The Other Side: The Secret Mulroney Tapes on the CBC

Ok. The con­stant CBC warn­ings that this pro­gramme con­tains coarse lan­guage is cer­tainly the hint that the CBC has yet to warm to Brian Mul­roney. A rather tepid present­a­tion. The chal­lenge to the film maker was to take the taped con­ver­sa­tions and find a way to make them visu­ally com­pel­ling. Although a good col­lec­tion of doc­u­ment­ary foot­age and occa­sional switched between soundtrack and voice overs, Peter Newman’s self-described role as ‘pet news­man’ causes a real lack of counter voice or even nar­ra­tion that does come across in the book. All in all des­pite the good foot­age, the book is a far more com­pel­ling product. Nonetheless,listening to a man seek­ing to con­stantly jus­tify his actions, remind of his hard knocks, our former prime min­is­ter comes across as a sniv­el­ing twit, para­noid, and con­vinced that he was a bet­ter man than the coun­try deserved…always con­vinced that he was doing the right thing…his remark refer­ring to the ‘genu­ine mediocrity’ of the Cana­dian media seems to really cap­ture his feel­ings towards the cit­izens of Canada in gen­eral.

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