When you think of the giants of late-night TV talk in the U.S., who immediately springs to mind? Carson? Letterman? Leno? Kimmel?
And in Canada? Tap-tap-tap, is this thing on?
In fairness, our country has produced a few memorable hosts, including a guy in a van, an apple juice baron and a sock.
In 1976 CBC made the first real effort to get in the game with “90 Minutes Live,” hosted by popular radio personality Peter Gzowski. Though he had no standup ability, the network tried to Frankenstein Gzowski into a joke-telling, sportscoat-wearing Carson clone with a moustache. If you were actively daring viewers to change the channel to a Buffalo affiliate, this is how you would do it. The show lasted two years, and Gzowski eventually returned to radio.
“90 Minutes Live” was rebranded in 1978 as “Canada After Dark,” which had a much better title and veteran comic actor Paul Soles behind the desk. If any Canadian late-night talk show was going to succeed, this should have been it.
Shot in Toronto, the show attracted impressive guests. David Letterman and Jay Leno appeared, as did other American stars, including Angie Dickinson, Janis Ian and Charlton Heston. The SCTV cast also did “Canada After Dark,” including Martin Short, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis.
So, what happened? The hour-long, weeknight series started 15 minutes later than Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” at 11:45 p.m., so many viewers had already locked in for the night. And Soles, best known as the voice of Hermey the Elf on the Christmas TV classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” just didn’t bring the right kind of late-night energy to the role. After six months, the series itself went dark.
The failure of “90 Minutes Live” and “Canada After Dark” sent other would-be Canadian late-night hosts, such as CTV daytime star Alan Thicke, straight to Hollywood. His “Thicke of the Night” (1983-84) enjoyed a brief run in syndication. But taking on Carson, proved just as pointless in L.A. as it did in Canada.
It was a long time before CBC would try again on home turf. “Midday” co-host Ralph Benmergui was recruited in hopes that his smart-alecky daytime approach would carry the night. “Friday Night! With Ralph Benmergui” (1992-93) was the result. Carson’s retirement in May 1992, however, had David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Arsenio Hall splintering the field. Benmergui’s once-a-week venture was also kneecapped by CBC’s dumb decision to cram their nightly newscast into a 9 p.m. slot, leaving Benmergui stranded on Fridays at 10, and later, for most of its run, at 11.
For its second season, Benmergui received a humiliating vote of no confidence: he remained as host, but other comedians did the monologue. This would be the equivalent of Jimmy Kimmel turning his first 10 minutes over to his writers, or members of the FCC.
In the States, to make the star look good, 11 new Harvard grads would have been hired instead. Canadian networks never invested in more than three writers. No wonder Canada’s smartest and best joke writers streamed across the border for jobs at “Saturday Night Live,” “The Simpsons” and “Letterman.”
One comic who made the most of his Benmergui appearances was Mike Bullard. His series, “Open Mike With Mike Bullard” had a very Canadian beginning in 1997, operating out of the back of Wayne Gretzky’s bar in Toronto. Producers used to scare up an audience by chasing patrons off stools and into the bleachers.
“Open Mike” introduced viewers to a generation of club comedians such as Harland Williams, Tom Green, Jeremy Hotz and Brent Butt. Prime Minister Jean Chretien was Bullard’s favourite guest.
In 1998, Bullard moved his show into the Masonic Temple on Yonge Street. By then airing on both CTV and the Comedy Network, the series cranked out 900 episodes in six seasons, occasionally topping the ratings of both Leno and Letterman in Canada.
Bullard’s hit-or-miss crowd work, coupled with scant writing resources, eventually wore thin. Discovering his time was up at CTV, Bullard jumped to Global. CTV countered by importing “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and programming it five minutes earlier than “The Mike Bullard Show.” Smoked in the ratings, the new series was shut down after five weeks.
The fate of Canadian late-night talk was sealed. It was deemed cheaper to import an American show.
But that didn’t stop some folks. “Man With a Van” (2008-2014) was just that: JR Digs, a former skateboard shop owner from Burlington, Ont., cruised the streets in his rusty 1991 Ford Econoline in search of guests. Digs was not that far off-road with this venture when you consider James Corden drove Carpool Karaoke for eight seasons on CBS.
This wasn’t even Digs’s first attempt at a Canadian late-night talk show. His previous series, which completely lived up to its title, was called “Another Crappy Canadian Late Night Talk Show.”
“Man With a Van” aired on Global at 2 a.m., a time slot where the brave or foolish would buy themselves airtime in hopes of making the money back by selling commercials. The wee small hours were also where one could find “The Being Frank Show,” which for a time aired after 1 a.m. on CHCH. The weekly series featured sauce and juice peddler — and shameless publicity hound — Frank D’Angelo as a wannabe Carson, complete with a desk, monologue and orchestra, all crammed into the basement of his King Street supper club, Forget About It.
These and other low-cost Canadian talk show efforts had to have been inspired by the relative success of Stephen Kerzner and his all-wool alter ego, Ed the Sock, the star of Citytv’s “Ed & Red’s Night Party” (1995-2008), a cheeky mix of snark and hot tubs which ran in various incarnations for 14 seasons. It was even exported to Australia.
As the traditional broadcast and cable landscape continued to fragment, the Canadian late-show act shifted to the internet. One early success was Lilly Singh, a Scarborough native whose sketches began drawing crowds on YouTube in 2010. Her millions of viewers got the attention NBC in the U.S., where “A Little Late With Lilly Singh” premiered in 2019. The after 1 a.m. time slot and the COVID pandemic — as well as the now growing trend away from late-night talk shows — had her gone by 2021. Still, Singh broke through a ceiling as the first openly bisexual person, as well as the first of South Asian descent, to host a major U.S. late-night talk show.
Apparently, not even American networks can afford late-night talk shows anymore. In what it claimed was a cost-cutting move, CBS announced in July that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” will be shutting down in May. Jimmy Kimmel, despite becoming a flashpoint for free speech, will likely depart the scene when his ABC contract expires around the same time.
Pressure from thin-skinned politicians looking to shut down dissent aside, it does seem that not enough viewers on both sides of the border watch these shows live anymore to make them profitable. Ads on YouTube and social-media clips bring in a mere fraction of the revenue networks banked for decades from broadcast TV.
There is a logical alternative for Canada, one that could also be the next step for Colbert and Kimmel: video podcasting. Conan O’Brien has shown the way and built a whole new empire. This is a cost-efficient opportunity for Canada to try and create some sort of homegrown star system at a time when our population has its “elbows up.”
As for Canada’s greatest late-night venture? Some might say it’s “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” the dead-on series of “SCTV” sketches featuring Joe Flaherty as smarmy host Maudlin; John Candy as his sycophantic sidekick, William B. Williams; and Eugene Levy as unctuous guest comic Bobby Bittman (“How are ya!”).
It is fitting, then, that our biggest contribution to the late-night talk format is a comedy sketch. Canadians are simply better at deconstructing late-night talk shows than they are at actually constructing them.
