Pressing replay on MuchMusic Documentary on music channel even charmed skeptical Electric Circus host Monika Deol By: Eva Wasney Posted: 6:46 AM CST Monday, Nov. 27, 2023 Last Modified: 12:36 PM CST Monday, Nov. 27, 2023 Updates

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When Monika Deol heard there was a MuchMusic documentary in the works, she was skeptical.

It wasn’t the first time the former VJ had been asked to look back on her time with the popular Canadian music channel and she was hesitant to take part in a project that was overly glossy or nostalgic.

“I think that MuchMusic is a really complicated story,” Deol says over the phone. “You would have to have a 10-part series to really get MuchMusic — it’s that deep.”

While Sean Menard’s feature, 299 Queen Street West: The MuchMusic Experience, clocks in at just under two hours long, the director’s approach felt unique. Instead of “where are they now” on-camera interviews, the perspectives of hosts and staffers are included as narration over archival footage.

It’s a format Deol believes offers an unvarnished, behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to work at the scrappy upstart.

“You’re going to get the substance and the relevance as to why Much mattered and then we’re going to show people the proof. I think, overall, (Menard) did a really good job because what he did was distinctive,” she says.

The documentary, which premièred at SXSW this summer, covers the heyday of MuchMusic from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

Menard’s goal was to preserve a piece of Canadian music history and introduce younger generations to the personalities “who helped reshape, influence and change music journalism,” despite low budgets and little training.

The film includes interviews with the likes of Deol, Rick Campanelli, Steve Anthony, Erica Ehm, Sook-Yin Lee, George Stroumboulopoulos, Michael Williams and others.

Deol and Campanelli are in Winnipeg tonight for a local screening of 299 Queen Street West at the Centennial Concert Hall — the last stop on the film’s cross-country tour.

The event will include a Q&A discussion and meet-and-greet with the hosts.

“It’s like going to a concert,” Deol says of the screening event. “It’s really cool to see it on a big screen. It’s really cool to see it in a room full of people.”

The local tour stop is a homecoming of sorts for Deol, who was born in India and grew up in Beausejour and Winnipeg. Despite family and cultural expectations to pursue a traditional professional career, she was passionate about working in the Canadian music scene.

Deol got her start as a club DJ in the city before making the leap to television in Toronto. Getting hired at MuchMusic was a life-changing experience.

“The energy in that place blew my socks off. For the first time ever, I felt like I belonged. I’m not an outsider in this place; it’s just a whole bunch of outsiders,” she says.

Surrounded by a diverse group of colleagues, Deol hosted the station’s news programs and its popular live dance show, Electric Circus, from 1988 to 1996. The show was an unapologetic celebration of club culture that saw passersby pulled off the street to dance alongside DJ sets and live performances by the likes of Queen Latifah, Daft Punk and Britney Spears.

For Deol, the show was about the people who showed up to strut their stuff.

‘It was like a mini (United Nations) on the dance floor,” she says, adding that she continues to book EC-themed gigs and events 27 years after stepping away from the show.

“We had every nationality, every gender, every shape, size, look. It was so inclusive that way and that wasn’t happening a lot on North American television.”

Taking part in 299 Queen Street West has allowed Deol to reflect honestly on an intense yet rewarding period of her life, during which she describes being a workaholic who was on-air seven days a week. The documentary offers fans a perspective on the politics and inner workings of a television station that put CanCon on a pedestal, she says.

“I think what MuchMusic did is it gave Canada a star system,” Deol says. “It gave Canadian artists a chance, it championed them, it glamourized them. It brought them to relevance in a way that very few other mediums did at the time.”

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @evawasney