Battle of Blades eyes second season; Score fires Morency

  Battle of the Blades, the CBC’s figure skating/hockey series, is more than a hit.

  It’s also a groundbreaker.

  For starters, it is original, which is not an insignificant achievement in Canadian television. It was conceived by Toronto sports marketing executive Kevin Albrecht. And the plan was executed by his partner Sandra Bezic, the skating choreographer.

  It’s certainly been an audience winner. The opener last month drew two million viewers. Since then, the 60-minute show, which airs Sunday night, has been drawing a steady 1.5 million, which is good for a Canadian production.

  Keep in mind also that Sunday prime time is a tough slot in television. Blades is up against the CTV powerhouse, Amazing Race 15, and, for the male demographic, the NFL game on TSN/NBC. The half-hour show on Monday competes for viewers with the largest audience producer on Canadian television, House, on Global.

   Consider last week’s ratings: On Sunday, Amazing Race 15 drew 2.61 million, but Blades picked up a respectable 1.55 million. On Monday, House blew away the competition with 3.7 million viewers, but Blades hung in with 1.14 million.

   Then there’s the male demographic. Blades, in which ex-hockey players pairs skate with some of Canada’s leading female performers, is first and foremost a show that appeals to women. But, the guys are watching, too. Albrecht says about 40 per cent of the total audience is made up of men. For the 90-minute opener, 735,000 watched.

  “[The large male demographic for the opener] has to be a record for figure skating,” Albrecht said.

   A few days ago, the CBC received a note from a group of six men in Vancouver who get together in a bar each Sunday night to watch the football game.

  On the first night of Blades, curiosity got the better of them and they decided to watch the first five minutes on one of the bar’s TVs.

  “They ended up watching the whole 90 minutes,” Albrecht said. “And now they’re meeting every week to watch this for an hour before going over to the football game.”

   Albrecht is wondering if the image of macho ex-jocks on figure skates will inspire more boys to get involved in the sport. The hockey players competing in the show have agreed that figure skating lessons, when they were children, would have improved their skating for hockey.

  “I’m having Skate Canada monitor this,” Albrecht said. “I’ve asked them to track registration this fall of boy figure skaters in his country, because you have all these hockey players, all eight of them, saying, ‘If I had it to do over again growing up, I’d take figure skating, because it would improve my hockey so much.’ ”

   The success of Blades also could lead to its exportation to other countries. Albrecht is in discussion with television executives in Russia, which is a natural market for the show given the country’s rich tradition in hockey and figure skating. The Czech Republic and Slovakia is another potential market.

   A variation on the Blades concept has been devised for Scandinavia that would involve a skating competition between Swedish and Finnish competitors.

   Not surprisingly, the most difficult element of the Blades’ start-up was recruiting the hockey players.

  “Almost every session was the same,” Albrecht, a former IMG executive and event organizer, recalled. “I’d talk about it for the first 10 minutes and they’d just look at me like, ‘What? Are you joking?’ Then, half an hour into it, they’re giving me ideas for it.”

  Most important for the players was the assurance they would not be embarrassed.

  “They said they wanted to sure we weren’t going to put funny outfits on them and make them look ridiculous,” Albrecht said. “We promised them up front, they wouldn’t. We made it clear to them that this was not going to be Blades of Glory. You’re going to be wearing jeans and t-shirts, and, on Sinatra night, you will be wearing suits.

  “We told them they would have the best team in the world teaching them. We assured them they would have the best partners and would have time to train.”

  Bezic partnered the players with champions such as Jamie Sale and Shae-Lynn Bourne, and she brought in some of the sport’s leading choreographers and instructors.

   Set at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, the show airs in front of a live audience. And it’s slick. The music and themes are at a level of the best produced ice shows. Co-hosts Ron MacLean of Hockey Night In Canada and Kurt Browning, the former world championship, are first rate. The showmanship and humour of Browning, in particular, is a plus. And the quality of the performances has surprised everyone.

   Does anyone not believe that Hockey Night analyst Craig Simpson, a hard driving NHL forward, could have made it on pick skates with a pairs partner?

   Simpson was the first among the hockey players to make a jump. But Albrecht said the two other pairs teams that remain also are working on jumps.

  The series wraps up in two weeks, but we are likely to see it again. The plan is for a Blades 2 next season, with a new group of hockey players.

 Morency out at the Score

 Wackadoo sports host Gabriel Morency has parted ways with the Score Television Network following a suspension last week.

   Sources confirmed this afternoon that Morency is gone, probably fired, and finished at Score’s Hardcore Sports Radio on Sirius as well as the network.

  Morency twittered that his days were numbered after Richard Garner, the Score’s head of programming who hired him, left the company in March.

“When Garner left it was f  (deleted) over!  id rather be on the f (deleted) titanic.”

 Why was it over?

 ”i was too hardcore. they want complacent pussies who do what their told to do working for them.”

A call to the Score’s head of programming, Greg Sansone, was not returned.

  Morency was a wild-eyed original,  unpredictable and singularly weird, but entertaining in a strange sort of way.

   Said a source about Morency’s week-long suspension:  “He’s been flat-out crazy since he’s been there, so I don’t know what he would have done any differently to cause a suspension.”

   Sources say Morency is planning to create his own website with a radio/webcast component to compete with the Score.

Nantz marriage breakup

  From the National Sports Journalism Centre in the United States:

 CBS sports announcer and host Jim Nantz must pay $916,000 (U.S.) yearly in alimony and child support to his ex-wife and give up their Connecticut home under terms of a newly issued divorce decree. The ruling came Monday, dissolving Nantz’s 26-year marriage to Ann-Lorraine “Lorrie” Carlsen Nantz.

   Judge Howard Owens concluded neither was at fault. “In fairness, for most of the years he prioritized his family obligation and put his wife and daughter Caroline first. As frequently happens in marriages of lengthy duration, the parties do not have the same interest and ardor for their spouses’ endeavors,” the judge wrote in his decision.