TRIPPING the Rideau Canal: Picture yourself in a boat on the Rideau - for four strangely soothing hours
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
When he came up with the idea of a four-hour immersive “real-time” trip down the Rideau Canal for TVOntario, documentarian Mitch Azaria obviously had no idea it would be airing for viewers effectively trapped indoors.
“We started on it two years ago, and Jane (Jankovic, TVO’s executive producer of documentaries) programmed four or five months ago. These are unimaginable times,” says Azaria, who just finished a 14-day quarantine after returning from a holiday at a festival in Valencia, Spain.
But here it is. If the best place to be during self-isolation is somewhere isolated, TRIPPING the Rideau Canal is the next best thing to being there.
TRIPPING the Rideau Canal.. The next best thing to being somewhere, other than your house.
The kind of experimental programming only a public broadcaster could get away with, TRIPPING is effectively a four-hour film that never breaks the viewer’s eye-line (it’s as if you’re in the same seat for the entire time). It was shot aboard a 1948 mahogany Shepard runabout over a 27 km stretch of the canal from Manotick, Ontario to the Parliament buildings, with four locks on route and scarcely another boat ever encountered, apart fromt the occasional kayak There is no narration or soundtrack, just birds, bullfrogs, trees, waterfront houses and occasional small-talk with a handful of lockmasters.
The result is purported to be the longest continuous documentary ever to air on Canadian television. Azaria claims disbelief when I tell him I made it through two hours uninterrupted (he says they have a group of six people called “the 240 club” that have watched the entire four hours at a sitting).
TRIPPING is, however, a definite mood soother, with revelations (I’d never experienced how the locks lower a boat three stories) and seamless additions (occasional blocks of text give offer us chunks of history, and animated black smoke “time machine” episodes have us float past pieces of antiquity, like the 19th Century passenger steamer The Rideau Queen).
This combination of beauty and solitude was the result of a near-perfect day, just before Thanksgiving last year and just in advance of the closing of the locks for the winter.
“We’d spent a fair amount of time on the canal and decided the wind had to be under seven kilometers, because then the water’s flat and we’d get that nice sort of kaleidoscope reflection.
“We also thought, if we got a lot of other boat action, we could get stalled at the locks, and it would break the water. Also, we’d have to get clearances from the boats we passed. So, we had to find a time of the year when it was really quiet and didn’t have a chance to run into too many folks.”
Azaria keenly understands the phenomenon of ambient TV. More than a decade ago, he and veteran broadcast executive Bob Mackowycz pitched a pay service on Rogers Cable called Mood on Demand, which may have been ahead of its time.
“Bob’s idea was, this was the advent of the big screens, and he said, ‘’People are hanging these things on their living room walls, and they’re having dinner parties and they’re hanging out. So, let’s think of them as picture frames, and put something in the frame.’”
“We had an aquarium, we had puppies at Christmas. Our real favourite was, we did a deal with the McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg because Bob knew the curator. We had a Group of Seven offering that was just spectacular.”
Extras for TRIPPING the Rideau Canal – including a 360-degree virtual reality experience – are available on trippingtherideaucanal.a
TRIPPING the Rideau Canal. Written and directed by Mitch Azaria. Airs on TVOntario at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Friday April 10, and at 11 p.m. on Sunday, April 12. Streams from April 10 on tvo.org