Steve Moore shares his thoughts on Daniel Barrow’s Winnipeg Babysitter-

Last night I saw Daniel Barrow’s very winning Winnipeg Babysitter, a film composed of footage of 18 different Winnipeg public-access television shows that aired between 1981 and 1999. Because the original archive of the programs was cavalierly destroyed after a giant cable company purchased the small cable company (whose channels included the public access channel), Barrow was compelled to find each show’s original producers and make copies of personal collections of show tapes. Having grown up in Winnipeg and seen so many of the shows when they first aired, the effort to salvage this footage (not only for this film but as part of a now-enormous archive) is clearly a labor of love for Barrow.

And a very worthy labor it is. The love is manifest not only in the choices of shows and footage, but in the text commentary that Barrow projects on a separate screen to one side of the show footage. That’s where we learn more about, for example, Louise Wynberg and Marion Clemens. Wynberg and Clemens played keyboards and drums on a show that ran daily for decades and whose simple and lovely premise was that they would play familiar popular tunes and take requests via phone or mail. Barrow’s text tells us that they were dearly loved in Winnipeg and it’s so easy to see why. Neither is a great musician, but kindness and enjoyment shine out of them. We see them play in the studio and also in a retirement home where Marion takes the mic into the audience of seniors offering whoever wants it a chance to sing along to “You are my Sunshine.”

Like so many of the shows that Barrow features — and like hundreds of shows airing every day on cable-access across America — “The Cosmopolitan Time” as Wynberg and Clemens called their show is absurd and deeply endearing and slightly painful to watch. For content or form or intention the 18 shows share little in common, but each delivers this kind of freebase dose of human nature: ambition, big-heartedness, self-delusion, and awkwardness sit together in a single spoon with discretion and the fear of failure boiled off by the studio lights.

Barrow tells us that with the purchase of the small cable company by the larger one, not only were the archives destroyed but the public-access channel was shut down altogether — despite howls of protest from the community (including Barrow himself). Barrow’s film makes you feel the loss keenly. Defenders of cable-access television typically frame it as a great and necessary bastion of free speech. And it is; you can watch Barrow’s film and feel the pleasure and release of those on screen as they seize that chance to put their ideas into the world. But so rarely are those ideas free-speechy; they’re not political or polemical — at least in this footage and among the other cable-access programming I’ve seen. Much more often the ideas are artistic or just informational, much less about asserting a point of view than about answering the call of enthusiasm. And the loss of a home for that enthusiasm – as much as the loss of what that enthusiasm creates – is the real drag about losing a cable-access channel (or,for that matter, a pirate radio station or a city mural program or a hundred other programs that encourage freak speech).

Because, let’s be clear, Winnipeg Babysitter is not generally about old ladies singing to seniors. Mostly it’s freaks unfurling giant flags of freakdom. A favorite segment was “Boron Skull Chameleons” which aired on the show “Midnight Movie Factorium” and in which trans-dimensional steel-headed aliens come through mirrors all over the earth, slaughter and burn humans, and make tea out of the charred remains — but of course, that’s all just backstory. The segment itself is several minutes of a boron skull chameleon blandly sipping his tea while he extols its virtues to whomever happens to be watching — including those few humans that the chameleons maintain in zoos. Another favorite was the segment “Kangaroo Birth Cycle Coat” (from the show “Stadium Trash”) which is an advertisement for a fur coat with a built-in kangaroo joey incubation system that offers wearers the pleasure of frequently watching a new-born joey claw its way through thick fur toward the coat’s gestational pouch. Oh, sweet nectar of nonsense.

For now, cable-access is kiboshed in Winnipeg, but it is alive and well in Austin on three separate channels (10, 11, and 16). Barrow’s film convinces me that we should each have a show and do nothing but watch and be guests on each other’s shows forever. I’m serious and here’s the link to channelAustin, which manages 10, 11, and 16 to help us get started: http://www.channelaustin.org/. And here’s another link, this one to the city’s public-access TV info page: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/telecom/pubaccess.htm.

Use it or lose it.