SCTV is off the air

A ton of traffic has come through from an Unfogged link to the last post, so I think I’d better put on my best “sanity face” for a moment. When I was young, I wanted to grow up to be like Scott McLemee; unfortunately I didn’t know of Scott McLemee, or else I would have understood that he lives in a state of grace. So when I invoked “I Was a Teenage Communist” as a description of his reflections on his youthful political activity I kid; and this may be more evident to those who remember the source of the reference, the ’80s Canadian sketch comedy program SCTV. As a small child in small-town Michigan, I used to watch SCTV on the Canadian stations, and although at six I was not wholly versed in the ways of the world and unable to understand some of the program I haven’t forgotten it since.

The program was a spin-off from the Toronto Second City comedy troupe (itself a spin-off of the troupe in the “Second City”, i.e. Chicago). The premise was this: an independent television station in a small town called “Melonville” went without syndicated programming and aired its own, terrible, original programming. Instead of “Battle of the Network Stars”, “Battle of the PBS Stars”; a sock hop program called “Mel’s Rock Pile”, and so on. SCTV was aired in the US for a couple of years, after Saturday Night Live, and its gentle but pointed humor made quite an impression on people at the time: Matt Groening has cited its scores of characters as an inspiration for the Simpsons’ “ensemble” cast, for example. The actors (John Candy, Eugene Levy, et al.) went on to movie careers, and SCTV was replaced by various demi-imitators on basic cable.

I had a chance not too long ago to watch some of the episodes on DVD, and I think it holds up pretty well. Although it was clearly a vastly different time the basic idea of “making a dollar out of twenty-five cents”, culturally speaking, seems somewhat applicable to contemporary situations. So perhaps there’s a certain amount of method in my madness after all.