Colourful cast of community characters Winnipeg public television archives a treasure trove of creativity By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:50 PM CST Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/12/2023 (963 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re a Winnipegger of a certain vintage, you might remember flicking on the TV and stumbling across the Pollock & Pollock Gossip Show, starring the brother-and-sister duo of “Nifty” Natalie Pollock and “Rockin’’ Ron Pollock. Or maybe the heavy-metal sock puppets on Metal Inquisition, hosted anonymously by Terrible Dog and Fearless Pig. Or perhaps an early production from local cinematic co-conspirators Greg Klymkiw and Guy Maddin.

These are among the colourful local heroes immortalized in Winnipeg Babysitter, a hybrid curatorial/archival/expanded cinema project that documents — and celebrates — the golden age of Winnipeg public-access television by Montreal-based, Winnipeg-born-and-bred artist Daniel Barrow.

Barrow brings the project back to the Dave Barber Cinematheque on Saturday. The curated archival footage will be screened and Barrow will perform live commentary using an overhead projector.

In the late ’70s and throughout the 1980s, Winnipeg saw a boom in public-access programming, owing to a mandate that cable companies had to provide community access as a condition of their licence.

Yes, there were religious and political programs, but there was also the absolutely gonzo magic that can happen when anyone with a vision (and some moxie) can access airtime and professional production services.

“Just the whole idea of community-access television, and the idea that television’s a media that’s part and parcel of a participatory democracy, is really inspiring,” Barrow, 52, says during at interview at Cinematheque while clips from Winnipeg Babysitter flick silently on the screen.

“I’m also really inspired by renegade artists who have no institutional support but just are motivated purely by a creative impulse and passion.”

In a sense, these performance-based public-access creators — such as Winnipeg performance artist Glen Meadmore, who just wordlessly picked his acne for 30 minutes on TV each week on a show called The Goofers — walked so that today’s TikTok and Instagram personalities could run.

“A lot of these artists really are innovators of the idea of an influencer or an independent streamer, but the difference is that all of this was viewed by happenstance because it was on Channel 11,” Barrow says.

The seeds of this project were planted when Barrow was a TV-obsessed kid growing up in Winnipeg.

“I’ve always been a cinemaniac. These were all programs that I watched as a kid, so in many ways this is a program that was curated from childhood memory,” he says.

In the 1990s, Barrow was working at Video Pool as the distribution co-ordinator and was in charge of the video art archive when he heard an upsetting rumour: Shaw had just purchased Videon/VPW, and the public-access television archive had been destroyed.

“But it occurred to me it may be part of my job description to actually see if I could reconstitute this archive,” Barrow recalls.

And so, he started putting out feelers. Remember, this is pre-social media; it’s not as if he could track down and message creators on Facebook.

But Winnipeg is a small town. “I only had to ask, like, two people before someone knew someone who knew that person.”

Barrow combed the VHS collections of the original producers, television collectors, fans and enthusiasts to create his archive, which became a formal curatorial project in 2006 when a version of Winnipeg Babysitter was shown at the Garbage Hill Festival at Cinematheque. That iteration of the program was more than four hours long.

“I accumulated quite a lot (of footage) mostly, like I say, just using word of mouth and the phone book when that didn’t work,” Barrow says.

While the idea of public-access television is not unique to Winnipeg, this collection certainly is, and yet Barrow has found international audiences for it. A 90-minute version of Winnipeg Babysitter has been shown at La Maison Rouge in Paris, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Light Industry in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The iteration that will be shown on Saturday debuted at the Vancouver International Film Festival in October.

“It didn’t even occur to me that anyone outside of Winnipeg would be interested because I thought nostalgia would be the principal motivating factor for people to come out and see it,” Barrow says.

But when he took Winnipeg Babysitter to Milwaukee after he was asked to curate a program, he couldn’t believe the reception.

“People were just laughing as if they had seen it 20 or 30 years ago.”

As a multimedia artist, Barrow is best known for his overhead-projection performances, in which he essentially does live animation by layering images over top of one another.

Using the overhead projector in Winnipeg Babysitter is a way to add commentary — such as biographies of each television producer and personality — without turning it into a documentary.

“Another thing that I think is really interesting about (public-access television) is the ’80s formalism of everything, so I didn’t want to interject contemporary text on top of it,” Barrow says.

“So I thought, well, I’ll just use the overhead projector to provide context on a separate screen.”

Winnipeggers will also be able to own this piece of city history: Winnipeg Babysitter will be available on a limited-edition Blu-ray for the first time.

Without Barrow, this footage might have remained lost forever, archived only in people’s basements and memories.

“It’s such a portrait of a specific community and a specific place in time,” Barrow says. “And that’s worth preserving.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com