Anchorboy (7 page)

A
S MUCH AS PEOPLE MIGHT
think I am some sort of pop culture junkie, I don’t watch entertainment shows like
etalk
or
Entertainment Tonight
. This is not a comment on the abilities and attributes of the fine people working on those shows. I just don’t like the presentation style that has become ubiquitous with them. SHOUTING LOUDLY AND BOLDLY while posing in some sort of weird cross-legged stance so I can understand just how important this upcoming story about John Travolta’s latest masseuse is. It’s just not me. It’s just not anyone, really. If someone actually came up to you on the street and started talking to you like that, you would think they were a bloody lunatic. Whoever invented this presentation style should be exiled from the industry and forced to work with mannequins. I’m pretty certain that would be preferable to them anyway.

I have hostile feelings toward these types of shows because it was their resurgence in the early part of this century that ushered in the death of the half-hour local sports highlight show where I got my
start. All across the country, Global Television had
Sportsline
shows that provided a half-hour of daily highlights and local sports content you couldn’t really get anywhere else. The greatest thing about these shows was that they provided the ultimate training ground for any aspiring sports broadcaster. Those shows were never ratings blockbusters, more like niche cultural mini-blockbusters for local sports fans. So it wasn’t entirely surprising that Global scrapped all their
Sportsline
-style shows across the country and replaced that half-hour of Canadian content with
Entertainment Tonight Canada
. Despite my mixed feelings, I had always been a bit curious about the world of entertainment television. I wondered if I could fit into it with my own presentation style. That is to say, with no style at all.

I started to think about applying for entertainment reporter jobs. This was still pretty much pre-Internet, when even a small start-up local TV station had two full-time entertainment reporters! You had four media outlets to inform you of entertainment happenings in your city: radio, TV, newspapers, and of course the local alt-weekly left-leaning newspaper, which probably had the best local entertainment coverage of all of them.

Around this time, Manitoba-based Craig Media Inc. was launching another one of their not-so-successful A-Channel stations in Winnipeg. Ads were plastered on the back of
Playback
magazine, an industry paper, announcing openings for on-air and behind-the-scenes talent for this exciting new start-up station, which in this case wasn’t really a true start-up because the Craig family were just rebranding their already existing Manitoba station to match their two television stations in Alberta.

At no point in my life had I ever imagined moving to Winnipeg. I didn’t have any preconceived notions about the city, I just never really thought about it unless the Jets or the Blue Bombers were playing. Still I thought I’d send a demo tape to the station anyway.
I didn’t think I’d be contacted about a job, but maybe I could get a bit of feedback about whether going in the entertainment direction was even a viable option for a complete and utter jackass like me.

I sent a VHS tape (still prominent in 1999) to A-Channel news director Darcy Modin, and she called back surprisingly fast. Shockingly fast, actually. I should have realized I was immediately in a position of bargaining power, but I was simply too surprised by getting a phone call at all. Darcy told me the entertainment anchor posts had been filled, and she was actually wondering if I might be interested in hosting the station’s brand new morning show,
The Big Breakfast
. Years later Darcy would reveal that her first two choices for the job had fallen through over, surprise, money. Turns out A-Channel was a bit desperate. Desperation! The gateway to opportunity! (That was an alternative title for this book.)

While travelling in England in the summer of 1998 I had seen the U.K.’s version of
The Big Breakfast
on Channel 4 with Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen, and it seemed like a laugh riot and something I’d love to try. Darcy offered to send me a few VHS tapes of Calgary’s
Big Breakfast
show starring Dave Kelly and Jebb Fink so I could watch them and have an idea of what I might be getting myself into. They arrived a couple of days later, and I popped them into the VCR at my apartment near the legendary Bessborough Hotel in downtown Saskatoon. I was immediately captivated by the show. Dave Kelly was the absolute perfect morning show host, like a young Regis Philbin. Perky, friendly, good-looking, but not
too
good-looking, the guy positively radiated energy, but not in an
annoying
way. The guests and subjects he tackled were actually interesting to me. Local restaurant chefs, local bands, and local entertainment happenings. To sum up, the whole thing was very
local
.

The thing I liked best of all was the free-flowing nature of the show and the sense that the hosts were genuinely enjoying themselves. While
Sportsline
had been a very structured and classic-style
nightly highlight show featuring teleprompter reading, highlight reading, and a bit of occasional banter,
The Big Breakfast
was pretty much the exact opposite: three hours of pure mayhem on the prairies. No script, no prompter, no rules! The formula was relatively simple: One main host in the studio, another co-host on remote, and a news anchor, preferably female, who bantered frequently with the main studio host and kept the show a little bit grounded. It was, for all intents and purposes, a note-for-note rip-off of Citytv’s
Breakfast Television
format that had been so successful in Toronto. Without all that pesky traffic and transit reporting getting in the way of the fun.

Darcy liked the demo tape I had sent her for the entertainment reporter job but wanted to see something more. “Could you head out onto the street in Saskatoon and interview people and ask them interesting questions?” Um, no, I’m pretty sure me stealing a camera for an afternoon would arouse the suspicions of my current boss in Saskatchewan, I replied.

“Well, I need to see something more than just you reading highlights. I need to know you have the personality to pull this off.” I should point out that at the time I wasn’t exactly dressing as the Phantom of the Opera and screaming at the viewer every five minutes like I did on
SportsCentre
. Other than dressing up in an afro wig and disco outfit for Halloween I had kept things pretty normal at
Sportsline
(admittedly, dressing in an afro wig might not be considered “pretty normal”). The demo tapes I was sending out reflected a young, competent, but fairly boring broadcaster. Not much “personality” to be seen there. Luckily, I have friends who are a lot more talented than I am.

My friend Jeff Cole was in my class at Ryerson and is now a highly sought-after freelance television director and cameraman in Toronto. He was the guy at Ryerson that
everyone
wanted to have working on their projects, because he was the guy at Ryerson who
actually knew what he was doing. One day in 1997 I told him I was going to try my hand at stand-up comedy at Toronto’s Laugh Resort alongside my much funnier friend Peter Sayn-Wittgenstein. The Laugh Resort was located in an old firehall on Lombard Street. The one-time home of Second City in Toronto, the club would hold an amateur night every week. Peter and I, longtime fans of stand-up comedy, thought we’d give it a shot.

We had just returned from a weekend trip to New York where we had hit up the legendary comedy club Catch a Rising Star. The headliner that evening happened to be a young comedy writer named Louis CK, who at the time was just beginning his stand-up career. I’ll never forget how Peter and I sat in the front row and literally laughed until we cried at Louis’s incredible set, despite the fact that the rest of the crowd pretty much sat in stone-cold silence. I vowed to follow his career from then on, hoping he might catch a break and make it big someday.

I made two appearances at the Laugh Resort in Toronto, and my best joke involved an article I had recently read in
Details
magazine (back when people read
Details
magazine, or should I say, back when people read magazines at all) about how gender roles were reversed in the porn industry: The women had all the power and made all the money, while the men made next to nothing and had to wait around all day to get called to the set, leading luminaries of the genre like Peter North and Randy West (why were so many male porn stars named after directions?) to complain that they had “no life.”

“So let me get this straight …” I said onstage in my best stand-up delivery, “they sit around all day and do nothing, and then get called to a porn set to have sex with beautiful women and get paid for it? No life?
That’s my ideal life!
”

Needless to say, my stand-up career was short lived.

Thankfully, though, Jeff Cole kindly attended one of my few
appearances and, as he always did, brought his highly sophisticated VHS camera along to record the proceedings. Afterward he gave me the tape, and I sent it home to my mom for safekeeping.

Fast-forward years later and I’m on the phone with Darcy talking about the
Big Breakfast
job, and she’s asking me if I have “anything else that might show my personality.”

“Well, a couple of years ago I did some amateur-night stand-up comedy, and I may have a tape of it floating around somewhere.”

“I need that tape,” said Darcy, in the same ultra-serious tone she would use to say “I do” during our wedding four years later.

Soon I was off the phone with Darcy and on the phone with my mom in Kelowna, asking her if she wouldn’t mind digging through their basement and tracking down a VHS tape that said “Jay’s Stand-Up” on it. Luckily, I am the light of my mother’s life, and she managed to find the tape in question almost immediately, shipping it off to Winnipeg later that day. Two days later I got a call from Darcy asking if I would like to be the new host of Winnipeg’s only local morning show.

I was a steadfast negotiator. I flat-out refused to accept anything less than $48,000 for my first year and $53,000 my second year after initially being offered $40,000 for year one and $45,000 for year two. Read all about my negotiating tactics in my next book,
Zero Leverage: The World of Canadian Television
.

Truthfully, it was a big salary bump from what I was making at the time, and at this point it wasn’t really about the money anyway. It was time to try something different and challenge myself a bit. I had been given the sports director job in Saskatoon based on the promise that I would stick around for five years, but it was time to move on and Lisa wasn’t too upset about it. She said some wonderful things to me when I told her I was leaving, telling me I had really grown as a broadcaster and she was sad to see me go. I really appreciated how kind she was. I was sad to be leaving Saskatoon
for other reasons. I had made amazing friends there in a very short time, people I remain friends with to this day. I will never forget my time in that city, but it was time to start wandering back east.

Goin’ to Winnipeg …

M
Y CO-HOST ON
T
HE
B
IG
B
REAKFAST
was Jon Ljungberg, a Massachusetts-raised stand-up comedian by trade who, when travelling through Winnipeg twelve years earlier, met a girl at a gig. The next thing you know, he had two kids and a nice bungalow in the Windsor Park area of town. We immediately hit it off. I remember walking into the station for the first time and seeing him in a Hawaiian shirt, like a complete parody of a stand-up comedian. He was so friendly and immediately offered to take me “for a drive.” I assumed at that point I’d either get fed or raped, and I thought it was probably pretty likely the former. Off we went, and within twenty minutes we were having a conversation about how funny the concept of “felching” was. Felching is a sex act in which a man extracts his own semen out of his partner’s anus through a straw. Literally in tears laughing as Jon waxed poetic about the concept, I said to myself, “I will get along with this person. This person and I will be friends.” We are still friends to this day. And felching is still hilarious.

We would have about eight thirty-second “chats” on the show every single morning, five times a week for two years. Jon’s sense of humour, like mine, was mostly just silliness. We would tape “best of” shows at places like the amusement park and the Forks Market, stopping at various businesses and using props or eating food. I knew everyone in the city within three months. The mayor, all the restaurant owners, all the local bands, they all came by to be on the show. It was really fun. I would have loved to have been making more money, but I didn’t think about it that much.

When I finally met Darcy in person I was swept off my feet. She was so sexy and so indifferent to my antics, but she was a good boss who gave Jon and me a lot of leeway to have fun and be ourselves. I was really starting to show my personality on television—three hours of unscripted live TV will do that for you. The only catch was working mornings, something I did not handle well back then and still don’t to this day. Jon asked some of the local radio DJs for advice about how to feel more awake while doing the show, and they all said, “You will never feel awake while doing a morning show.” It was a bit like the advice the camera guy gave me at ITV:
You will always be working when everyone else is off
.

I told Jon I had a crush on our boss, and he laughed at me and wished me luck. During the first A-Channel Christmas party in December 1999 I decided I would approach her about going on a date. I figured that everyone at the party had been drinking, and if she was appalled or offended or worse wanted me fired, I could explain it away the following Monday morning by telling her I had had too much to drink and didn’t mean what I had said.

We were living together within a year.

I really had no plans to leave Winnipeg. I honestly thought I might never leave.