Anchorboy (14 page)

The show became more and more popular. We even somehow managed to convince Jimmy Fallon to come on while he was in town taping some bit for his new NBC late-night show. Much taller than you would expect, almost as tall as me, Jimmy took the time to take pictures with everyone who asked him, answering every request for a photo or autograph with a cheery “No problem,
buddy!” His “handlers” waited impatiently on the sidelines as we whisked Jimmy into one of our Barcelona chairs. I needed something, anything, to make the interview just a little bit different from the standard interview Jimmy would have done with a local morning show in Ithaca, New York. No offense to the good people of Ithaca, New York, but I needed something that Jimmy and I could perhaps have a little comic moment with.

Our crew had spent the previous two weeks complaining about the number of hours they were working compared with what they were being paid, leading to the inspiration for my Jimmy Fallon comedy prop. I asked around to the crew, and one of our lighting guys reached into his wallet and had exactly what I needed.

As the interview ended I said to Jimmy, “I just wanted to give you a gift before you go. You see, Jimmy, we’ve been working so hard here at the Olympics, and our compensation hasn’t been great.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Jimmy, confused and likely a little scared.

“In fact, I’m going to sacrifice my day’s compensation so you can see what it’s like to work for a Canadian television network. Here you go, Sir.”

I handed him a few wadded bills of Canadian Tire money.

After the final
Olympic Morning
ended with a staged bit where I was officially “fired” from CTV and arrested by two International Broadcast Centre security guards while Bev packed up her carry-on luggage and wheeled it off-set, I was completely exhausted and ready to sleep for four weeks. However, there was one major event still to come that would close out the Games: the men’s hockey final between Canada and the USA.

S
OMETIMES PEOPLE ASK ME IF
I have access to every sporting event on the planet, and the answer is absolutely not. I can sneak my way into the press box for almost any pro sports game in North America, but the Olympics were a whole other animal. For obvious reasons security was way more intense, though while I was in a media line to get into a preliminary-round men’s hockey game between Canada and Switzerland, I saw Brendan Shanahan sneak Jason Bateman and Will Arnett past the line and into the building.
What if Shanny were a terrorist?
I wondered to myself.

After the final
Olympic Morning
was over and we’d said our goodbyes, I went back to my room to change and grab a quick bite of room service. The plan was to meet up with my
Olympic Morning
director, Nilesh Hathi, and his wife, Lucie, who had also worked on our show. The three of us planned to watch the gold-medal game at the Molson Canadian Hockey House, essentially a beer tent with overpriced Molson beers and live bands where you could watch all the hockey games. It seemed as good a place to go as any. I had tried to
get a pass into the press box, but they were understandably hard to come by at that point, and I couldn’t argue that I was “covering the game” since my Olympic responsibilities had ended that morning.

Nilesh and Lucie stopped by my hotel to pick me up about two hours later, and we started walking toward the beer tent. About ten steps into our walk they broke the news: They had somehow managed to secure two tickets to the game from an international media member whom Nilesh had worked with at one point in his career. Never had the phrase “Be nice to everyone you work with” rung more true than that day. Nilesh and Lucie tried their best to downplay their good fortune, but there was no hiding it: I was being deservedly ditched and now had no one to watch the gold-medal game with. I considered heading back to my hotel room and watching the game alone, but that seemed downright pathetic. Even stumbling into the most crowded and disgusting downtown Vancouver pub by myself seemed like a better option than that. Instead I continued to walk to MCHH, figuring I would surely see someone down there that I knew.

The walk took about half an hour, and by the time I arrived there was already a massive lineup at Hockey House. David Kines, the former VP of programming at MuchMusic, had told me I could come in the VIP entrance. I was about to head in when I checked my phone and saw I had received a message from Susanne Boyce, then head of programming for CTV:

“Where are you?”

Curious, I replied back instantly: “I’m down at Molson Canadian Hockey House.”

A few seconds later, a reply from Susanne: “Oh, too bad. I have a ticket to the gold-medal game.”

Sweet Lord.

A shot of adrenaline ran through my body. My fingers were shaking as I typed:

“You hold on to that ticket. I will be RIGHT THERE.”

“Ok, haha,” she replied.

It was just thirty minutes to puck drop.

The next fifteen minutes of my life could best be described as the final scene from
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
with Ferris running through the streets and backyards of his Chicago suburb in order to beat his parents home and keep them from discovering he skipped school. Cabs were not an option. There was no way of hailing one back to the International Broadcast Centre where Susanne was; the streets were packed with people, and cabs were nowhere to be found. Transit was an even worse idea. Certainly, no buses were getting around downtown that day. There was simply no other option:
Run, Onrait, run
.

If you’re not familiar with downtown Vancouver, I can safely say that not only did I have a big run ahead of me but I had a big
uphill
run ahead of me. The Molson Canadian Hockey House was steps from Canada Hockey Place, aka GM Place, later to be renamed Rogers Arena, but forever known as the rink where the Canucks play. Susanne and the precious golden ticket were back at the International Broadcast Centre where we broadcast
Olympic Morning
and all the other shows, otherwise known as Canada Place and also the former Canadian pavilion at Expo 86. The distance wasn’t so much an issue; despite my poor conditioning, I should still have been able to make it there and back with ease. But there was one problem: The first half of the run was essentially
all uphill
.

I could hear the song that played at the end of
Ferris Bueller
in my head as I sprinted through the streets of Vancouver past red mittens and toques and signs and Canadian flags and so many happy people, so many smiles. I was trying to focus on the task at hand: If I could make it there and back in half an hour, I wouldn’t miss the drop of the puck. There was something else motivating me: Susanne was one of
the
bigwigs at CTV. This “golden ticket”
she had for me surely would not be in the nosebleed section. There was a chance I could have one of the best seats in the house for one of the most important hockey games in Canadian history.
Run, Onrait, run!

Like anyone in my situation, I was fuelled by adrenaline at the beginning of the run. I was making excellent time as I navigated my way uphill. I was acquainted enough with my surroundings that I didn’t make any wrong turns, but about halfway through my journey I started to really slow down. I am a skinny man who is blessed with great metabolism for my age, but this should not be mistaken for excellent conditioning. The most exercise I usually get is a bike ride to the Drake Hotel café in downtown Toronto for eggs Benedict, a
very leisurely
bike ride, I might add. Not to mention I didn’t exactly spend my customary twenty minutes stretching. I started to cramp up in my stomach, my legs were giving out, and I was sweating like Patrick Ewing in the 1994 NBA Finals. Scratch that: I was sweating like Ted Striker at the end of
Airplane!
(“The gear is down, and we’re ready to land!”) I could barely see through the sweat dripping down my ragged face, but the idea of clutching that golden ticket kept me moving until I finally arrived at the IBC, only halfway through my journey. I sprinted up the escalator to the CTV Olympic studios, frantically calling out to anyone,
everyone
, that I recognized, “HAS ANYONE SEEN SUSANNE? HAS ANYONE SEEN SUSANNE?” In my sweaty and frantic condition, people must have wondered if I had come to kill her.

Finally, I spotted Susanne casually speaking with a group of executives as if she wasn’t holding a ticket that was likely worth $5,000 at that point. She spotted me out of the corner of her eye, smiled, reached into a bag over her shoulder, lifted the ticket out, and held it up like it was Simba at the beginning of
The Lion King
.

“Looking for this?” she asked.

“Man, am I glad to see you!” I proclaimed, completely aware
that I really had no time for small talk with this woman, even though I still had to display how gracious and appreciative I was to receive the ticket.

“I have a favour to ask you,” she said calmly. She was kindly ignoring the fact that sweat was dripping on my shoes.

Oh, Christ
, I thought,
am I going to have to perform sexual favours on this woman to get this ticket?
I quickly surmised that I would, in fact, perform sexual favours on this woman to secure this ticket. I didn’t even hesitate for a second. This was, after all, Team Canada in a gold-medal Olympic hockey game. I would very likely have agreed to sexual favours if Susanne had been a man. Turns out that wasn’t what she was looking for.

“You’re going to be sitting next to Craig Kielburger. You know who that is, right?”

“Of course,” I lied.

“You’re going to be sitting next to him at the game. I need you to entertain him. Make sure he has a good time.”

So many things went through my head at that moment:
Make sure he has a good time? At the gold-medal men’s hockey game at the Olympics?
If this man needed me to make sure he had a good time at this event, he needed to hand in his passport. Nonetheless, I agreed to the request without hesitation, snatched the ticket from her hand, thanked her profusely, and began the run back to the arena. The good news is that the run was now mostly downhill toward the water. The bad news is that I was physically exhausted and very likely in the worst shape of anyone in the city of Vancouver at the time. I refused to miss puck drop, however, and I still had fifteen minutes. It would be just enough. I navigated the streets of Vancouver past hordes of excited Canadian hockey fans heading to their designated spots to catch the game, many of them calling my name. “ONRAIT, WHERE YA GOING?”

“Can’t … [gasp] … talk … [wheeze] now …” I’d reply with a
smile. It was kind of fun. Kind of. I hoped I didn’t die on the way to the most important sporting event I would ever attend in my life. That would really be tragic. Sort of fitting for a sportscaster I suppose, but tragic. But I didn’t die on the run to the arena. I made it with minutes to spare. As I made my way further and further down the lower bowl, I realized that the entire Olympic experience had been worth it: I suddenly found myself five rows up from centre ice, about five rows in front of Mr. William Shatner, and I took my seat right next to Craig Kielburger. I later discovered that Mr. Kielburger was the co-founder, along with his brother Marc, of Free the Children, a children’s rights advocacy group. At the time he was just twenty-seven years old and had already been awarded the Order of Canada. Craig had recently returned from Haiti, where the tragic 2010 earthquake had just taken place. He was genuinely nice, great to talk to, and took none of my energy.

The Golden Goal was as great as I’d imagined it would be in my head, and I realized the very moment Sidney Crosby scored that I was probably the luckiest man in the world.

I
JUST WANTED TO DO
a simple little show. Nothing special. Something I could do on the side while I continued my duties at TSN. It had been over a year since I’d hosted
Olympic Morning
and very little had come of it. I had been heaped with praise but it had resulted in nothing further. I did get
one
offer. Nan Row, executive producer of
The Marilyn Denis Show
, kindly offered to make me a regular contributor as the “dating expert” from a male perspective. While I appreciated the opportunity, I didn’t exactly think that was in my wheelhouse. Not to mention I had just started a relationship and my entire presence on that show would have been an elaborate lie. Not that television is slim on elaborate lies. We once convinced ourselves it was a good idea to have puppets in the intermission of hockey games at TSN.

I had always been a fan of
The Soup
with Joel McHale on E! network. When the show started back in 2003, my then wife and I would watch it all the time. I loved the concept of the show. It was formerly known as
Talk Soup
, a clip show specifically focusing on chat shows
and especially the chat shows of the 1990s. Trashy shows that were hot at the time, like the ones with Morton Downey Jr., Ricki Lake, and Jerry Springer. The show was hosted by a rotation of heavily talented actors and comedians starting with Greg Kinnear and followed up by John Henson, Hal Sparks, and Aisha Tyler. Once reality shows started to take over the television landscape, E! decided to rebrand it as
The Soup
and hired McHale, a comedian and actor from Seattle, to be the new host. McHale was great on the show, but the clips were the real star. Soon there were regular categories of clips like “What the Kids Are Watching,” “Reality Show Clip Time!” and “Chat Stew,” the latter focusing on those chat show clips that were once the sole focus on the show and were now simply part of a bigger entity. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it was a cult hit, the best kind of hit.

It wasn’t long into
The Soup
’s run that I began to wonder if this was a concept that might work in Canada. Even back in 2003, Canadian reality shows were being produced in mass quantity.
Canadian Idol
was doing exceptionally well for CTV, not to mention a gaggle of homemade reality shows and cooking shows on HGTV and Food Network Canada like
Holmes on Homes, Canada’s Worst Driver
, and
Canada’s Worst Handyman
. Then there was “Coach’s Corner” on
Hockey Night in Canada
, as well as
Canada AM
and
George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight
, plus all the great local news clips from all the Canadian networks. So many funny moments were happening on these shows, some intentionally, most unintentionally. It was time to celebrate our own television mishaps! I figured if they could do
The Soup
in the States, why couldn’t we do it here?

The concept stayed in my brain for years as I rose through the ranks at TSN and focused on my career at hand. There wasn’t really a lot of time to pitch a new television show. Oh, who am I kidding? I was just extremely lazy. Finally, in the late spring of 2011, upon coming to the realization that no one was going to approach me from CTV, I decided to get off my lazy ass and do something about it.

One of my
Olympic Morning
producers was Mark McInnis, who at the time was also head of programming for MTV Canada. Mark was the kind of person that I instantly bonded with. A gentle and genuinely creative soul, he was extremely encouraging and didn’t have the bitter edge that so many TV execs in this country seem to have acquired over too many years of working in this business.

Mark was in charge of MTV’s highly successful
The Hills After Show
, and he was the first person I thought of when considering a Canadian version of
The Soup
. At the very least, I thought Mark could steer me in the right direction of people who might be able to get the show off the ground. He was very close with Susanne Boyce, who had recently left the company after being CTV’s head of programming for several years. So, the person who essentially brought Mark into the fold had
just left the company
. This probably should have been an indication to me that Mark might not be long for the company either, but I was too worried about making sure my pitch was right instead of figuring out the right person to pitch to. Remember:
not much of a details guy
.

I told Mark my plan: The country had been producing so much original reality and news programming in the past ten years that it was time for a Canadian version of
The Soup
to celebrate all of it. I told Mark I knew it would be tricky: Networks like Global and CBC probably wouldn’t be eager to let us use clips of their shows and make fun of their talent, but I said that I thought we could be patient and wait them out. CBC might be been a government-funded network, but they needed to promote their shows as much as anyone did. If they allowed us to use a funny clip of a retired hockey player competing on
Battle of the Blades
, we could offer some free promotion for that show in exchange, perhaps introduce a newer, younger, hipper audience to a show like that. But that was a big
if
. There was a chance Global and Citytv could hold out for years before letting us use clips from their shows, if they let us use them at all.

The good news, I reasoned, was that CTV now owned so many different networks that we probably had enough material for a show within the walls of our own company. Between shows like
MTV Live
and
1 Girl 5 Gays
on MTV Canada, and
New.Music.Live
. on MuchMusic, and
Canada’s Worst Driver
on the Discovery Channel, and
Stratusphere
on Travel and Escape, and all the shows on CTV, like
etalk
, well, it’s safe to say we thought we had the content to at least do a half-hour a week. Any concern about the show looking like a promo clip for CTV network was certainly justified, but if the show was funny enough, I reasoned, other networks would come calling. Surely Citytv wouldn’t be too protective of a show like
Canada Sings!
in which they themselves were making fun of bad contestants. There was also plenty of online content being produced in this country as well, enough for a few clips a week for sure.

Mark loved the idea of the show and quickly brought in his senior creative producer, Ben Rotterman, to help shepherd it along. I told both gentlemen it might be a good idea for us to actually approach the producers of
The Soup
about using their show title graphics, music, and even a copy of their “set.” There was already a
Canadian Idol
, a
Canada’s Got Talent
, a
So You Think You Can Dance Canada
. It wasn’t as if we would be breaking the mould by producing
The Canadian Soup
. If anything, I thought it would lend legitimacy to the show.

But Mark and Ben didn’t like the idea of doing a Canadian version of
The Soup
. In their minds it made more sense to call the show something completely different and make it our own right from the start. There was a method to their madness: The two of them were essentially in control of programming at MTV, MuchMore, and MuchMusic, and they reasoned that by starting the show on one of those networks and calling it something new and unique, we would have some ownership over it and hopefully it would be given a longer time to find its way and be successful. I had seen shows
like
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
start out slowly. Had NBC given Jimmy only a month or two, the show would likely have gone down as a miserable failure. Same with
Seinfeld
. Same with
Beverly Hills, 90210
. I reasoned that if we could make the show a hit on a network like MTV or MuchMore, then a spot would be found for us on the main network. Or not. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to do a simple little television show that I would be proud of week after week. I wasn’t really concerned about
where
it aired. I just wanted it
on
the air.

This may be a point where a reasonable person would say, “Shouldn’t you have a manager or agent negotiate these things for you? Aren’t you a creative type who should just be worried about content?” When Mark and Ben agreed to shoot a pilot for the show, I was just happy to be
doing something
within the CTV family for the first time since the Olympics. My basic philosophy was: Get the show on the air and make sure it’s good, and the rest will take care of itself. I didn’t care about money. This was about doing something I loved and truly cared about.

I was assigned a show producer named Michael MacKinnon, who had started out in the business shooting and editing
The Buzz
, a comedy show that started on Rogers Cable TV and eventually made its way onto the Comedy Network.
The Buzz
starred Daryn Jones and Mistah Mo and was almost a precursor to
Punk’d, Jackass
, and shows like that. I always thought Daryn was a really funny and talented guy and was surprised it took so long for him to find a home on conventional television, co-hosting MTV Live and working for Mark McInnis and then eventually moving to the CBC. Michael was also a funny and talented guy, and he was genuinely enthusiastic about the project. So we had Mike on board, and Ben and Mark were on board; it was time to shoot a pilot for the show. We wanted to stick to material we knew we had access to rather than trying to do a pilot that featured a bunch of clips we couldn’t use anyway. For
the most part we stuck to Internet clips and a ton of MTV Canada and MuchMusic-based clips, knowing we had access to all of them and would probably be using a ton of that material going forward.

After Michael and his crew assembled enough clips for a credible pilot, the two of us sat down and wrote some intros and jokes for the clips—nothing too hilarious, just funny enough to give senior CTV execs an idea of the tone. The whole thing made me feel really happy, like I was finally accomplishing something outside of TSN. We were shooting a pilot for a real TV show. In Canada! It was practically a miracle.

Mike, Mark, and Ben came up with the name
The Week That Was
. I didn’t love the title. I felt it had been used on a bunch of radio and television shows before and wasn’t really unique enough. Again, though, I wasn’t about to let a little detail like that derail our progress. We shot the pilot at the famous Masonic Temple in downtown Toronto, which was being used as a studio by CTV, mostly for MTV Canada, and has since been sold, likely to condo developers. The Temple had hosted a number of legendary bands on its mainstage over the years, even Led Zeppelin. I’d seen Sloan play there back in my Ryerson days. Our studio wasn’t exactly a walk-in closet, but it was pretty close. It was about the size of a decent one-bedroom apartment. It really didn’t matter because it was all we needed.

The pilot went as well as hoped: not mean-spirited, but rather a celebration of all the television being produced in this country. I had visions of
The Week That Was
being sold all over the world, with various foreign networks playing it for audiences who would laugh endlessly at Canadian TV clips. I was dreaming big. I didn’t think it was the funniest show we could do, but I thought it conveyed the spirit of the show very well. I was confident we’d get picked up. And we did!

But it was complicated. My bosses at TSN had been
very
good about letting me shoot the pilot in the first place. They knew I
wanted to try something new and were completely in favour of it as long as it didn’t affect what I was doing at TSN day to day. That was the plan, anyway. Spend maybe three days a week working on
The Week That Was
: two days of writing and prep work, possibly pretaping one item per show, a comedy sketch or an interview perhaps, then on day three shoot the actual show and look ahead to next week. Keep in mind I was already working a full-time job. I didn’t want the new show to take anything away from
SportsCentre
.

It didn’t take long for the feedback on the new pilot to start coming back, and it was generally very positive. Apparently, the pilot was shown to the CTV sales team and was met with great enthusiasm, with several young salespeople, guys who had watched me for years on TSN, offering to sell the project to advertisers. Rick Brace, who was in charge of all CTV Specialty channels but had once been the president of TSN and was aware of my existence, gave the green light to the project. Rick was apparently concerned about our ability to secure clips for the new show, but Mark and Ben reassured him that there was enough content within the walls of CTV to get us started and we’d work from there. We were a go.

We had been promised only a limited early run, and it was my fault: I had to make my annual trek with Dan across the country to do live shows for the Kraft Celebration Tour in August, so
The Week That Was
would have to go on hiatus about four episodes in. Should we wait and launch the show after the Kraft Tour was over? Or produce and air four episodes during the summer, get our feet wet, and then return as a well-oiled machine after a two-week break? We were all eager to get going, so we decided to launch the show as soon as possible.

I had become acquainted with the Toronto-based Sketchersons comedy troupe through their weekly show, “Sunday Night Live” at the Comedy Bar in the Bloorcourt Village neighbourhood. I was actually honoured to have been asked to host the show, essentially a
note-for-note live rendition of Saturday Night Live, complete with “Weekend Update” and a musical guest. The Sketchersons would frequently ask Toronto “celebrities” to host, like Mayor David Miller and former
Kids in the Hall
star Scott Thompson, as well as other local stand-up comedians and sketch comedians. I was asked to host the show in 2010 just after the Olympics, and I had a great time doing it.

I found everyone in the cast to be supremely talented and fun, and in particular I hit it off with a baseball– and
Battlestar Galactica–loving
nerd like me named Brendan Halloran. When it came time to find a writer for the show, I knew Brendan would be a great fit. He understood exactly what we were going for, but going in he was already understandably frustrated by the limitations of writing on our show. There was simply no way for us to be as mean-spiritedly funny as
The Soup
because we wanted to encourage other shows to sign up and let us use their clips. Still, I kept reminding Brendan that we had plenty of amazing footage that would make the show a definite hit. Or, if not a hit, at least a serviceable choice on Sunday afternoons while you’re nursing a hangover.