On television, Rex Murphy is an imposing figure as he delivers, in beautifully crafted language, his weekly diatribes on anything and everything from the state of the nation to the dropping of Onward Christian Soldiers from some church hymn books.
In person, Rex Murphy is a short, slight, dapper man with hair that springs like rusty steel wool from a “high forehead.” In ordinary conversation, the language is toned down and the Newfoundland accent largely disappears.
Ah, but on stage, now that’s a different story. Spellbinding, mesmerizing, he holds his audience in thrall. Rex Murphy is obviously well read; he obviously enjoys reading, and savors the sound of words. The Newfoundland accent, which one suspects he cultivates for his audience, doesn’t hurt either.
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Murphy was the featured speaker at the recent Moose Jaw Festival of Words.
In his own unique style, he skewered television and warned of the corruption and destruction which the medium is capable of wreaking.
“Television is a consuming media, a narcotic,” he said.
“It eats time.”
Murphy said that television is “intrinsically hostile to language. It is centered on pictures, not words.”
He called it a superficial medium, enough to arrest the attention, but not enough to engage the brain. Once it has a person’s attention, he said, it doesn’t want to do anything with it except hold onto it before moving into its prime reason for existence, commercials.
It seems that one of Murphy’s objections to television is that watching it keeps people from reading.
It took Murphy more than 20 minutes to get into his main theme, having first skewered everything from Toronto to the Mars mission to Ontario’s nudity law.
Following his presentation, Murphy attended a reception where I had occasion to ask about something which had been troubling me: why, in his unity special on CBC last September, Saskatchewan was skipped over.
Murphy said it was a case of doing the best with what they had; the program started with a budget of $60,000 which was then cut to $40,000.
It was a reason, I guess, but I wasn’t really happy with it nor with the excuse that some of the Maritime provinces also weren’t included.
But such is life, and for all that it was a grand evening. I shall cherish for some time my notebook from the evening, with Rex Murphy’s autograph on it.
