Anchorboy (13 page)

Half the time all I could think about was
Did Mrs. Saunders flash her tits at Johnny Cash like this?
The Man in Black probably loved every second of it, though Mrs. Saunders was a bit younger then. And what about Tommy Hunter himself? The ol’ Canadian country crooner is famously a man of the Lord. Surely he did not
take kindly to his makeup artist telling him to pluck her nipples like guitar strings?

This behaviour continued regularly until she retired in 2011. I pretty much got used to it, and it always made me laugh. CTV News Channel prime-time anchor Marcia MacMillan walked in on Mrs. S yanking up the bedazzled sweater more than once and shielded her eyes as if she’d just witnessed a horrific accident. For almost ten years Mrs. Saunders was a constant, sexually harassing companion at work, and dealing with her became as much a part of my routine as reading the teleprompter.

I was sad to see Mrs. Saunders retire but at the same time happy I would no longer be subjected to the daily sight of her entire naked torso wrapped in swaddling clothes shoved inches from my cheek. She told me she plans to become a part-time “slot slut” at the casino (her words), where she’ll probably befriend more hookers and likely become the world’s oldest and most successful pimp. She also said she plans to do part-time makeup work on the side, which should serve as a warning to all future broadcasters. I really will miss seeing her every day. Please don’t tell her this or she’ll show up at my door at some point wearing nothing but a potato sack and holding a stack of boxes.

“The rest of the tchotchkes are in the car,” she’ll say.

O
RIGINALLY, I WAS KIND OF
an afterthought when it came to the Vancouver Olympic Games coverage. I was just happy to have been asked to go at all because not everyone at TSN was so lucky. My original assignment was to simply keep doing what I did every night: host the 10:00 PT edition of
SportsCentre
on TSN. Dan and I were asked to host together, and to be honest we were really excited about the proposition. We knew it was a job we could do in our sleep and wouldn’t involve much preparation. We could show up, write and host the show, and then head out to the Roxy every night for drinks with the crew. The Olympics! On TSN!

About three months before the Games were scheduled to start, I got a phone call from Rick Chisholm, the former head of production at TSN who was now serving as head of production for the Olympic Consortium. He explained that they were trying to formulate a plan for coverage of the Games on CTV in the early morning. I had assumed that
Canada AM
would simply continue to do what they were doing in that slot, and maybe even expand from three
hours to six. I think there may have been some concern that without actual sports broadcasters on the show, the morning coverage might dissolve into chaos. It dissolved into chaos all right, but I ended up being the one leading the charge.

Rick said he wanted to change my Olympic assignment and that now I would host a new show, called
Olympic Morning
on CTV during the Games. I was told I would be co-anchoring with
Canada AM
host Beverly Thomson in Vancouver, while Bev’s regular co-host on AM, Seamus O’Reagan, would be hosting with
CP24 Breakfast
host Melissa Grelo in Whistler. If that sounded confusing, trust me, we were just getting started. But I made the incorrect assumption that there was a big, grand plan for the show already in place and this entire proposition had been well thought out.

Don’t get me wrong. I was genuinely excited about the idea that Rick had apparently hand-picked me to anchor this new show, but I was already a bit concerned after asking him a few questions. Questions as simple as “What time will the show be on?”

“You’ll start at 3:00 a.m. local time and finish up at 9:00 a.m.!” answered Rick cheerfully, trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible.

“I’m sorry?”

“Hey, I didn’t say it was going to be
easy
.”

I did a quick bit of math in my head and realized that in order to prepare and write for the show, I would have to be in the studio at midnight every day at the
latest
. The show would run throughout the Olympics, so that meant seventeen days of starting at midnight and finishing at 9:00 a.m., not counting a post-show debrief that may take an hour or two. For the privilege of moving from a TSN program to a CTV one, I was going from working a one-hour show to a six-hour show. This didn’t do anything to dampen my enthusiasm, however; I was aware this was a more high-profile gig and ultimately a positive move for me. But as I pressed on with questions for Rick, I began to wonder what I had signed on for.

“How will we fill the show’s content between the hours of 3:00 a.m. and, say, 7:00 a.m., before any of the athletes are up and no events are being held?” I wondered aloud.

Rick’s answer: “We’ve talked about maybe setting up a camera in the Olympic Village and doing interviews with the athletes that way.”

Was this a joke? Did they really think that Olympic athletes who had trained for this moment for four long years would be interested in waking up in the middle of the night and breaking their routines so we could do a four-minute interview? I was beginning to worry, but Rick assured me everything would be taken care of.

I arrived a day before the Games began, and we were off.

People have often commented that Beverly didn’t seem to “warm up” to me until about Day 3 of the Games, and I suppose that’s probably true. I actually thought we got along really well right away, and I did my very best to include her in everything I did. Perhaps Bev was as frustrated with the entire process for the first couple of days as I was and decided by the third day there was nothing she could do about it, and it was best to just roll with the punches. Or perhaps it just took her a while to get used to my crap. Either way, I can think of
several
other anchors whom I had less chemistry with than Bev Thomson. I found her to be a really wonderful person behind the scenes as well. She had beaten cancer, had recently separated, and was raising two children in Toronto essentially on her own. Yet she was pretty much eternally upbeat and truly the voice of sanity for me at the Games. I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done had she not been there with me.

The show featured an entire cast of characters: I mentioned the four hosts including me, then there were Dan and Jessi from
The Hills After Show
on MTV; Elaine “Lainey” Lui was our Olympic gossip correspondent; and
Canada AM
weatherman Jeff Hutcheson was out in a remote location, usually Robson Square. Gino Reda, my TSN cohort, was also on board to serve as our hockey analyst.
Gino also proved to be a voice of sanity in a sea of production chaos. He worked tirelessly at the Games, going to all of Team Canada’s practices and hosting an Olympic Web hockey show at night, then stumbling into the studio, sometimes with no sleep at all, and appearing with me for a few segments. Gino also proved to be a wonderful guest booker as well, even though that was absolutely not in his job description. He brought Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier into the studio at an ungodly hour; they both happily obliged because, well, you just don’t say no to Gino.

At one point, about halfway through the Games, with fatigue and delusion setting in, we were in the middle of a commercial break when Jen, our producer, informed us we would be coming back from the commercial break on-camera and throwing it to a live shot of a café on Robson Street, where revellers were still up partying from the night before. Remember, our show started at 3:00 a.m. local time, so pretty much every night when I walked to the studio around midnight, I would pass pack after pack of drunks. Or, on one fateful rainy night, my colleague Dave Randorf and his girlfriend walking hand-in-hand like two teenage lovers. I hated them. I hated all of them for being off when I had to work. (How quickly I had forgotten the advice the Edmonton camera guy had given me all those years ago:
You will always be working when everyone else is off
.)

So Bev and I were supposed to send it down to the drunks on Robson, which we had done a few times already on our show during the Games to varying degrees of success. And by “varying degrees of success,” I mean in general it was usually a complete shit show. I’d made the assumption that it was poor Jeff Hutcheson who’d been told to round up the drunks and interview them and that we would be throwing to him, but instead Producer Jen said: “Send it down to a café on Robson Street and throw it to Rena. She’s the one interviewing the inebriated.”

I looked at Bev for a moment. Then I hit the talkback button that allowed me to speak directly to Jen.

“Uh, Jen?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Who the fuck is Rena?”

Turns out no one had bothered to tell us that CTV had flown out another on-air personality named Rena Heer from CP24 to serve as an extra remote host. It is the first and only time I have participated in a broadcast where I didn’t know who all my fellow hosts were.

We were usually able to drag one or more of our Olympic analysts into the studio to fill a segment or two. One night I was sprinting through the International Broadcast Centre in hot pursuit of an Olympic muffin for me and an Olympic yogurt for Bev. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I spotted an older gentleman wearing what is widely known as a “Canadian tuxedo”: denim shirt and denim trousers. I believe he may even have been wearing a denim hat. I looked closer and realized it was in fact none other than CTV’s
Olympic Prime Time
host Brian Williams, the veteran of twelve Olympics, which he had mentioned to me at least twelve times. I found Brian to be quirky, charming, and completely supportive of everything I did.

Every time I run into Brian he tells me the same story: Back when he was working for the CBC and Ralph Mellanby was producing
Hockey Night in Canada
, Ralph would apparently tell Brian that his unique style of broadcasting was his calling card and that he should never change. Brian always told me that he thinks of this whenever he watches me, which I find incredibly flattering. I can say that Brian has never been anything less than incredibly supportive about me and my career, and we have a really great relationship.

I wasn’t sure why the hell Brian was there at 3:30 in the morning, since his
Prime Time
show had ended at 11:00 and he probably
should have been asleep. I noticed he was frantically searching around on a desk for something.

“Brian! What are you doing here?” I called out. He turned around and saw me.

“Hey, Jay! I’m here looking for my notebook. I’ve lost my notebook with all my research and information about the Games, and I need it for my next broadcast. I’ve got to have that notebook.”

I instantly felt terrible for Brian since I knew he was as much a creature of habit as I was. This was probably killing him.

“Brian, I’m so sorry,” I answered back. “But listen, since you’re here anyway, why don’t you come on the show for a segment? It will only be four minutes. We can talk about the Games so far and how you think Canadians are faring. We can even talk about your notebook. Maybe someone out there has it and will return it! What do you say? Come on the show for a few minutes?”

Brian took one quick look at me and said, “Jay, don’t be a smartass.”

Not sure if he ever found that notebook.

Each day blurred into the next. I realized this is what it must be like to have to actually work for a living.

By week two, some CTV personalities had started to voice concerns that they weren’t being utilized enough during the Games coverage. And by “not enough” I mean “not at all.” CTV’s solution was to have them come on our show. One segment featured Tanya Kim from
etalk
, Leah Miller from
So You Think You Can Dance Canada
, and Jeanne Beker from
Fashion Television
. Tanya and Leah were both incredibly nice, and Jeanne was a true professional who had a great attitude even though she admitted she didn’t even understand why she was there. Especially since she was supposed to be at New York Fashion Week at this point in time. Imagine if the Super Bowl was going on and someone said to an NFL football analyst who had been covering the league for the entire season, “We’re
not going to send you to the Super Bowl. We want all our talent at the Olympics.”

“But what am I going to do there?” the talent might ask.

“We’ll figure it out when we get there” would be the reply. That should be the motto of Canadian broadcast television:
We’ll Figure It Out When We Get There
.

Jeanne could have sulked and complained about the fact that she was forced to miss out on the most important event of her journalistic calendar. Instead, she came in every day with a smile and had nothing but nice things to say to me and everyone on the crew. She was paired with two girls who were almost young enough to be her daughters but didn’t question it, at least not to me. She allowed the other girls to take the lead while she quietly sat and waited to make her points. Seeing someone with her experience and talent handle the situation that way made me pull up my own bootstraps, stop complaining so much, and buckle down a bit. The girls would come on the show each morning during the final hour from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. local time, an hour I quickly coined “the CTV Olympic Galaxy of Stars Hour.”

One day after discussing the ridiculously long lineup at The Bay’s Olympic store (literally down the block; I couldn’t believe it), the girls announced they had brought a present for me: a pair of Canadian Olympic–themed boxer shorts. I was thrilled to receive the gag gift, even though I was well aware that, being a man, I would actually
wear
these boxer shorts on a regular basis when the Games were over because I am cheap. Give a man a pair of free underwear and he will most likely wear that underwear.

After the segment with Leah, Tanya, and Jeanne was over, the girls were whisked away and I had a two-minute commercial break to prepare for the next segment. J.D., the floor director, mentioned that I should put the shorts on and model them on-air. At that point, I had already brought an Olympic rubber chicken mascot on-air,
an Olympic banana, and Olympic mittens, so it stood to reason that the Olympic boxers should get equal airtime. But I was skeptical. I thought maybe the higher-ups would think it was too much and perhaps I’d get in trouble for it. They weren’t exactly thrilled about the Olympic chicken. But J.D. was insistent, almost like a drill sergeant:

“Strip. Put ’em on,” he said sternly.

Thirty seconds left in the commercial break.

“I don’t know, man,” I said sheepishly.

Fifteen seconds.

“Do it!” he said with a grin. Watching me humiliate myself was keeping the crew sane.

I decided I couldn’t say no to J.D., and I dropped my pants in front of the entire crew and our remaining guests, including Susanne Boyce, who at the time was essentially running the CTV Television Network. Luckily I wasn’t going commando that day, and I decided it would be for the best if I didn’t take off the boxer briefs I currently had on. I wanted to push the envelope, but I didn’t want to get arrested. I pulled the shorts on over the briefs a mere two seconds before we returned live to the nation. Sitting alongside Bev as we closed the show for the day, I caught a shot of myself in our studio monitor. Brown socks, brown dress shoes, suit jacket, shirt, tie, and no pants. Nether regions covered by a pair of Olympic boxer shorts. The boxer shorts were bright white, and yet my pale legs outshone them.

“Look at
those
pearly whites,” I said.