Catherine Cullen (right) totally not flirting with Living Montreal's Sue Smith

Sue Smith, the host of Living Montreal (perhaps the only English television program left that’s produced for a local Montreal audience) apparently ran out of ideas this week and did five shows themed on CBC Montreal and the Maison Radio-Canada.

Above is some little-known nerd reporter from CBC Radio who on Thursday’s show did a chocolate-chip cookie recipe she got off the Internet. (Actually, it’s my former classmate Catherine Cullen, whose career has now officially outperformed mine, allowing me to make fun of her with the photo below.) They’re actually shown on a set in the basement made by the production department specifically for this segment, which is kind of cute (did it have running water?).

Catherine Cullen is just happy to be on TV

Sadly, too little of the 115 minutes over the week involved actually exploring the iconic CBC building (and too much on graphical segues and plugs for the website). The trips through various offices act more as a backdrop for various food/style/shopping/other chick stuff.

Still, if you’re a junkie for inside journalism like me, take a peek at these:

• Some retro clips of Smith and Gerri Barrer from their days at Citybeat.
• CBC weatherguy Frank Cavallaro talking about local establishments he likes to frequent (spoiler alert: Little Italy), and tours of the costume and props department at Maison RadCan, which produces much of the network’s comedy and drama programming in addition to news.
• Monday and Tuesday’s shows are at CBC Radio Montreal, where I spent all of two weeks but remember some of the faces. Tuesday’s show has almost throw-away shout-outs to Julie Chamberland, Shawn Apel and Justin Hayward
• Monday’s show also has Homerun host Bernard St-Laurent giving his pick for favourite (underrated) Montreal park: Parc René-Lévesque
• Tuesday’s show also has Daybreak host Mike Finnerty talking about a pie place.

And while you’re exploring the Living Montreal site, you can take a peek at segments from the Flab Gab column which stars The Gazette’s June Thompson, who was brought on board in December.

P.S. To Living Montreal (or whoever is responsible for its website): Your Flash-based video system looks cool and seems to work OK (except for the minor issue that if I pause a video I can’t restart it …  actually that’s a pretty serious issue), but this post would have been made a lot easier if you had some simple way to copy a link to individual videos. I had to get the ones above through the “Send to a friend” feature, sending myself half a dozen unnecessary emails.