Authors: Jay Onrait
T
HE
D
REAMCRUSHER WAS ON THE
phone, back turned to us, and remained that way for about a minute while Ben and I made funny faces at each other. Usually a person hosting a meeting in this situation might turn around, acknowledge the people in the office, and raise one finger to say, “Just a second, gentlemen, I’ll be right with you.” I began to wonder if maybe the Dreamcrusher had forgotten about us, even though they had summoned us to the office.
Was this some sort of intimidation tactic?
I wondered.
I really should be helping to write jokes right now
.
Suddenly, the Dreamcrusher spun around and faced us.
“Where are my flowers, guys?”
“Uh …” I stumbled before quickly realizing what the Dreamcrusher was referring to.
I had brought a bouquet of flowers with me to the set of
Canada AM
that morning for my interview with Bev Thomson as a peace offering
for all the funny clips I had hoped to use of her, though really it was just a simple little sight gag. The Dreamcrusher had
seen the interview. “I can run out and grab some flowers right now!” I offered cheerfully. But the Dreamcrusher was no longer interested in talking flowers and quickly moved on to the next subject. The Dreamcrusher was about to crush dreams.
“Guys, here’s the deal …” began the Dreamcrusher.
I leaned forward in anticipation.
“You will get nothing.”
“I’m sorry?” I replied.
“You will get nothing. No clips from any of our shows. Nothing. All of those clips are off limits.”
“Okay, hold on …” Ben started, but the Dreamcrusher was not finished.
“Sorry, guys, I’m not budging on this. I can’t have the reputations of my talent compromised in any way.”
It took every ounce of my strength to remain calm. “You do realize that your talent sent us many of the clips we intended to use? We have some great stuff that we think will make your talent even more popular.” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew the Dreamcrusher wasn’t buying the argument.
“Forget it,” replied the Dreamcrusher. “You guys want to make fun of us, and it’s not going to happen. I don’t care who sent you the clips. What happens if you play one of our clips featuring one of our hosts and it goes viral?”
“They … become even more popular?” I replied.
Surely, several funny clips from the Dreamcrusher’s shows had already appeared on YouTube by this point. There was no stopping funny clips from going viral. Did this person realize that a funny clip from a show “going viral” was a good thing? Apparently not. This person was a television person and was above the concept of clips “going viral.” This person had absolutely no intention of being a team player. I wanted to throw something at this person so badly.
“No, I’m not going to let you guys embarrass us,” the Dreamcrusher replied.
“What if,” I reasoned, “I drove up here to your offices once, twice a week and we went over the clips we intend to use together, and you can voice your concerns or ask us to make any changes you like? I’ll even bring you scripts and jokes so you can make sure nothing will embarrass any of your talent. We can even talk to the talent!”
“I don’t have time for that,” the Dreamcrusher stated matter-of-factly. The Dreamcrusher was ready to wrap this meeting up. I looked over at Ben. He continued to try to reason with the Dreamcrusher, but it was clear the Dreamcrusher had never intended to be reasoned with. The trip had been a complete waste of time. Ben and I stood up and walked out without saying goodbye; it was as polite as I could have possibly been in the situation.
As I drove back downtown to my condo after saying a dejected goodbye to Ben, I started to have revenge fantasies.
The first thing I fantasized about was taking a shit on the Dreamcrusher’s car while it sat in the parking lot of the studio building.
How would I get away with it without people seeing me?
I wondered. Could I possibly shit in a bag and then dump the shit on the Dreamcrusher’s car? Maybe I could just wipe my own shit on the nameplate that hung over the Dreamcrusher’s parking stall. I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with defacing the Dreamcrusher’s property with shit—I was never very imaginative when it came to pranks.
I also considered actually spray-painting the outside of the Dreamcrusher’s office with some sort of creative tag like “asshole,” but then I realized all I’d be doing in that situation was making a bunch of work for the custodial staff at the network. I soon came to the conclusion that I was being childish and I needed to “park it.” I was so frustrated with the Dreamcrusher for refusing to even be reasonable in this situation that I was thinking irrationally. Luckily, my thoughts did not turn into actions, and thankfully I haven’t seen
the Dreamcrusher since. I highly doubt the Dreamcrusher gave the meeting a second thought.
We were flat-out screwed. Losing half our content one day before taping the show forced us to use clips from shows that had aired, in some cases, several months ago. Many of those clips were from American shows that had surprisingly given us access. The clips were okay, and the fact that their producers had given us access was truly appreciated, but the truth is I was gutted. I had not intended to use clips from American shows at all; what would have been the point of that? I was trying to do everything I possibly could to separate ourselves from
The Soup
; instead, we were looking more and more like
The Soup
every day. The show was supposed to be a celebration of all things
Canadian
; instead, I was being undone by Canadians who were too sensitive to be made fun of. In other words, I was being undone by the one thing that makes Canadians so Canadian. Damn Canadians!
We had intended to try to write some sketches involving people around the office: “show behind the show” sketches pioneered by my hero on
Late Night with David Letterman
. We thought we might try to introduce such sketches after the two-week break for the Kraft Celebration Tour as a new and funny element that would take the show to the next level. Instead, because of the dearth of actual clips we now had to work with, we needed actual content that we could shoot and edit in less than twenty-four hours.
There just happened to be a massive heat wave that week in Toronto, and Bell Media had sent out a company memo to all employees encouraging everyone to go ahead and wear “summer-appropriate attire” because of the rising temperatures. Quickly seizing the opportunity in front of us, we wrote a sketch that would fill time and hopefully shock people a little bit. The premise of the sketch was that after reading the company-wide memo, I arrived at work in what I considered to be “summer-appropriate attire”: completely
naked except for one of those floppy women’s summer hats you’d imagine ladies wearing in a stage production of
The Great Gatsby
.
To achieve this effect, I walked a few blocks down Yonge Street to the massive three-storey sex shop, Seductions, known in Toronto as the Walmart of sex shops. There I bought a flesh-coloured thong (Caucasian flesh of course), though they only had one in a medium. My penis and balls were squished into that thing like a jack-in-the-box, and it was not flattering. I don’t consider myself well-endowed by any stretch, but the combination of full-blast air conditioning combined with the tiny thong made my penis and testicles look like bait in a tackle box. There were several women on staff, and they all must have been thinking the same thing: “So, it’s true: Tall, skinny guys have small wieners.”
I didn’t care. In fact, it was fairly liberating to put my modest junk on display in the name of a few much-needed laughs both behind the scenes and on-camera. I wasn’t completely thrilled with the way the sketch turned out, not because of my compacted genitalia, but because we simply didn’t have the time to write or edit something that would have been more worthy of a first show. We were left with no choice.
The next day we taped our first episode. Spirits were high, and the entire crew joined us as our “audience,” much the same way
The Soup
used their crew as a makeshift audience to provide laughter. We had all been through a pretty damn rough week, and I think everyone just wanted to be done with episode 1 and hope things got better for episode 2. I tried to abide by my mom’s favourite piece of advice: “Do the best you can with what you have.”
Viewership was low, like 8,000 people for the first viewing, 24,000 for the second. To put this in perspective: If an hour of
SportsCentre
got 8,000 viewers, my bosses at TSN would probably commit suicide. Expectations were lower at a station like
MuchMore, which didn’t have the viewership of TSN, but the writing was on the wall. We weren’t getting promoted, and therefore we weren’t getting viewers, and we weren’t even doing the show we wanted to do in the first place. We were screwed.
After the first show aired most of the feedback we received was negative, but much of it surprisingly did not centre on the content of the show; instead people were annoyed by the small studio audience. It just confused the hell out of them. We kept getting requests to either make the audience bigger or forget the audience altogether. I had underestimated how few people in Canada had actually seen
The Soup
.
We decided to play off those complaints, and I used my relationship with the very kind executive producer of
Marilyn
, Nan Row, to set up a sketch with me “stealing” some of the audience waiting to walk into the studio to see a taping of
Marilyn
and taking them over to my show. It worked really well, and I was so grateful to Nan and Marilyn for trying to help us out.
Another time-filler sketch involved me auditioning to be the in-game arena host for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Then Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke even sent me an e-mail wishing me luck on the sketch and apologizing for not being around to make a cameo. What a guy! My spirits were lifted somewhat, but we were getting no closer to having more clips to use on the show. Comedian Brent Butt from
Corner Gas
graciously agreed to record a fake voice mail for the show to use in another sketch, working for free while he was busy on other projects. Other than the sketches, our shows consisted of the same clips over and over from the same shows that would allow us to lampoon them:
etalk, Marilyn, 1 Girl 5 Gays
. In other words, only CTV shows. My vow to not let
The Week That Was
turn into a half-hour commercial for CTV was failing miserably. I was also exhausted. The whole point of doing a clip show was to allow me to have the time to work at
SportsCentre
and not
be wasted at the end of the week. Now I was getting up early and working on sketches after hosting on TSN the night before. I knew I couldn’t keep up this pace unless we were able to secure some more clips, but all we kept hearing was “We’ll pass it on to our lawyers and see what they say.”
I had really, really blown it. I should have spent about a year clearing clips behind the scenes with other broadcasters. Now we were stuck doing what was essentially a sketch show without a sketch troupe and just one writer. Something had to give. There would be times when Brendan and I would come up with a concept based on a clip from a Canadian show. We’d get halfway through writing it, and then we’d remember to look over to Marla to see if we had permission to use the clip. She would never answer verbally, just slowly shake her head from side to side to indicate there was no chance to clear the clip in time for our show taping that Friday. I came to despise that head shake almost as much as I despised the Dreamcrusher. The problem was that I didn’t have to deal with the Dreamcrusher anymore, but the head shake I had to deal with several times a day, every day. Roadblocks were all we saw in front of us. We weren’t trying to take anyone down, we weren’t trying to ruin anyone’s career, we just wanted to make a funny little Canadian show, and it just wasn’t happening.
We finished our four shows for the summer, barely, and then I prepared to head west for year three of the Kraft Celebration Tour. I normally looked forward to the Kraft Tour anyway, but this was an especially needed break. Dan and I and the rest of the crew hopped on a flight to Kelowna, about a two-hour drive from Armstrong, B.C., where the tour was scheduled to begin. As the plane landed, I did what every single person does on a plane that lands anywhere in the world these days: I powered up my phone and went to check my messages. The first thing I noticed in my inbox was a company-wide memo sent from the head of
CTV Specialty programming. I clicked on the e-mail and scrolled through it. Then my jaw hit the floor.
The gist of the memo was that Mark McInnis and Ben Rotterman were being let go from the company after many long years of service. Yes, the same Mark and Ben who had approved the original pitch and overseen the entire thing. The same Mark and Ben who were in charge of my show. There was no mention of my show in the memo, but the bottom line was pretty clear: It was over for
The Week That Was
.
I felt, to be perfectly honest, a sense of relief. I could not have kept the show going in its current format. It wasn’t funny enough, and it wasn’t close enough to the show I really wanted to do. I thought we might be given a year to find our way like all network shows need these days (see:
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
), but I knew we weren’t going to get the resources we needed anyway.
I thought I knew the mechanism of CTV shows. I also thought that if I kept the operation small, practically a secret, I might be able to hang on to creative control and create something I was really proud of. But it backfired; instead, we were like a forgotten entity, and the people in charge were halfway out the door by the time we hit production. I should have been more diligent in making sure we had access to the content we needed, because that was the entire purpose of the show. Had I realized the show would turn into half a sketch show, I might have pushed to hire more sketch comedians. But I didn’t want to do a sketch show, I wanted to do a clip show, and not having access to those clips was just the beginning of our many issues.