Thank You Kindly: A Tribute to Due South

Today marks the birth, in 1920, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and so to mark the occasion I’m going to write about Due South.

Right now, any Mounties reading this may well be throwing up their hands in disgust. I apologise. I know that Due South is not representative of the methods or practices of the RCMP, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m trivialising the work carried out by a respected law enforcement agency. But I can’t help it; Due South is one of my favourite TV shows and I want to celebrate it.

(I’d also be stunned if it turned out that any Mounties were reading this, but if you are, please leave a comment!)

Due South, which ran from 1994 to 1999, is the story of an upright Mountie who, after uncovering a Canadian conspiracy that cost the life of his father, finds himself exiled to Chicago, where he works with the local police force. Now, I’m aware that synopsis doesn’t sound great – even the cast admits that, when they first heard the pitch, they were reluctant to be involved, simply because it sounds, well, a little uninspiring.

Pitches can be deceptive. For instance, that one line description fails to mention that Constable Benton Fraser owns a deaf wolf. Nor does it mention that the ghost of his father regularly shows up to dispense largely unhelpful advice. It doesn’t mention that three of the supporting cops are called Huey, Dewey and Louis. And while it’s a culture-clash comedy, Fraser’s incredible politeness and dedication plays into every stereotype people have about Canadians when compared with Americans. Sure, Due South is a cop show, but it also fits into that small genre of shows where the use of stereotypes is less offensive laziness and more a calculated effort to embody the positive values everyone associates with a country -  The Avengers (Steed and Mrs Peel, that is, not Captain America and Thor) is another good example, and there’s a strong current of it running through Doctor Who and The West Wing. Due South may be funny, but you don’t find yourself laughing at Fraser – you find yourself holding doors open and saying “thank you” a lot more. Because Due South makes being polite the path to awesomeness.

The show’s heart is probably the major component in its success. It’s interested in the little people – pizza delivery boys, department store Santas, struggling small businesses. Fraser becomes the hero of those who, in any other cop show, would be background extras. Like the politeness, this is a source of humour, but not the butt of jokes – while Fraser’s desire to help a random person on the street exasperates his partner, Detective Vecchio, it’s Fraser who’s played as correct, the moral centre of the show. The ‘little people’ are as deserving of respect, politeness and dignity as anyone else. It’s not an earth-shattering message, but it’s one that deserves more airplay.

Aside from the writing, the casting is also great. Paul Gross and David Marciano were fantastic as Fraser and Vecchio, the buddy-buddy core of the show. Honourable mention also goes to Leslie Nielsen, who not only plays up to his comedic talent, but also reminds us that he started out as a serious actor. This sort of show stands or falls on the charisma of the cast, and while Gross was not only a great leading man, he and his fellow actors managed to turn something they thought might have been stupid into somthing loveable and loved.

One final thought – Fraser’s uncanny ability to bring to mind a piece of random trivia that helps solve a case is attributed to his grandparents being librarians, a rarely mentioned but currently quite relevant piece of characterisation. Benton Fraser is awesome because he spends time in libraries. How can you not love this show?

 

In Praise of Tour Guides: World Tourism Day 2011

(As today is the UN’s World Tourism Day, I thought I’d repost this old entry…)

As I may have mentioned here in the past, I’m an information junkie. However, I’m an information junkie cursed with a terrible Swiss Cheese of a memory, possibly caused by an old gypsy woman, and therefore I’m a fan of tour guides.

(The Glass Floor in the CN Tower can hold the weight of 14 hippos.)

We spent a lot of time on tour buses this week, mainly because a ticket lasts for something like five days and thus it’s easy transport around an unfamiliar city. The great thing about this is that it also comes with a commentary and, as I’m the sort of guy who sits and listens to DVD commentary tracks, that’s a selling point.

(The horses in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are classed as officers, and get badge numbers and official funerals.)

I enjoyed the Toronto tour guides a lot (ShopDineTour Toronto, for a free plug), not least because they pull off the sort of trick that I just can’t – they know what they’re talking about, they can remember it, and they can communicate it in an entertaining way. This is the sort of thing I struggle with – my brain has a communication and information retention firewall installed, and so when the guide on the way to Niagara Falls is reciting the history of Toronto AND making it interesting, I’m in awe. He just seemed to know vast amounts about John Graves Simcoe, the guy who founded Toronto, and yeah, sure, he’s making a living from reciting this stuff but it’s something I could never do. I’d get the script all tangled up in my brain, and then knock myself out on a low-hanging branch.

(Casa Loma, a mansion/castle just outside of downtown Toronto, was used as the filming location for Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the first two X-Men movies… but not the third.)

That said, I also want to give a shout-out to guides from other cities – some the people who first got my respect as guides were the US National Park rangers on Alcatraz Island, who not only knew all about the old prison there but also the oysters and fish that live around the island. It’s a cool, outdoorsy job, but it’s also got a sense of the geek spirit, in the most postive way – the idea that this stuff is cool, it’s good to be enthusiastic about it, and there’s nothing wrong with communicating that enthusiasm to the people who pay to do the tour. It’s fun.

(Yonge Street is the longest street in the world, stretching 1896 miles out of Toronto. Many dispute its claim to this, however, but I don’t care.)

And don’t forget the drivers – heck, my main regret from Niagara Falls was that they didn’t give the driver a mic as well, because he was as clued up as the guide and had a fun double-act thing going on. We were near enough the front to hear this, but it was gold. The personalities made a pretty long journey that much more entertaining.

(The city was originally named York, but when New York got too big, the Canadians renamed it Toronto so there wouldn’t be comparisons.)

But for courtesy, friendliness and entertainment value, we probably have to give the award to the guide we saw a few times throughout the week, who recognised us and said hi, bothered to tell us when the bus times were so we didn’t end up inadvertantly stranded, and, while we guessed he was a bit geeky from his first MacGyver reference, the fact that he admitted to being a comic collector in front of a bus full of people gave him geek kudos. AND he had his Toronto knowledge. You can’t ask for more than that.

(Toronto is North America’s third largest film and TV filming location, after LA and New York.)

So if you’re ever in Toronto, check out the yellow buses. They’ll even give you a free map!

Toronto Smells! Follow-up ( #SmellyTO )

Apparently Toronto’s mystery smell is the fault of springtime. It’s always the quiet ones…

Toronto Smells! ( #SmellyTO )

No, please, Canadians please come back. I can personally vouch that Toronto didn’t smell when I was there last year. However, it seems that there’s a mysterious smell been tormenting the city this morning. But don’t despair, all great cities have their smelly moments – witness the Big Stink of London in 1858.

Not that I’m suggesting that Toronto is dirty like Victorian London. I love Toronto, certainly more than I love London…

Writer’s Block: Heroes and villains

What do you mean, ‘childhood’ (although if you want to stretch a definition of ‘superheroes’, then my childhood sci-fi heroes were Doctor Who and Optimus Prime…)?! I got into superheroes when I was a responsible adult and Forbidden Planet opened in Wolverhampton, around 1999-ish. My favourite superhero is Superman, the original and best. There are a bunch of reasons for that (not least because he went toe-to-toe with the Ku Klux Klan in real life), but here’s something I wrote a while back that sums up why (without actually summing anything up at all…):

I’ve spent the last week in Toronto, and I’m also a monumental geek. Those two facts may be evident from this blog, but they both collided this week. See, I own, and wear, a Superman t-shirt.

Toronto has a major, if under-reported Superman connection – it’s the inspiration for Metropolis, the character’s home city. Joe Shuster, the artist who created Superman along with writer Jerry Siegel, lived in Toronto for the first 10 years of his life, learning to draw and working as a paperboy for the Toronto Star – it’s no coincidence that when Clark Kent first got his gig as a reporter he worked for the Daily Star, although it was renamed as the Daily Planet within a couple of years.

Toronto is also home to the World’s Biggest Bookshop, which may be somewhat corporate, but hey, I’m a book geek, the place was calling to me. There I am, browsing the history section (I think), when an older guy spots my shirt:

“Superman fan, huh?”
“Oh hi, yeah, I am.”
“Up, up and away… Anyway, just wanted to say I like the shirt.”
“Cool, it gets a lot of comments.”
“Really? Glad I’m not coming across as being strange then.”

There’s a CTV News article on the Shuster-Toronto link, and Joe Shuster’s final interview, in which he talks about his background, was published in 1992; it seems to be a way of him restating the link between his most famous creation and his Canadian heritage. It’s a good interview, tinged with sadness and nostalgia. In some ways it’s a reminder of just how different the world was when Superman was created back in 1938.

We’re at the top of the CN Tower, the second tallest free-standing structure in the world. One of the coolest parts of this is the glass floor, 2.5 inches of reinforced glass that can, apparently, hold the weight of 14 hippos, although I think we need to get 14 hippos up there to check this out. The fact that it’s five times stronger than it needs to be doesn’t stop people from being scared of walking on it – after all, it’s looking straight down over 1000 metres, and if you’re scared of heights, it’s going to make you a bit twitchy. Me? I’m daft enough to be one of the people jumping on it.

A middle-aged lady, however, was scared, which is why she starts shouting “Superman, Superman!” at me. I end up having to hold her hand as she walks gingerly across the frame, with me telling her all the time that it’s perfectly safe, that they use this stuff in space shuttles. I think she felt better with the Superman logo being around, even if it was a fat Brit wearing it – I ended up having my photo taken.

So maybe Superman, one of the USA’s archetypal heroes, owes something to Canada too. I like that idea, but maybe that’s because it fits my stereotypes – I always see Constable Benton Fraser, who’s a character seemingly popped out of Canada’s subconcsiousness in much the same way that the Doctor popped out of Britain’s, as having Superman-y characteristics. I like the idea that Toronto, which has cemented itself as one of my favourite cities, has also influenced one of my favourite characters. It’s kinda cool.

We’re riding around on one of Toronto’s many tour buses (that’s another blog – don’t worry, Canadian tour guides, it’s going to be a nice one), and this is something like the third time we’ve done the loop and I’m a bit jetlagged, so I’m zoning out a little. I notice that, as we’re held up in traffice on one of Toronto’s many streets filled with cafes and restaurants, a guy dressed as a chef is pointing at me. To be honest, at first I try to ignore him – I’m from Britain and therefore have an instinctive need to not make eye contact with pointing strangers – but it becomes impossible. As I look at him, he draws an imaginary triangle on his chest, pointis at my shirt then gives me a thumbs up. I wave and he goes back to work, leaving me slightly bemused.

The Toronto-Superman connection is relatively understated, although comic fans are familiar with it. There aren’t plaques memorialising it, although there was a postage stamp in the 1990s, and there’s a Joe Shuster Way in west Toronto (I’m gutted I didn’t find out about that until I was back home). Then there are the wider links – Canadian Margot Kidder, who played Lois in the Christopher Reeve movies, used to date former prime minister Pierre Trudeau; a scene in Superman II was filmed on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

Talking of which… On the day we went to Niagara Falls I wore my Batman t-shirt. I got no comments. None. Nada. In fact, of all the clothes I own, the only one that ever gets comments is my Superman t-shirt.

So why do you think that is?”