Designer Guys to host CBC daytime lifestyles show

CBC Television has nabbed the original Designer Guys for a new daytime lifestyles show to begin in January 2008.

Steven Sabados and Chris Hyndman will co-host a one-hour show that features fashion, design, health, cooking and other lifestyle and how-to advice.

Their as-yet unnamed show was announced Wednesday as part of a revampedCBC daytime schedule that will also include The Martha Stewart Show.

Martha Stewart's lifestyle show, syndicated from New York, will play at 11 a.m. (11.30 a.m. NT), replacing The Gill Deacon Show, which was dropped earlier this year after failing to build an audience.

The show is a lead-in to CBC News Today, the lunch-hour news program.

The public broadcaster hopes to sustain audiences in the daytime with its strong news programming and a choice of two lifestyle programs.

"We have a great deal of design expertise already, but this is also an opportunity for us to learn," said Sabados, who created design firm The Sabados Group Inc. with Hyndman before becoming host of the Designer Guys TV series in 2000.

Designer Guys is now hosted by another set of experts.

The format of the CBCshow has yet to be fully worked out, but it will include talks with great chefs, profiles of Canadian designers and celebrity guests, as well as the ordinary person "from Moose Jaw with a great recipe."

"I see it as a time when viewers can have a cup of cofee and relax for the best part of the day," said Hyndman.

The pair say they are putting together a creative team that will share their own passion for great design and do-it-yourself projects.

Their show will air at 2 p.m. (2.30 p.m. NT), taking the other time slot vacated by The Gill Deacon Show.

The revamped schedule also includes two new children's shows in the morning — Kids Canada, a show with puppets and animated characters aimed at preschoolers and Bo On the Go!, a Canadian-made animated show about an inquisitive young heroine and her dragon friend.

"As the national public television broadcaster, our schedule is, and will remain, overwhelmingly Canadian," Kirstine Layfield, executive director of CBC network programming said, adding that therevamped schedule features more Canadian programming.

"At the same time, we are pleased to have been able to make room for other kinds of programming that fits our strategy and sensibility, and that will attract and engage our daytime audiences."

The Great Canadian Food Show returns to CBC daytime for the fall season, as well as documentary series Little Miracles, which follows the lives of children and their families as they struggle with illness at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children.

Late afternoon programming includes Frasier, The Simpsons and Arrested Development.