MOOSEMEAT & MARMALADE
Where: Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN)
When: Premieres Tuesday, May 7
The popularity of Moosemeat & Marmalade is such that Victoria co-hosts Art Napoleon and Dan Hayes get noticed often in public by fans of the hybrid food-and-culture docuseries.
Not everywhere in Canada, mind you.
“We have an appeal with rural Canadians, but not so much for city people,” Napoleon said. “If we walk into a Tim Horton’s, we’ll be bombarded with people wanting photos. But if we walk into a Starbucks nobody would notice. We’re Tim Horton’s-famous.”
That is an apt summary of the homespun TV series, the seventh and final season of which premieres tonight on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN).
Often described as a fish-out-of-water amalgam of Canadian culture and cooking, weekly 30-minute episodes show the hosts foraging and hunting for food, while sharing their respective thoughts — often comical — on the process. The Moosemeat of the title refers to Napoleon, an award-winning Cree singer-songwriter, hunter, and bush cook originally from remote Moberly Lake, B.C, while the Marmalade points to Hayes, the buttoned-down British co-owner of The London Chef, a Victoria-based cooking school and catering company.
During early episodes, the show pitted the free-spirited Napoleon (who was more at home in the wild than the city) against the seemingly uptight Hayes, whose classically-trained skills were suited for traditional cooking environments. As the show progressed, and grew in popularity, the story arc began to come full circle. That played a part in their decision to to make the show’s seventh season their last, he added.
“Season One, Dan and I were quite different. This last season, we’re almost the same. He hunts all the time and eats only wild game, and I’m cleaner and chef-ier. Where would we go next? I think it’s a natural place to leave people wanting more.”
The seven seasons and 93 episodes were shot over a nine-year period, during which time Hayes and Napoleon became quite close. The show still pits them against each other, however, which makes for good viewing. Upcoming episodes filmed last year take Hayes and Napoleon to Sweden, the Maritimes, and Ontario’s Six Nations of the Grand River, among other places, and the to-and-fro banter remains on point.
It is Napoleon’s unofficial job to jab at Hayes, and he has made it an art form for the better part of a decade.
“We argue a lot, so it became this odd couple adventure show,” he said with a laugh. “There is something that just comes out. Our chemistry is that we annoy each other a little bit, but we also learn from each other. Without calling it reconciliation — because that is an overused term that has a lot of meanings to a lot of people — there is a little bit of that going on. If he and I can get along, and work things out in the end, anybody else should be able to. I think maybe on an unconscious level, that is in there.”
Moosemeat & Marmalade has never lost its farm-to-table, head-to-tail, zero-waste philosophy and hunting, fishing, and cooking procedures from First Nations culture remain constants (the upcoming season captures the co-hosts ice fishing and seal hunting, among other pursuits.) There has always been a local bent to the programming, too. The Malahat First Nation and Nuu-chah-nulth territory near Tofino are the focus of episodes this season.
There are locales Napoleon wanted to visit if Moosemeat & Marmalade returned for another season, but the show is coming to an end with its integrity intact, he said. The series, which premiered in 2015, was one unexpected adventure after another, and he’s happy with the finished product.
“It was just an experiment, we didn’t know there would be a second season,” Napoleon said. “But people started e-mailing APTN. A few months later, the station said they would give it another year. And it took off after that. And that was all based on the response from our supporters. We have really loyal fans.”
