NACTV proud to offer community programming

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This article was published 17/04/2011 (5309 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEEPAWA — The Invisible Man, a.k.a. Don Phillips, wrapped in gauze and wearing dark glasses, is in studio introducing the latest instalments of "Horror Theatre," which airs on Friday nights.

April is "Celebrating Women Month," where women are celebrated with circa-1950s B-movies such as "Wasp Woman," Queen of the Amazons, and early Roger Corman flick Swamp Women, in which "women try to kill each other while wearing skimpy clothing," the Invisible Man deadpans into the camera.

You can almost hear Count Floyd howl.

But it’s not SCTV. It’s NACTV, or Neepawa Access Community TV, to the uninitiated.

Neepawa is the little town with its own TV station. It airs about 12 hours of programming a day on Access Channel 12. The station is run by two paid staff and 40 volunteers. And it’s one of the last bastions of community television.

What ever happened to community access TV?

Outside of pockets like Neepawa, it has just about vanished. Whereas community access once meant community members taking over studios and producing shows on a dedicated channel, cable companies eventually took back the channels. Paid staff began producing the shows instead of the community.

"Communities lost control of the media," said Ivan Traill, general manager of NACTV.

"Winnipeg had some of the most radical, fun, interesting, goofy public access shows I’ve seen (shows like "Math With Marty," "2 Sports Guys," and early Guy Maddin). That went on until the late 1990s," said Cathy Edwards, a national crusader for public access television, based out of the Ottawa-Hull area.

Then, pay TV service providers "managed to find all kinds of ways to evade it," Edwards said.

There were originally about 300 community TV channels on cable in Canada. Only 119 remain. Fewer than 20 of those channels have community groups producing 50 per cent or more of the programs, like they do in Neepawa.

In 1999, Shaw had public access studios in Winnipeg, Flin Flon, Thompson, Morden, Portage la Prairie, and Selkirk. Only Winnipeg remains.

Alex Park, director of programming for Shaw in Calgary, said Shaw began to produce its own access programs in part because community-produced shows had few viewers.

"I think viewers expectations of the local channel began to increase and they wanted to see programs with decent lighting and decent sound and hosts who knew what they were doing," he said.

Shaw abandoned the smaller studios in part because access television became more about shooting programs out in the community like kids’ hockey games, instead of talking heads in a studio.

But stations like NACTV, which has a studio and uses it extensively, think the studios were just a nuisance cable companies wanted to be rid of. (Neepawa is part of the Westman Communications Group cable co-operative, based in Brandon.)

"It’s a pain in the ass (for TV service providers) to have jerkwater places like us. It’s easier to have a van and go out and film community fairs," said Traill.

Loose cables hang down from the ceiling like water moccasins, at the NACTV station in downtown Neepawa. Three TV monitors, purchased for $100 each at The Bargain Store, play with the sound off. Spools of silver DVD discs, labelled in black felt marker, are everywhere like sprouted mushrooms. NACTV has a tight budget and buys almost all its equipment, used, on ebay at one third the full cost.

"The whole idea for community access TV in the first place was cable companies were to make available cameras and equipment and an outlet for anyone in the community who wanted to produce programming, and they would put it on air on a channel. A few of us still operate like that," Traill said.

NACTV will cover breaking news. When a severe downpour caused flash flooding in Neepawa last June, Traill, who turns 80 this year, shot footage of the flooding and road washouts and put the information on air as fast as possible.

Traill is the driving force at NACTV. He retired from teaching 25 years ago and began working nine-to-five, and many evenings and weekends, as NACTV station manager.

"I’m a full-time volunteer," he said. People of Neepawa just call him Mr. TV.

"Ivan goes, goes, goes," said Deb Stemkoski, NACTV program director, a paid position.

Traill once shot 19 hours of baby eagles hatching in a nest and taking their first flights. Stemkoski had the unenviable task of editing it down to 90 minutes. He shoots all kinds of other wildlife, including foxes. They have two hours of filler they run of baby fox pups playing.

"People love that stuff," said Traill.

But not as much as they love seeing themselves, or their kids, or their grandkids, on TV. That never gets old, Traill said.

How is NACTV financed?

There are 19 small communities in the Westman Communications Group, a cable co-operative started in 1977. It includes towns like Souris, Boissevain, Carberry, Russell, and so on. (Brandon is the 19th and has its own more developed access channel.)

Westman splits close to five per cent of its gross revenues between the 19 community channels, said Neil Thomson, Westman manager of marketing. That’s more than the two per cent that TV providers are required to set aside for community access, under the Radio Television Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission. As a rural co-op, Westman has a stronger mandate to support community programming.

Even so, Westman payment to rural community stations works out to just $6,000 to $8,000 per year for a town like Neepawa. No one can run a TV station on that. So NACTV does a lot of fundraising, such as its annual telethon. NACTV took in $11,000 in five hours last February, in a town of less than 4,000 people.

NACTV also obtained a broadcast license 15 years ago — meaning people in the area can pick it up with rabbit ears — which also allows NACTV to run commercials like national Home Hardware ads, or locally produced commercials for retailers like Neepawa’s Chicken Corral. NACTV runs six to eight commercials per day, said Traill.

It adds up to a $120,000 operating budget.

With that, NACTV produces 40 per cent of all programming that comes out of the 18 community access channels in western Manitoba (excluding Brandon, which has twice as much funding as the 18 other community access channels combined).

 

» Winnipeg Free Press