Two New Shows From Armando Ianucci!

Once again, speaking of Mercer ...

Here's the back story. Mercer used to be one of the main guys on a weekly news satire show here in Canada called This Hour Has 22 Minutes. He was always - and by far - the best of the contributors, in my opinion, and the show slid pretty quickly after he left. This hour was Canada's Daily Show well before there was a Daily Show. One of their guys was well known for roaming the halls of parliament and getting prominent politicians to put him in a head lock. One had Preston Manning - the leader of a neo-con party at the time - give him a spanking. One of the women used to dress up as Xena and harangue both politicians and major business people. She also once rushed the stage after a Jean Charest press conference - he was leader of the opposition in Quebec at the time, I believe, and one of the most prominent politicians in the country - and gave him an impromptu hair cut. At its peak This Hour was one of the best political satire shows ever made.

Anyway ... Mercer used to do weekly rants and more mock-serious stuff, much like Stewart and Colbert. I believe the Talking To Americans spots began during the lead in to the election that saw George W elected the first time ... Mercer went to the US to try and do a bit with him and was rejected because W doesn't have much of a sense of humor (Mercer later tried 'conducting' an interview with him by shouting questions across the White House lawn while W was headed to the presidential helicopter and was escorted away by Secret Service) but the budget of the show being as small as it was they couldn't afford to have him come back without anything so he had to make something up on the spot, this became Talking to Americans.

Mercer started going to major US university campuses - Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc - where people would presumably be well educated, making up absolutely ridiculous stories about Canada, and asking people for their responses to these 'stories' on camera. So we got Harvard history profs congratulating Canada for granting women the right to vote, people congratulating us on the switch to proper currency (I think he told them we'd used leaves up until then), etc etc. It's absolutely hilarious stuff and they eventually collected them all into their own TV specials, which is still one of the highest rated things the CBC has ever done. Which, of course, means it's entirely unavailable. Plenty of Anne of Green Gables DVDs out there, though ...