They billed it as "the television event of the year," and I guess they weren't far off. After all, it was a better way to spend four hours than the previous week's awful Oscar-thon.
Still, the CBC's grandiose miniseries, Trudeau, left me and many others with decidedly mixed feelings.
That, I suppose, was partly the point, since the man himself left us the same way. Fittingly, the series began on Easter Sunday and ended on April Fool's Day, thereby encompassing Canadians' views of the subject - Trudeau as everything from political saviour to reckless jester.
And I don't regret spending two evenings immersed in the nostalgia it evoked, though I thought the silly scenes of Trudeaumania (shot in the style of the Beatles' Hard Day's Night) were less effective than the use of vintage CBC logos. (Remember the rainbow butterfly?)
Childhood memories
Unlike some here at the Sun - which in many ways was born of anti-Trudeaumania - I have time for Trudeau, probably because my memories of him are wrapped in the romantic haze of childhood and adolescence. He was the first PM I was aware of (I was 7 when he first took office), the first one I went to see on the campaign trail (out of sheer curiosity about his flower-child wife, Margaret), the first one I met (as a nerdy 16-year-old at a student Parliament in Ottawa), and the first one I got to write about as a journalist.
For better or worse, he shaped my view of Canada and my expectations of what this country and its leaders should be. Not that he necessarily lived up to those expectations, you understand, but he certainly set them higher than the current crowd.
I'm no TV critic, but here's what struck me about the series:
Colm Feore was Pierre Trudeau - he had the voice, the steely stare and the shrug down cold. But both he and the script failed to give us a coherent narrative of Trudeau's life or to explain what he was all about. Because of this, I doubt many of those too young to remember Trudeau (say, anyone under 35) would have bothered to watch - a pity, because they're the ones who should know what it was like to have such a colourful, if infuriating, leader.
The ending - a chance meeting between the estranged Maggie and Pierre immediately after Trudeau's triumph over Rene Levesque at the 1982 constitutional conference (yawn) - was awful. Why not show their real reunion, at the tragic funeral for their son, Michel, just a few years ago?
Two things, though, really hit home. First, Trudeau's handling of the October Crisis of 1970 - "We will not negotiate with terrorists" - remains his finest hour, and resounds as much, if not more, today as it did then.
Second, the constitutional stuff, which is exactly the opposite. I remember following all those conferences in excruciating detail - I even went to Parliament Hill to watch Trudeau and Jean Chretien (portrayed in the series as far more articulate than he is today) and the Queen sign the "repatriated" document. Yet now it all seems so irrelevant. The thought that so much public effort and money was spent on things like "amending formulas" at a time when inflation, unemployment, taxes and the national debt (the most indelible Trudeau legacy) were rising out of control, boggles the mind.
Good numbers
Ratings released yesterday show nearly two million of us tuned in to Trudeau - just over two million the first night and 1.75 million the second. That's pretty good, we're told, for a Canadian drama. (By comparison, 4.6 million of us watched the Oscars.)
Then again, just last month, CTV pulled in 1.5 million viewers for its movie Tagged: The Jonathan Wamback Story - a real-life crime story that exposed the failures of youth justice in Canada; in other words, the kind of drama the CBC would never do. And it did so without the benefit of the CBC's massive public funding, its promos during the Olympics and its expensive ad campaign in movie theatres.
Looking back, I now understand much of the fury against Trudeau. Oh, I still admire his vision of a bilingual and strongly united Canada - and there's a certain charm about a politician who talks about a "just society." (Do any of today's crop of leaders, particularly the present PM, even have a vision of Canada, never mind the ability to capture our imagination with it?).
But I'm astonished when I reflect on his Central Canadian arrogance, his obsession with academic subjects instead of bread-and-butter concerns of Canadians, and his obliviousness to the waste and mismanagement of our money.
Which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up how I feel about the CBC.
