Mercer - Rick Mercer Final Report

Raise a Little Hell

WILL RICK BE RANTING?

This was the only question Slawko Klymkiw, the CBCs director of English-language TV programming, asked when executive producer Gerald Lunz said we were moving to Toronto with plans to launch our own show.

It was the fall of 2002, and Gerald, my partner in show business and in life, assured Slawko, Rick will be ranting.

There were no more direct questions, which is just as well because we didnt have any answers. Details were hazy. We shook hands, and just like that, we had a TV show.

In this business, in show business, nothing happens that easily or that fast.

Rick Mercers Monday Report launched in January of 2004, and out of the gate we had a bona fide TV hit on our hands.

Immediately, I was on the road nonstop and I loved it. The studio might have been in Toronto, but in my mind the real set for our show was the ten million square kilometres that made up the country.

We called the show Monday Report, a play on the title of the venerable CBC News program Sunday Report, a current-affairs institution. We also had an ulterior motive. From the very start, we had lobbied hard for a Monday-night time slot, the best real estate in network television. Once wed secured that slot, we figured the best way to ensure we kept it was to put the word Monday in the title.

It worked like a charm. We ended our first season as the number one show on the CBCand our champion, Slawko, promptly moved us to Tuesday. The Monday Report crew jackets and shirts we purchased in celebration of being renewed went to the Salvation Army and the show was rebranded simply Rick Mercer Report.

And I kept ranting.

But from the moment we were renewed, I had one nagging fear: Would I have enough to rant about? We had a hit on our hands, and that was exciting, but in TV a hit can run for five to seven years. How would I find something to rant about every week?

Eventually, I learned not to underestimate the absurdity of life in this confederation we call Canada.

My cameraman, Don Spence, who was there for every rant and every adventure for fifteen years, has done the math. Together we walked forty-two kilometres in Graffiti Alleyme marching forward with a chip on my shoulder, Don marching backward, a forty-five-pound camera on his.

I never did run out of subjects to rant about. And while the rants didnt really change in style, they did change in tone.

When I started, my motto was Anger is my cardio. It still stands as my single-line bio on my Twitter feed. It is a tad disingenuous. I dont consider myself an angry person. Thats Geralds job.

Sure, some of the rants came from an angry placethere is a lot to be angry about. If you watched Question Period every day, like I used to, being anything but angry would probably be a sign of dissociative mental disorder. But I am not for the most part an angry person. I do, however, believe there is nothing to be gained by keeping quiet or pretending that everything is fine when it is clearly not.

We all know those people. The curtains in the living room are on fire and their response is Well, there are