Image from CBC

After seeing ads all around the subway, I discovered that the CBC would be doing a new show about skating. I had no clue what it would be all about but I knew that figure skating somehow fit into the equation. Since seeing Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, my love for the sport had rekindled and I hoped that my schedule would allow for me to watch the program, which I did.

If you were wondering what the show is all about, it’s actually rather simple. Eight pairs, composed of a famous male hockey player and a female figure skater would skate in a figure skating competition. Each pair will do one routine per week and viewers will have to call to vote for their favourite couple; a format similar to So You Think You Can Dance. To help viewers with the technical aspect of the sport, a panel of judges (Sandra Bezic, Dick Button and a guest judge) will give their comments along with a score in the archaic 6.0 format where skaters are given points out of 6. The winning couple will win $100,000 for a charity of their choice (very Canadian, eh?) and the title of… Canada’s favourite skaters? (I just made that up.)

Although the competition sounds rather interesting, what really got my attention were the competitors. They are listed in their pairings as follows:

• Claude Lemieux and Shae Lynn Bourne
• Glenn Anderson and Isabelle Brasseur
• Stéphane Richer and Marie-France Dubreuil
• Ken Daneyko and Jodeyne Higgins
• Tie Domi and Christine Hough-Sweeney
• Bob Probert and Kristina Lenko
• Craig Simpson and Jamie Salé
• Ron Duguay and Barbara Underhill

Since I haven’t watched hockey in ages, the show has kindly given biographies of the hockey players and they all seem to be competent and pretty decent at their sport. As for the figure skaters, many of them are World or Olympic medalists. As well, the show features many interesting and famous choreographers such as David Wilson who choreographed World Champion, Yuna Kim’s winning 2009 programs.

With all this going for the show, I was actually slightly disappointed. The routines were sort of fun to watch but by the end of the show, you started getting really sick of the very similar lifts in every routine, which were the only highlight of the program since the routines were more theatrical than technical. There was no footwork, only one throw jump in the entire episode and no spins, spirals or twizzles, which are my favourite elements in figure skating. Since the beginning of the show, the figure skating snob in me kicked in and started picking at the sloppy entrances and exits into the lifts – a crime that was not limited to the hockey players.

You could say that it is unfair to judge the skaters this way, but you really have to wonder at who the target audience for this show is. Would fans of a rough and tumble sport like hockey be inclined to watch their favourite retired players figure skate week after week? If you’re a figure skating aficionado like I am, how much sloppy skating can you take before you can’t take it anymore? And if you’re a person who has no interest whatsoever in skating, why would you even watch this show? To me, it just seems as if this competition is very apt at estranging its potential viewers. I would hope that all the pairs would get better each week, but if the same kind of sloppy skating goes on, I’ll be less inclined to tune in, especially with the fact that I have to organize my time carefully if I ever want to watch TV. Perhaps in the end, the only people who will be left watch will be the ones who gush over every Canadian figure skater, good or bad, who and agree with P.J. Kwong’s belief that Canada is the world’s #1 figure skating nation. As a Canadian, even I disagree with that and would concede that the title should belong to Russia, who has produced excellent skaters in every discipline.

In any case, I might stay tuned if I have the time to watch the show. Hopefully there will be more highlights in the future other than watching hockey players trip over the ice picks on their figure skates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 11:56 am and is filed under Arts, Entertainment, General, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.