Miskatonic University PressI’m listening to The Great Eastern again. It’s not well known now, but it’s a masterpiece. It ran on CBC Radio in the late 1990s and every episode, plus background material and some scripts, is available on The Great Eastern web site. The shows are also available from the Internet Archive, but I realized it should be easier for everyone to get the show, so I made this:
RSS feed for The Great Eastern.
Put that into your podcast program and it will get every episode of the show for you (from the Internet Archive, so as not to put a strain on the site made by Gerry Porter; I was sorry to learn he died in 2016).
I’ve written about the show before, and refer you to this post from 2014 for more background.
The Great Eastern, “Newfoundland’s cultural magazine,” was a show on the BCN (Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland), which CBC Radio picked up sometimes to carry across Canada. The show was hosted by Paul Moth and featured book reviews with Kathleen Hanrahan, a political panel, documentaries (there’s a great one on Economology), music, interviews and features on artists such as Ned Brocklehurst and Hugh Kuva, promos for other shows (such as “Look It’s” and children’s program “Uncle Jack’s Shack”), and more. The BCN (“coal-fired radio” built with Krupps-Funkenscheit technology) broadcast in Newfoundland at 520 on the long wave and had a rich history; every episode had a “From the Vault” feature where Director of Radio Ish Lundrigan would play some tape from the station archives, sometimes from old episodes of The Great Eastern when it was hosted by Ron Gellately. The show was firmly grounded in Newfoundland culture and history, often featuring people from the University of Newfoundland at St. John’s (the UNSJ) and in later seasons having a special on Oougoubomba, Newfoundland’s failed African colonial experiment. The listener gets a good picture of life in St. John’s, with its popular local candy Furlong Knobs, restaurants such as Chez Ed, and the fancy Hotel Palmer Hotel. Canadians could participate in the “What’s That Noise from Newfoundland?” contest.
But none of this is real. Well, almost none. St. John’s and Newfoundland are real. There was a Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland. The musicians and bands played were real. Pretty much everything else was made up. The Great Eastern writers and performers built a complete alternate Newfoundland universe (one where Canada is treated as a separate nation) and played it absolutely straight. To fully appreciate The Great Eastern you need to be ready to play the game. Accept it as true.
It is incredibly funny, going from very smart and biting satire to rude schoolboy jokes.
If you listen to podcasts and like long-form narrative shows, and are willing to enter an unfamiliar but fascinating world—Newfoundland—you should try this show. It was nineties radio and sounds like it (it’s mono, not stereo) but that shouldn’t put you off, and the sound design within that constraint is outstanding. (Always listen right to the end of a show, for community announcements from Rita Molloy or an update from weather watchdog Erling Biggs.)
It will take a while to go through all the episodes. Enjoy. While I’m at it, I’m enjoying reading Strangers and Others: The Great Eastern by Stan Dragland. I was at the Toronto book launch in 2016 and my copy is signed by Dragland and Paul Moth (“yours in coal-fired radio”).
(Paul Moth was played by Mack Furlong, one of the writers along with Edward Riche and Steven Palmer, both of whom also performed. Steven Palmer is now a history professor at the University of Windsor.)
CBC disliked the show because it was “too dense.” It wanted something that didn’t require so much attention, that was a little “less foreground.” The Great Eastern addresses this. And it does require attention, but it deserves it, and rewards it. Attend to the shows as you would an audiobook or straight radio drama and you will get all the more from it. Dragland’s book brings a lot of this out. You don’t need to catch all the details, but if you do, your appreciation will grow to match the levels of old admirers like me.
For example, the regular political panel is there right in the first episode, with J. Richard Candow, Ariel Flint and Carl Johnson. Johnson is always on the phone from some other location and hardly ever gets a word in. The way he’s a second behind the others, and usually ignored, is hilarious. But there’s an obscure gag: he is “Valdmanis Chair in Political Economy at UNSJ.” This would be an endowed chair at a non-existent university, named after Alfred Valdmanis, the Nazi-collaborating Latvian who was made Director General of Economic Development in 1950 and put in charge of industrializing Newfoundland. By 1954 he was in jail for corruption. (For more, see Alfred Valdmanis and the Politics of Survival by Gerhard P. Bassler.) Valdmanis is real but seems fictional. Ari Uldmanis, BCN’s Director of Engineering, is fictional but seems real, though whether you’re suspicious of his German accent and how he emigrated to Newfoundland after World War Two is up to you.
Librarian and archivist readers will appreciate this, from season four episode two, in a promotion for BCN’s “University of the Air.”
Shhh! This Monday at ten, pay a visit to the information desk when University of the Air presents Dr. Dana Burton’s “Introduction to Library Science:” “The Joy of Reference,” “Put a Hold on This,” and “Mummy, What’s a Card Catalogue?” Dr. Burton also looks at library administration in the current fiscal climate: outstanding fines and the use of goon squads, turning user data into direct marketing millions, and profitable things to do with those old books that nobody reads any more. Lost in the stacks? Don’t get all dewey-eyed and decimal about it. You’re overdue for University of the Air’s “Introduction to Library Science,” this Monday at ten o’clock, only on BCN 520.
Turning user data into direct marketing millions. That is one damned fine throwaway gag from 1997.
If I’m ever in St. John’s I’ll go to Memorial University (which is real) and look at the fonds for the show in the university archives. Notes from the description of the collection say:
The Great Eastern aired until 1999, when, during the Corporation’s cost-cutting process, CBC’s Variety Department offered to move the show to the afternoon as part of Definitely Not the Opera, considered by the creators to be “a soulless program that none of us had any respect for.” The writers decided to move on “after the most rewarding creative experience of our lives.”
It’s all there for you to enjoy.
For background, check The Great Eastern on Wikipedia, and it’s worth looking into the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. The province only joined Canada in 1949; before that it had been a British colony then a dominion of the Empire. In the Great Depression the unelected Commission of Government was set up—I think this is referred to as “the dictatorship” in the show—and stayed in power until a slim majority of people voted in a 1948 referendum to join Canada. The Great Eastern has several references to Joey Smallwood “surrendering to the Canadians.” All this, and the way the show was done with a completely straight face, led to confusion among Canadian listeners about how much of it was real. Who’s to say?