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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Colin & Justin back with more Cabin Pressure

The bonny boys of home renovation and decoration are back. Yes, Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan—better known to their legions of fans as Colin and Justin—return for Season 2 of the pair’s primetime Cabin Pressure project where they take turn a dilapidated cottage into a dream getaway starting Sunday night on Cottage Life.

In Season 1, the duo partnered with friends and purchased a run-down outpost and converted it into something magnificent, complete with massive bunkhouse, outdoor hot tub and a bank of windows in the main house overlooking a lake. But it didn’t take long for McAllister and Ryan to yearn for a property of their own. So they sold it and went hunting for another piece of paradise.

That hunt—and the subsequent adventures involved in transforming “chicken poo into chicken pie,” as McAllister so colourfully describes in Sunday’s first instalment—is the show’s focus. There is plenty of poo, thanks to the wild animals who took up residence in the cottage, and … nastier things.

“We find a dead beaver, dead raccoons, dead pigeons and dead squirrels,” McAllister describes while Ryan makes a face. “The worst was, we removed some drywall and found the corpses of several hundred dead mice. We found what we thought was black insulating foam and it was actually the fur from several hundred dead mice. The stench was unbelievable.”

“There was a damp spot on the ceiling that we thought was just a little bit of water damage,” Ryan recalls. “And we uncovered a huge wasp’s nest and a highway of rodents.” McAllister figures they got rid of 80 per cent of the original cottage, keeping some character intact while meeting their needs in a prime lakeside location in Ontario’s cottage country. That involved lifting the building up off its foundation so that a basement could be dug out, adding extra space in a mud room, TV room, laundry and storage and over $100,000 to the value of the property.

And while Ryan describes Season 1’s final product as “European Colin and Justin,” he says this season’s project is all about connectivity. Bedrooms are enhanced to feel like guests are sleeping in the forest and the cottage’s main great room is modernized. But McAllister is quick to point out that chunks of money spent to update windows, septic systems and add the basement meant tighter design budgets and being creative with existing items. Case in point: they turned the top five feet of the television antenna into a fab lamp, resurrected the waterlogged deck into a headboard and made tables from discarded wood.

“I think last season was a walk in the park,” Ryan says. “This season is bigger build and we’re more boisterous. I like to think this is our Adele second album: better than the first!”

Colin & Justin’s Cabin Pressure airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Cottage Life. Cottage Life is available for a free preview now.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Preview: SongbirdSOS examines declining numbers of feathered friends

My Toronto backyard is a playground for songbirds. We have a resident cardinal and his mate that have claimed our property as theirs. Robins, sparrows, chickadees and crows land on the lawn in droves. We’ve had woodpeckers on our dying tree in the back, and goldfinches in the flowers out front.

But we’re on the verge of losing our birds forever. That’s what SongbirdSOS—part of Thursday’s episode of The Nature of Things—posits. As York University’s Dr. Bridget Stutchbury says, species of birds still exist, but their numbers are way down. The wood thrush population in the Americas is down 62 per cent since 1966; the Baltimore Oriole is down over 45 per cent; the Bobolink has seen a 64 per cent decline. The question is, why?

Beautifully shot, SongbirdSOS suggests a few sobering answers. Mankind’s creation of artificial light has messed with the birds’ ability to migrate during the night, disorienting them and causing midair collisions. And, of course, we’ve constructed huge skyscrapers that songbirds fly into, a point driven home by FLAP  (Fatal Light Awareness Program) Canada when they lay out the bodies of hundreds of dead birds on a plain white sheet for all to see. Lost breeding and wintering habitats in rain forests, wetlands and boreal forests, oil pipelines and farm pesticides are contributing to declining song bird numbers, as well as house cats.

On the positive side, there are steps being taken to halt the dropping populations, including allowing birds to feast on hurtful insects in Costa Rican coffee fields and mandating building owners to switch off the lights at night. Hopefully enough changes will come in time to save the songbirds before their tunes cease.

The Nature of Things airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on CBC.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Interview: Cameron Mathison’s Game of Homes giveaway

It’s perhaps the coolest name ever devised for a competition show. It’s certainly one of the biggest giveaways in Canadian television.

Cameron Mathison hosts W Network’s impressively-titled Game of Homes (we’re pretty sure they cleared it with HBO), a series that pits teams of amateur home renovators against each other for the ultimate prize: a house with a chunk of land to put it on.

Debuting Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT, the Sarnia, Ont., born, former All My Children actor turned Good Morning America and Entertainment Tonight contributor challenges four couples to renovate a run-down home. Every week finds the couples fixing up one room in the home before they’re judged by folks like Jillian Harris and Todd Talbot from Love It Or List It Vancouver, Jonathan and Drew Scott, or Colin & Justin. One team per week pockets a prize for best room reno. In the finale, the judges weigh in on who they think deserve to win before viewers vote too. The winning pair not only win the house they renovated but are awarded a piece of Vancouver property to put it on.

How did you get involved in Game of Homes?
It’s funny, I was talking to my agent about this. I went to McGill where I majored in structural engineering and that was something I was going to do with my buddy, who was a designer. I was talking to my agent about that and, literally, the next day Game of Homes called and asked me to send them a tape. It’s something that just came my way that happens sometimes.

With your background, did part of you want to run over and take over the renovations from the competitors?
Like, a large part. Like, 95 per cent of me wanted to get in there either with my two cents or to get my hands dirty. To the point where I have actually pitched to turn the tables on the host of Game of Homes and I’ll do my own transformations with some twists and turns. That’s all I can say. [Note: that project is Cameron’s House Rules, debuting Tuesday on W Network’s YouTube page.]

I couldn’t wait to get to set every day and see what they had done. The challenges are tough, but they do a phenomenal job. I saw the job on paper and thought it was amazing but I wondered how the teams would be able to pull it off and they do.

W Network

The teaser was amazing, showing the four homes being brought on barges to sit on a Vancouver pier while the competition was going on. They have generators for the tools, but they don’t have heat and plumbing, do they?
No heat, no plumbing. It’s tricky.

Are they shown how to do the work beforehand?
Each team has a contractor working with them, but every decision is driven by the team. The contractor will help them with aspects that might be too technical. It depends.

Is there anything that surprised you about the show or the competitors as production rolled?
I think the prize is pretty amazing. A house and property in a city where that’s at a premium? That said, every week there are amazing prizes. Trips to Paris, trips to Japan, Caribbean cruises, spa weeks, it’s out of control. And yet, one of the most surprising things is that the teams became very, very close and were rooting for each other. It was really touching and fun to watch.

There must have been a lot of tears of frustration too. Lack of sleep!
Sleep deprivation was a big one. I was host and couples’ therapist. I had to come in and say, ‘Come on guys, you have to compromise and communicate to get through this.’ A lot of tears shed and animosity against the guest judges. It was so hard to announce a weekly winner because everyone wanted it so badly and no one was going home. Everyone was in it until the very end.

Game of Homes airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on W Network.

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Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Link: TV’s Deluged By Data Deluges The Senses

From James Bawden:

TV’s Deluged By Data Deluges The Senses
I think it was last summer that I suddenly realized my insular little world was fast changing.

There I was walking in my neighborhood one afternoon when I met up with an old friend who said she’d just sent her teenaged daughter to a special camp to break her twitter addiction. Seems the teen was notching 3,000 tweets and twitters a month even as her grades plunged accordingly. Then I saw a nun at St. Michael’s College out on the lawn reading her tablet. And bookstores I’d been frequenting for decades started disappearing.

If only I had been able to see John Freed’s new documentary Deluged By Data at that time I wouldn’t have been in such a funk. Continue reading.

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