WATCH: Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users weigh in on which Canadian TV show is the most memorable. Tess van Straaten reports.
They’re the TV shows many of us grew up with ? Canadian classics like Mr. Dressup, the Friendly Giant, Fraggle Rock, Degrassi Junior High, Kids in the Hall and the Beachcombers, which was shot in B.C. But which one is the most memorable?
A tongue-in-cheek twitter poll was launched by CBC Vancouver reporter Justin McElroy, a self-described maniacal self-ranker of things.
Mr. Dressup defeated Kids In The Hall in the #CanadianTVBracket finals with 62% of the vote. Here is the full, finished, completed bracket. pic.twitter.com/fqYJzbl1Qj
— Justin McElroy (@j_mcelroy) November 27, 2017
“It turns out people really do just want to argue about old Canadian television shows and somebody needs to be crazy enough to put them together for a match-up,” McElroy says.
Body Break, Corner Gas, Due South, The Littlest Hobo, Flashpoint, Road to Avonlea and even the Heritage Minute were also in the running for “Canada’s Most Memorable English TV Thing.”
In all, there were 64 shows to vote on, facing off in four categories ? comedy, drama, children’s and miscellaneous, for things that didn’t find a standard format like Body Break and the Heritage Minute. More 400,000 votes were cast and the competition sparked some intense online debate.
“I was a little bit surprised people got so angry and passionate about what shows they wanted to talk about!” says McElroy. “But then again, this is the internet where people argue all day long about what’s better.”
In the end, Mr. Dressup triumphed, crushing Kids in the Hall on what would have been star Ernie Coombs’ 90th birthday.
The children’s show was on the air for almost 30 years and puppets Casey and Finnegan can be found on Hornby Island with Judith Lawrence, their puppeteer and creator.
“What people don’t realize is that we ad-libbed a lot of the dialogue,” Lawrence tells CHEK News. “The reason it sounded so spontaneous was because it was ? we worked on an outline writers gave us and did our own dialogue according to the situation.”
Tess van Straaten
