Once upon a time, Winnipeg television was mandated to include a public access channel which was used – and abused – by many throughout the 1980s.

Public access television in general has spawned some of the most renowned satire, most notably the “Wayne’s World” sketch on Saturday Night Live.

All of the content of Winnipeg Babysitter lives up to the cliché and reputation of public access TV.

Winnipeg Babysitter is a program of cable access programs that toured internationally through Winnipeg’s Video Pool Media Arts Centre. The program was turned into a DVD and released this past July.

It’s a compilation of clips found in the dirty archives of an era that middle-aged folks remember but refuse to divulge the photographs from. It truly is a time capsule of low-production quality and overall ridiculousness.

Perhaps the most famous show on the DVD is the Pollock & Pollock Gossip Show starring “Rockin’” Ron Pollock (the guy who ran in the 2006 Winnipeg mayoral election and came dead-last with less than three per cent of the total vote) and his sister “Nifty” Natalie who’s apparently good at wearing low-cut blouses and agreeing with everything Ron says.

The Pollock & Pollock Gossip Show provides such entertainment as a topless elderly man dancing while a small man with a moustache and the outfit of a female Brazilian samba dancer lays on the table and kicks his legs like a horizontal can-can dancer.

Another standout show on the Babysitter DVD is a quaint little music video by “The Cosmopolitans,” a band of now certainly deceased elderly women performing in the humble, small town of Oakbank.

My favourite show on the DVD, by far, is Magic Mike’s Castle. In this special show, the magic mirror (a piece of tin foil) literally spits the “magic word” out of his mouth. The magic word is “no” and Mike opens a crappy song that doesn’t rhyme about the word by advising kids to say no “to drugs and cigarettes and everything.” Just say no to everything, kids.

Now, granted, most of these shows first aired before I existed, so I can only assume this sort of thing was acceptable in the ‘80s. In any case, I highly recommend this DVD to anyone who (a) has a fetish for the bizarre and occult, (b) watched a shitload of public access TV in the ‘80s and/or (c) has plenty of psychoactive drugs to use and needs a DVD to watch them to.

Although Winnipeg Babysitter receives three stars, it must be noted that it does so entirely due to accidental hilarity, with no intentionality whatsoever on the behalf of the programmers.

Published in Volume 64, Number 7 of The Uniter (October 15, 2009)