Townbeat airs on CBC (Atlantic only) Friday, Janurary 23 at 7 p.m. Newfoundland time (6:30 in rest of Atlantic Provinces and parts of Labrador).

Town Beat! Your Eye On You!

Paul Moth hosts Town Beat!, a magazine-style show on civic affairs and culture produced at Cable 62, the community channel in the fictional town of Burgton, a medium-sized, middle Canadian municipality known for its once great arts college and its extra-maximum security prison.

Poised between urban and rural life, alternately resembling Kingston, Sackville, Penticton, and Lennoxville, Burgton is "meta-Canadian", and Town Beat! is a satire on the "ways" of Canada.

The Paul Moth character is urbane, witty and opinionated, though personable and diplomatic as befitting a host. Paul is "hip but humbled", a bruised veteran of a checkered career in the entertainment industry that bottomed out in substance abuse and trouble with the law. Paul's rocky road to recovery (recounted in his published memoir of the same name) has been paved with small market media jobs, Town Beat! being the latest.

Episodes of Town Beat! will be made up of three- to five-minute field reports and studio interviews, combined with cable ephemera ("It's a Burgton Fact", PSA's, promo's for other Cable 62 shows, etc.). Half the segments will be features with one-time characters, like the German olfactory artist who is presenting her work at the local gallery. The other half will develop recurring characters like the town archivist, the local librarian, the station manager, the activist artist, and the town's affable extremist mayor.

The target audience for Town Beat! is young and savvy. The show will cultivate that audience not only through its edgy, media-literate humour, but also by intermittently featuring real, up-and-coming bands, and by developing a high-profile, state-of-the-art web-site in tandem with the show.

It should be noted that viewers will not be watching a show about the making of Town Beat!. They will be watching Town Beat! itself. Much in the manner of The Great Eastern, this is a straight-faced, yet absurdly comic send-up of our culture, and the way the media reports it.


This week on Townbeat!

Paul and the gang review the Au Gratin, latest novel from Jean-Phillipe Beauchemin Laplante. Ou-la-la!
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