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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Preview: Blood, Sweat & Tools celebrates DIY disasters

I was a little confused when the first few seconds of Discovery’s latest home building competition, Blood, Sweat & Tools—debuting Monday on Discovery—started to roll. As the narrator explained, the most inept handymen and women had been collected from across the country to compete in construction challenges. Um, hadn’t this already been done by Andrew Younghusband and Discovery on Canada’s Worst Handyman?

Like that show, competitors have weeks to improve their skills in hammering, nailing, sawing and building. Also like Handyman, the competitors are judged on their work by three experts in Rob Koci of Canadian Contractor magazine; fourth-generation tradesman and carpenter, Helder Brum; and power tool expert Hillary Manion, who deem who gets to stick around in the competition. The big twist that sets this apart from that? A $50,000 grand prize, viewers deciding who gets to take the windfall home and … the competitors are teams of two.

Filmed in Ontario’s cottage country, each duo is assigned a ramshackle cottage and a bunch of tools to help them fix the buildings up. In Monday’s bow, the teams are tasked with three challenges: build a worktable, construct a fire pit and swinging bench, and install a toilet, all while showing workmanship, planning and teamwork. But before the teams can even start on the projects they have to get into their locked cottages. That has the expected result: teams try to use brute force to get into their cabins as quickly as possible rather than show any kind of forethought in how they do it.

I find shows like this focus mainly on what teams can’t do rather than what they can and Blood, Sweat & Tools is no different. Fun is poked at husbands who can’t manage a straight cut, women who forge ahead on projects without thinking and the general ignorance of people when it comes to some of the most basic of renovation tasks. It’s easy to get out of your depth. I know because it’s happened to me.

Thankfully, Koci, Brum and Manion are there not just to shake their heads in disbelief at these dunderheads but to actually give them instructions, plans and an education in construction with an extra helping of safety thrown in so that no one loses a finger and slaps production with a lawsuit.

If you’re a do-it-yourselfer looking for tips to success with your own projects, Blood, Sweat & Tools is for you. If you just like watching people scream and yell at each other while they mess up basic home renovations, this is definitely up your alley too.

Blood, Sweat & Tools airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Preview: Franklin’s lost ship found

I have a fascination with the Canadian north. What has made men and women trek to some of the most inhospitable land on earth? I’ve read the fictional works of Jack London and the real-life triumphs and tragedies of men like Ernest Shackleton and Captain John Franklin, the latter of whom is featured in Franklin’s Lost Ships, The Nature of Things’ season finale.

The news that one of Franklin’s ships, the Erebus, was discovered last year after being missing for 170 years was a discovery that excited and entranced me, and Franklin’s Lost Ships doesn’t disappoint in its exploration into how the Erebus was found. In 1845, Capt. Franklin and 129 men set sail from England  aboard two ships—the HMS Erebus and Terror—headed for the uncharted waters of the Arctic. None survived. Graves and notes left by crew members have been found since, along with Inuit tales handed down through  generations detailing what happened, but the ships remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Thursday’s documentary not only details the six-year search Parks Canada has been on for the duo National Historic sites, but the story of how Franklin and his crew ran into trouble in the first place. Franklin was a decorated war hero, but had failed in earlier overland mission to find the Northwest Passage. On his last mission, he not only had enough food to last three years, but warships Erebus and Terror had been fitted with central heating and propellors. It was expected that the elusive Northwest Passage would be traversed and mapped without problem.

Experts like Ryan Harris and Marc-André Bernier of Parks Canada, John Geiger of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, historian Huw Lewis-Jones and authors Ken McCoogan and Dave Woodman breathe life into the tale with help from re-creations, explaining not only how last year’s adventure was undertaken with state-of-the-art sonar and satellite maps paired with the last coordinates left by the crew before they perished.

Franklin’s Lost Ships is also a story of British arrogance, of a society that preferred—in the 1800s—to ignore Inuit reports of cannibalism among the crew and reports of one ship locked in the ice and sinking while another was carried south. In fact it was those stories, and luck, that caused last summer’s mission to be a success. Incredible footage of Erebus looming up in the murk, covered in seaweed and dwarfing the divers around her is dramatic stuff. But that’s just the first chapter in the story; future dives will venture inside the ship to search for documents, film and bodies for a more accurate telling of what truly went wrong during Franklin’s last expedition.

Franklin’s Lost Ships airs as part of The Nature of Things on Wednesday at 8 p.m. on CBC.

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Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Link: CBC’s Secrets of the fifth estate is no mere sizzle reel

From John Doyle of The Globe and Mail:

CBC’s Secrets of the fifth estate is no mere sizzle reel
In television time, 40 years is probably about half a millennium.

Over four decades, a great deal has changed in TV. There’s a lot more TV in existence, for a start. But one show that has, remarkably, continued to exist in our local landscape is the fifth estate.

Secrets of the fifth estate (CBC, 9 p.m.) is about those decades and it is to the credit of the program that it is not exactly a self-congratulatory celebration of great stories and investigations that made headlines. Nor is it sentimental about the past. Continue reading.

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Featured, Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

Preview: Survivorman searches for Sasquatch

I’ve always enjoyed Les Stroud’s show, Survivorman. I know I’d be dead if I was left in any of the situations he has been in, but it’s fun as heck to watch him fight to survive in hostile settings like the Arctic, jungle and plains.

Stroud returns Wednesday for six special episodes on OLN that focus on a legendary creature I’ve been fascinated with since I was a kid: Bigfoot. Stroud was given special permission by a Native Canadian band to stake out a spot in Klemtu, B.C., an area known as such a hot spot for Sasquatch that it’s not even a question of whether the hairy beasts exist because townsfolk have seen them walking down the main street and in their back yards.

Small-screen searches for Bigfoot have been around for years—Finding Bigfoot may be the most popular—and none have captured real, tangible evidence of the animals save for screams in the night and plaster casts of footprints. And the same holds true for Survivorman, at least until the last segment of Wednesday’s debut. It’s then that Stroud, who is virtually unshakable in all of his survival experiences, catches a major case of the willies thanks to something happening that he can’t explain.

Unlike traditional episodes where Stroud is dumped in a location, sets up camp and starts recording with cameras right away, the premiere spends several minutes taking sweeping shots of the town with eyewitness accounts flashing on-screen. This isn’t about surviving on what he catches in the water or in traps, or about keeping warm, this is about encountering a Bigfoot. Along the way, Stroud outlines how hoaxers have, over the years, faked footsteps, and addresses Bigfoot naysayers who say the lack of any found skeletons means the animals don’t exist.

Does Stroud finally pull back the curtain on one of our biggest mysteries? You’ll have to tune in to find out.

Survivorman: Bigfoot airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on OLN.

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Reality, Lifestyle & Documentary

BNN shakes up business with The Disruptors

From a media release:

With a flood of innovative Canadian companies set to go public this year, the next vanguards of our economic growth are popping up everywhere. These are the companies that see and exploit inefficiencies, disrupt the large and lazy and can keep future generations competitive. But few of them will make it to the public markets or the “big exit” without a lot of luck and a lot of help. Airing Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. ET beginning April 16, BNN’s all-new, original series THE DISRUPTORS traces the most exciting international business news and trends from incubators and venture capitalists, to young entrepreneurs and CEOs of some of the most innovative companies in the world, offering expert analysis and advice to smaller Canadian companies looking to scale up fast. BNN anchor and reporter Amber Kanwar co-hosts the new weekly, half-hour series along with Bruce Croxon, one of the country’s indisputable disruptors, who co-founded the wildly successful online dating site, Lavalife.

Each week, the duo analyzes pitches from the hottest prospects, offering a frank assessment of whether they stand a chance of becoming the next Uber, Airbnb, or Facebook. Hard-nosed, scoop-loving business reporter Kanwar believes innovation has its place, but it better be profitable. Croxon mostly agrees, but the digital disciple also believes no profitable company is safe from the next disruption. THE DISRUPTORS also welcomes leading CEOs of Canadian and international companies who share their own success stories, along with their thoughts on the risks faced by start-ups fighting for traction.

Behind the story pitch that resulted in the creation of THE DISRUPTORS, BNN’s Kanwar specializes in equity markets and is constantly digging for stocks flying under the radar, trends that are about to emerge, and curating research to make it accessible to viewers. Kanwar has interviewed CEOs from across the C-Suite, and brings the day’s biggest business stories to viewers on BNN, CP24 and CTV News Channel.

THE DISRUPTORS is produced by BNN, with additional research provided by BetaKit, the nation’s foremost source for Canadian start-up news and tech innovation.

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