I’ve got bidniss to attend to in Beantown today. I’ll spill the details later. Wish me luck!
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In solidarity with the people of the Philippines in the wake of super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, the CN Tower’s multicolour LED panel lighting system was set to the red, white, blue, and yellow of the Philippine flag on Monday and Tuesday nights. Thanks, Toronto.
And with the cancellation of Ford Nation after one mere episode — supposedly for the production costs; it took 5 hours to shoot 40-ish minutes of show, plus 8 hours of editing — Rob and Doug Ford, the mayor and the councillor who fancies himself the co-mayor of Toronto, join Wikipedia’s List of television series canceled after one episode.
As you might expect, the list contains TV shows with some stool-softeningly bad concepts. But even among all this list of disasters, one stands out: a 1990 British sitcom called Heil Honey I’m Home!
A spoof of American sitcoms from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Heil Honey I’m Home! features Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun as a Ralph and Alice Kramden-like couple living next door to a Jewish couple, the Goldensteins. It features a lot of tropes from old sitcoms, right down to the corny theme song, brain-dead plotline, and of course, the studio audience applause whenever a major character walks onto the set.
The show opens with a title card that claims that the show was found in the archives in Burbank, California (“Television City”), perhaps as a hint to the audience that the show is a parody. The one and only episode’s plot is based around the Hitlers having Neville Chamberlain over for dinner in order to convince him that Adolf isn’t a troublemaker, but a decent, ordinary guy. He asks Eva to keep the visit a secret from the Goldensteins, but Eva can’t resist boasting about it, and they invite themselves over. Hilarity, one assumes, was meant to ensue.
It’s painfully bad. I’ve seen improv troupes do a better job with similar concepts. Needless to say, the program was controversial and was accused of trivializing the Nazis; others say it was a show in the same spirit as Hogan’s Heroes. It’s not surprising it was cancelled after just one episode.
If you’ve got nothing better to do, or just morbidly curious, here’s the entire uncut episode:
It wasn’t bound to last — between the “two hours a day” Rob spends at the gym, his $170,000/year job as mayor, his battle with Toronto’s city council, a possible future battle in court, campaigning laws that would require him to leave the show should he run for office again, and the fact that he’s got only so many talking point — but Ford Nation has been cancelled sooner than anyone expected. Hosted on Canada’s Sun News Network, Canada’s hokey and low-rent counterpart to FOX News, Ford Nation was the television answer to The City, the recently-cancelled talk radio show featuring Toronto’s Peter Griffin-esque mayor Rob Ford and his brother and city councillor Doug Ford, who fancies himself the co-mayor of Toronto.
Simon Houpt from The Globe and Mail writes:
While Ford Nation pulled about 155,000 viewers, according to overnight ratings, it is a victim of the brutal economics of cable TV and the Fords’ relative inexperience with the medium: Monday’s episode took five hours to record, and another eight hours to edit, making it an unusually expensive endeavour for a niche network that is in only about 40 per cent of Canadian households.
It’s probably the highest-rated show ever to appear on Sun News. In reports filed with the CRTC, Sun News reported a viewership of 16,400 in an average minute; their best-performing shows never broke 100,000 viewers in 2012. Still, The Brothers Ford have only so many talking points, election campaign rules will eventually require them to leave the show, and in the long run, those two jokers might be pure poison with advertisers.
“It’s by far the most successful thing, from an audience perspective, the network has ever done,” said Kory Teneycke, the vice president of Sun News. But the program would not be produced again.
“For the Ford brothers, we welcome them back on our network, as we do all newsmakers, to be part of our programming as a guest on another show.”
For those of you who missed last night’s broadcast, George Jessup captured it and posted it on YouTube:
Don’t have time for the full episode? Here’s his highlight reel:
Don’t have time for the highlight reel? How about just the “urinating in public” bit?
The key line in this collection of sound bites (punctuated with “I’m just stumbling my way through this” sort of music that underscored the old Mac ads featuring ‘ordinary people’) is…
“All these rich elitist people? I’m sick of ’em! I’m sick of ’em. They’re perfect. They don’t do nothing. Get out of here, ‘they don’t do nothing’. They’re the biggest crooks around.”
It’s a message that works, and best of all, it helps people forget that he’s a millionaire from the label-printing company his dad started, with long-time family friends from high up in Canadian government (again, thanks to his dad), and makes a $170,000 salary.
Here’s the longer version:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
At first glance, it looked like a laundry list of our mayor’s problems, especially that last one, until I looked at it more closely. I read “FUSSY eaters” as something else.
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Where I was, two Thursdays ago
Even though I was on vacation, I had to do one career-related thing at a certain place since I had to be in the neighbourhood. I’ll spill the details later, but in the meantime, here’s a hint…
Click the photo to see it at full size.