Posts

Jump and Jive

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If you found yourself, as I did with my wife and two boys, at the Downtown Chatham Centre on the Saturday before Family Day in February, you may have come across a lot of jigging, jumping, and jiving going on. In the mall’s food court, directly outside the entrance of Ella Minnow Pea toy store, there were two free concerts at 12:00 and 2:00 starring the energetic trio of characters from the CBC show JiggiJump. Chatham was lucky enough to be part of the JiggiJump Sport and Fitness Fest during a mall tour throughout Ontario. The male and female stars of the show, David and Judy, along with their colourful kangaroo friend, JJ, put on an interactive show of musical adventures that get kids moving. JiggiJump is a fitness movement for children that started out as live presentations in schools in 2006 before becoming a television series on CBC in 2013. In a promotional video on Youtube, Judy explains the program by saying, “JiggiJump gets kids to be active in a very simple way. It just uses play and it’s fueled by imagination and by really fun music.” Read more

Moving our Imaginations with Music

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Some big name children’s entertainers came to Chatham’s Capitol Theatre in November. Big name, that is, if you’re like me and have spent way too much time with the Disney Junior channel on television (only between bouts of Treehouse, of course, while secretly wishing it was TSN or The Food Network). I’m happy to say these performers are real people, too; they aren’t puppets, or animated characters brought to life with costumes, or puffy purple dinosaurs. They are a four-man musical troupe – Rich, Dave, Scott, and Smitty – known as The Imagination Movers. They play instruments and sing upbeat songs, scattered between comedic skits that encourage children to solve problems by exercising their imaginations. Not that there’s anything wrong with these other forms of non-real entertainment, but as a father, I take personal satisfaction in seeing my children’s role models graduating to characters that are flesh and blood, after the last few years of admiring Elmo. I admit, I like Yoda and Chewbacca from Star Wars, but Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are who I aspire to be. Read more

Live & Uncorked with The Thirsty Traveler and The Surreal Gourmet

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Without television cameras on them, Food Network stars tend to let loose a little. Londoners found this out firsthand when Bob Blumer and Kevin Brauch rolled into town for their Live & Uncorked tour, giving us a taste of some high-energy antics with food and drink not seen on their TV shows. Blumer and Brauch have both been fixtures on Food Network since its inception and the live performance was advertised as an irreverent, behind-the-scenes look at their culinary careers. If this performance were ever to air on television, there would be plenty of censoring – the alcohol was flowing generously, the four-letter words were flying freely, and there was even a titillating video display of Blumer making S’more shooters with a topless woman in a see-through apron on the Naked News. Not your typical Food Network stuff. Read more

Boob Tube Food

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Watching celebrity chefs on the Food Network can be as addictive as eating your favourite foods. Television has brought the entertainment value of food from visceral to visual, even though it is quite paradoxical that an entire network serves up mouth-watering dishes that viewers will never eat. Although it may all be just a tease, Kathleen Collins tells us in her book Watching What We Eat that “people love to watch cooking, but it does not mean they love to cook or that they even do it at all.” Collins takes us on a tour of how cooking shows have become top notch entertainment, even though they started out as instructional programs for housewives, and she reveals how a combination of compelling chefs and scrumptious food presentation keeps us tuning in day after day. “The cable network gradually revamped the traditional instructional cooking program, adding live bands, participatory studio audiences, science, travel, and game shows, making the genre a microcosm of television and entertainment itself.” Read more