Here’s Jianny
How Billy Bob’s bonehead blunder gave the CBC some much needed cred By Jason McBride
Image credit: Courtesy of CBC
It was the face-to-face that launched a thousand hits. Make that hundreds of thousands of hits. A few hours after the infamous interview between CBC gentle jock Jian Ghomeshi and actor Billy Bob Thornton, more than 600,000 YouTube viewers had tuned in to check out the carnage. Oh, sorry, did we say actor? We meant music historian, which is apparently what Thornton prefers to be called. When Ghomeshi dared to make brief mention of his guest’s acting accomplishments during a standard career-surveying introduction, Billy Bob opted to punish him (seemingly by channelling his mentally deficient Sling Blade character: “Wuuut? I don’t understand”) and then went on to dis the entire nation, comparing Canadian audiences to mashed potatoes without the gravy. But it takes more than a little potato posturing to rattle our knight in glistening hair product. Ghomeshi kept his cool and came out of it a national hero. Given the current climate at the CBC—hundreds of job cuts, cancelled shows and lost Olympic dreams—this 15‑minute fillip couldn’t have come at a better time. As for Thornton, after being booed at Massey Hall, his band scrapped the rest of their Canadian tour dates. The excuse: two band members came down with the flu, though we’re guessing a bruised ego is more to blame.
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