Tag Archives: Urbania

| My articles, TV

Tamy Emma Pepin’s bilingual trip through the UK

http://vimeo.com/88195530

Tamy Emma Pepin certainly seems to have had a pretty successful career in the media. A contributor to TQS, the Journal de Montréal, and TVA as a freelancer. An editor for Huffington Post Québec. A social media ambassador for Tourism Montreal.

More recently, she was a contributor to Cap sur l’été on Radio-Canada, and she was one of the hosts of local lifestyle series Only in Montreal. That series, sadly, has not been renewed, but she quickly moved on to her next project: a travel series produced by Toxa (the company behind Urbania) and airing on Évasion.

The 13-episode one-hour series, Tamy @ Royaume-Uni, was shot last fall, and debuts Thursday at 8pm. So I had a chat with Pepin and another with producer Raphaëlle Huysmans about the show for a story that appears in Thursday’s Gazette.

It’s a French channel, and voiceovers and explanations to the camera happen in French, but because this is Britain, most of the stuff that happens is in English (which is thankfully subtitled rather than dubbed). Rather than sounding like an instructional video or sales pitch, the series takes a more documentary-style approach, following Pepin around as she plays tourist.

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| Media, Montreal, Opinion

Urbania explores the other solitude

Urbania's Anglo issue

Urbania’s Anglo issue. Apparently that is actually a jar of (pig’s) tongues, but no word on what language they spoke

One of my pet peeves living in Montreal is how so many people who should know better have little to no knowledge of what life is like on the other side of Quebec’s language divide.

To many francophones, Quebec anglos are no different from Torontonians or Albertans, a bunch of Harper supporters who have paintings of the Queen of England on their walls, who despise the French language and have no culture of their own, and who live here only because they can’t find a better job across a provincial or international border.

To many anglophones, Quebec francos are all hard-core separatists, card-carrying members of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, obsessed with language issues and with eliminating the English language from the province so they can impose their new world order which consists mainly of blackmailing the rest of Canada to send more money its way.

The media, sadly, doesn’t help this much. The French media don’t pay much attention to anglophone Quebec culture or local issues in their communities, while the English media pay so much attention to those things they don’t have the resources to explore Quebec’s francophone culture with more than a passing glance.

So it was with some excitement that I heard last month that Urbania, a hip and irreverent magazine that I’d heard about and had followed on Twitter for a while, was coming out with an issue focusing on anglophones.

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