Chris Selley: Another pathetic CBC attempt at humour

New CBC/APTN show, Northland Tales is an unscripted, half-hour comedy series where an Indigenous activist trio uses pranks as a form of social action, says columnist Chris Selley. Photo by Eric Wynne /Staff

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“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” is a 20-year-old movie about an idiot reporter from Kazakhstan government state media on tour in the United States. Some people my age love it, and tend to quote it ad nauseum. It was critically acclaimed. I hated every smug, smirking, mean-spirited, easy, unfunny, pointless second of it.

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For those blissfully unfamiliar, think of Rick Mercer’s (also insufferable) “Talking to Americans” bit. Basically it’s an opportunity to mock friendly, well-meaning Americans — real people, not actors — who aren’t as fancy or worldly as we think they should be. But Borat’s creator Sacha Baron Cohen is British and went to Haberdashers’ Boys’ School and Cambridge, so it’s much nastier.

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“Northland Tales is an unscripted, half-hour comedy series where an Indigenous activist trio uses pranks as a form of social action. With outrageous humour, they flip the script on modern and historical injustices against Indigenous peoples, offering a fresh, timely perspective on the prank genre,” according to the Indigenous Screen Office, which received more than $13 million in federal government funding and disbursed most of that to Indigenous-led productions.

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This allegedly involves interviews conducted under false pretenses. It also allegedly involves at least one member of the U.S. left-wing prankster group The Yes Men, which would be simply hilarious. They couldn’t manage this show without American input? Really?

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One target was Lindsay Shepherd, the former Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant who was infamously struggle-sessioned in 2017 for showing students an entirely inoffensive clip from TV Ontario’s The Agenda that featured Jordan Peterson. She has more recently made the news for objecting to the display of the residential-school “Survivors’ Flag” at the B.C. legislature, arguing it perpetuates falsehoods about graves on school sites. That got her fired as a communications officer for the Conservative Party of B.C.

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Frances Widdowson, a former professor at Mount Royal University who is often (like Shepherd) accused of residential school “denialism,” is the other major target who has come forward alleging she was misled about the nature of the interview the producers wanted to conduct, and what they were going to do with it.

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I don’t mean this as a criticism of these women, but neither Shepherd nor Widdowson is particularly high-profile at all. The whole thing comes off as even easier and cheaper than Borat.