Friday, October 21, 2011
Cassandra Szlarski for The Canadian Press
TORONTO From the very beginning, TV producer Kenneth Hirsch knew it would take extraordinary measures to adequately profile the lives of 18 extraordinary Canadians.
His plans would not be limited to a TV broadcast — it would involve books, tours, DVDs and an immersive online game for students.
Hirsch’s ambitious collection of biographies, Extraordinary Canadians, begins airing on Citytv this Sunday, five years after he began imagining the multiplatform venture.
“I think it’s probably the most exhaustive biography series done in Canada in 100 years and it took some time, but I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact,” Hirsch says in a recent interview from Saskatoon, where he cohosted an advance screening of an episode on Plains Cree chief Big Bear.
“I think Canadians will be surprised at how little they knew about these people … how dramatic their stories are and the massive contribution these extraordinary Canadians made to the world of art and diplomacy and music and medicine and literature.”
Each half-hour episode of Extraordinary Canadians is adapted from the Penguin Group (Canada) book series edited by John Ralston Saul. That literary venture debuted in 2008 with contemporary Canadian writers chronicling the lives of historical giants in minibiographies some 200 pages long.
They include M. G. Vassanji on Mordecai Richler, Nino Ricci on Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Jane Urquhart on Lucy Maud Montgomery, Lewis DeSoto on Emily Carr and Charlotte Gray on Nellie McClung.
The books followed the similar Penguin Lives collection in the U.S., which Hirsch says made him think, “Why is there no Canadian series?”
Read full article here.