Red Green says goodbye to Possum Lodge
Don your plaid and get out the duct tape! The final Red Green Show will be taped before a live audience in Toronto on Saturday.
The sold-out show marks the end of 15 years of Canadian TV history; it’s the last instalment of the final season of the show, which airs Friday nights on CBC TV.
Comedian Steve Smith originally created the Red Green character for a CHCH series out of Hamilton, Ont., Smith and Smith. It starred Smith and his wife, Morag.
The show, about the handyman with the philosophy “If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy” moved from one network to another before finding a home on CBC.
Behind the Scenes: Red Green Show
It attracts about one million viewers a week and is taped at Harbourside studios in Toronto before a live audience where fans often wear plaid shirts and carry a roll of duct tape to fit in with the Possum Lodge atmosphere. A fan club boasts about 100,000 members.
The show created a host of memorable characters, including his straight-man nephew Harold, played by Patrick McKenna, and the light-fingered Mike Hamar, played by Wayne Robson.
Red Green’s greatest legacies may be the thousands of uses he has found for duct tape, and the Possum Lodge Man’s Prayer: “I’m a man…But I can change…If I have to…I guess.”
Smith says that after 300 episodes and 9,500 pages of script, he’s not going to miss being Red Green.
“I won’t miss him, not even slightly,” he said in an interview with the Hamilton Spectator. “It’s been so great, honestly. It’s all positive memories for me, and if I felt sad, it would be kind of like I’m greedy, that I wanted more of that. I don’t think there is more. I don’t think there could be more and I sure don’t need more or expect more.”
Smith, a resident of Hamilton, plans to continue writing and running S&S Productions, which produced the Red Green Show.
He is a script consultant on the upcoming CTV comedy Jeff, Ltd. and plans to get more involved in the S&S animated program, Sons of Butcher for the Comedy Network.
Smith revealed that the final episode will give fans a video glimpse into what the future holds for the characters who hung around Possum Lodge with Red.
“It will be a kind of where-are-they-now thing where we fast forward 10 years ahead,” Smith says. “I really want the fans to feel satisfied and know what happened to the characters and that everybody’s OK and the lodge still exists somewhere. It’s just not on TV anymore.”
The final show will air in March.
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