The last crazed superstation insists their local TV also matters

Local TV Matters, the contentious and confusing campaign to engender support for charging cable companies to carry their over-the-air signals, gets Canada’s most stubbornly local station in its corner — albeit one worthy of national notoriety. NTV, the St. John’s-based channel that frequently uses music videos like “We Are the World” to fill unsold commercial time during relayed American shows, might actually be trusted to do something novel with a few extra cents every month. The superstation owner, 88-year-old Geoff Stirling, gained notoriety for calling master control in the late-night hours and demanding they run programs he wanted to watch, a primitive video-on-demand technique subjecting viewers to metaphysical explorations, or a debate between Stirling and Newfoundland’s late Premier Joey Smallwood — who travelled together to Cuba for the NFB documentary Waiting For Fidel — or a fixed shot of a fish tank. Five years ago, writer Susan Bourette from Report on Business Magazine was only given access to Stirling if he filmed the interview — for broadcast at 3 a.m. Satirical screeds crawling across the bottom of the screen, a newscast ordered halted in order to show an episode of Inspector Gadget, animations starring superheroes created by Stirling — wouldn’t you do the same if you were a media mogul? YouTube currently hosts but two examples of surprise NTV esoterica from summer 2008: a computer animated art festival set to songs by Nana Mouskouri, followed by Leonard Cohen crooning over pervy video mosaics. Naturally, one or the other of the national networks — NTV air CTV news programming in addition to Global’s prime-time lineup — have made inquiries, but Stirling wouldn’t sell. “This is my movie. I’m the writer, the producer, the director and the hero,” he told R.O.B. Magazine in 2004. “In my new movie, my reincarnation, I may not come back to Newfoundland. I may not even come back to this planet.”

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