fair, now that Elwy Yost is gone it was nothing like it was during his days hosting the program.

Given the governance of Ontario, they might as well just kill the channel completely and show nothing but infomercials.

While there are other channels now, TVO did show a wider range of films, some historic, some old classics, some foreign, even Canadian made ones, and stuff you aren't going to see on the mainstream channels. Last year SNAM showed Black Book, a Dutch WW2 era film, best film I have seen in quite some time despite being in a foreign language and subtitles. The thing is a film like this is two and a half hours long, for a network to show it they would compress it for time, and then insert over an hour of ads (for a cable network, speciality channels would just speed it up to fit in a two hour time block).

Today's entertainment shows don't discus films, hell they don't discus anything, its just blitzed up gossip, innuendo and mostly a platform for marketing film/TV products, all delivered by plasticized, hyperactive hosts with the attentions span of gnats; I can't change the channel fast enough! At least in the golden years of SNAM you actually had complete dialogue between the host and an actor/director/producer. After Yost left they recycled much of that material into smaller sorter segments for filler but it still was interesting.

TVO has Black Book available for streaming »ww3.tvo.org/video/167865 ··· ook-2006