or Mark Breslin’s Friday Night!

Despite its pretty outer appearance, the inside of the cbc building in Toronto can seem like a bit of a bureaucratic wasteland. I made my way through the maze of offices and cubicles to my meeting with a Canadian Media Monster, Mark Breslin. The offices of the new executive producer of Friday Night! with Ralph Benmergui seemed quiet as I awaited my audience.

High-calibre power

Breslin arrived, moving swiftly down the hall followed by about four other production people. They spun into his office and the door swung shut. High-calibre Canadian power, I thought to myself. Two minutes later, the other men left the office together and Breslin’s executive assistant told me to go in. ‘Call him Mark,’ she said. And so I entered the lair.

Breslin’s office was well decorated but modest, if not conservative, for a man of his means. Finishing up on the phone, he pointed me to a seat. There was Mark Breslin, middle-aged, short and stylish with a grin that said, ‘Just try me.’

‘What’s the interview for?’ He asked casually.

‘Playback.’

‘Oh no, forget it,’ he snapped, ‘I thought it was for Playboy.’

I laughed and apologized for not bringing my camera.

Always articulate, graphic and controlled, Breslin told me about the path that brought him to the cbc and Friday Night! He also spoke of the baggage he brought with him, a whole chain of matched luggage labeled Yuk Yuk’s (a string of comedy clubs owned by Breslin).

‘I’ve seen every comic in the world. I’ve seen every kind of comedy, every kind of comedy pacing. I’ve also learned to be a good scrapper in the political intrigues. God knows that at Yuk Yuk’s every possible enemy has come through that place trying to take it away from me. Whether it was organized crime, the government, unions or whatever. I’ve fought with them all and learned to win. That’s a very valuable skill when you come to an institution like this.

It was an accident

‘Like most things in my life, accident played a large part (in hooking up with cbc). Last year, I used to come to the show almost every week. For a lot of reasons. First, I had a lot of clients on it from my other life at Yuk Yuk’s. So I would come down and give coverage to my clients. Second, Ralph has been a friend of mine for a long time and I came down to be supportive. The third reason, of course, is that the show makes a great date because you get to meet the stars and it’s free. So I was here a lot. And because I was here a lot, I had a lot of opinions on the show. But who doesn’t have an opinion on this show?’

Breslin went on to explain how he was in Vancouver and happened to run into George Anthony and Ed Robinson (the creative head and deputy head, respectively, of arts, music, science and variety at cbc) to whom he gave his ‘long-winded spiel’ about what needed to be done with the show. One thing led to another, and after several lunches, he realized he was under consideration. ‘You don’t choose to come back to tv, it chooses you,’ the former Joan Rivers Show producer explained. ‘This is the first good offer I’ve had in a long time.’

Now that he’s got the job, something Breslin considers a sabbatical from his career as owner of Yuk Yuk’s, where does his first duty lie? The cbc? The people? Canada? To be funny? Or simply as an outlet for talent?

Many masters

‘I serve many masters,’ said Breslin. ‘That’s the compromise that always exists when you’re in a position like mine. On some idealistic level I feel my first duty is to Canadian talent and to the audience. But cbc picks up the cheque so I have to be fair to their mandates too. My job is balancing out different needs that different people have. I also have to worry about Ralph (Benmergui) and what’s good for him. Sometimes these things are in conflict and I have to make decisions that aren’t always comfortable.

We go way back

‘You know, I’ve known Ralph for almost 20 years. I knew him when he was a standup comic. I knew him when he had a rock band with my friend Joel (Axler), who is the comedy producer on the show. Of course, I knew him through Midday. He married a woman who was a waitress at my downtown Yuk Yuk’s. We have many ways of going back together; we even went to the same high school. So there’s a lot of karma between Ralph and myself.’

Enough karma to keep him as front man for a show that, critics maintain, he consistently struggles with? According to Breslin, Benmergui is perfect for the job.

‘What I like about Ralph in this role is that there aren’t a lot of people who can be a good interviewer, a pretty good comic, a good comic actor and play with an audience. There may be individuals in this country who are better than him at any one of those things, but have no abilities in any of the other tasks. Ralph’s pretty well rounded, and I like that.’

Breslin wants Benmergui to be the sane centre of an insane universe. This insane universe is spearheaded by the show’s house band, The Look People. We talked about the controversy that has surrounded his choice of band (fronted by a lead singer sporting a troll-like tuft of hair, they have a very non-network appearance) and his strategy behind it.

‘We were going to be doing such unusual and surreal things on the show and I had to prepare people for that. Once you see The Look People in the opening shot, and you’ve got a big hermaphrodite behind them, you know you’re not in charted territory. My fear with last year’s band, as competent as they were, was that they signified a certain kind of regime. A regime that this show isn’t about.

Surprise them

‘When I first started the show, Frank Shuster came to me and we talked about the show and I asked him if he had any advice for me. I mean, the man’s only been in show business for 50 years. He said, `My only advice is to surprise them.’ So I guess my job is to get the people who work on this production to give me things I can surprise the audience with. It’s hard to do. We’re a jaded people. We’ve seen too much. There’s just too much information out there. You’re trying to wake them up. Provide them with that moment that makes them go `Wow!’ We’ve got to give them tv that’s worth tuning in for.’

To accomplish this, Breslin says he subscribes to ‘the modernist approach to entertainment: no hugs, no learning.’ He points out, however, that ‘it’s not an approach that’s traditionally Canadian. We’ve always felt in this country that we’d have to justify our love, as Madonna would say. We’d have to justify our entertainment, our hedonism at the expense of some greater social goal. But this makes dreary stuff to watch, unless you’re making documentaries or news. I’m trying to create a show which is purely entertaining, which exists for its own good.’

I wondered if the show had an image and whether Breslin could describe it. He grinned at the challenge and answered swiftly, ‘Fantasy eclat voluptuary hedonism.’ His eyes widened and he smiled before continuing: ‘Yes, an image is crucial. One of my first jobs this year was to change the image.

Sober image

‘The image from last year was a very sober, politically correct show targeted at lower middle-aged people who read the Globe and listen to CBC Radio. I wanted to change that immediately to a kind of anarchic, comedy-oriented, vaguely smart, uptown and cynical show that would appeal to people who would like MuchMusic and alternative films.’

We talked about the aesthetic framework that he tries to create with each show. He dwelt largely on the importance of pacing and balance.

‘How many elements do I want?’ he asked. ‘What’s the balance between music, talk and comedy? How many written bits as opposed to prepackaged bits that we would buy from the entertainment community? Then there’s the question of Ralph. How do we get him in good working order? How do we prime him? What can we do to make him better? Feel better? Work better? We have to consider all those elements before we even start thinking about the show.

Putting pieces together

‘Then, for any given show, I have a lot of cards on the wall each representing ideas (blue, yellow and pink from comedy to music to interviews). So any piece that goes on the show ultimately I have to decide on, structure and tweak.’

To Breslin, it’s the comedy that gives the show its soul. Not surprising from someone whose career is comedy. But Breslin made his case: ‘If you tune in and see a band that you don’t like, nothing that band does will change your opinion. With the comedy bits, people are willing to get into them. They don’t prejudge them because they haven’t seen them before. I depend very much on this.’

I knew Breslin could sense the inevitable question coming. The question he fields time and time again. Ratings. Why does this show struggle?

Said Breslin: ‘I look at the broad strokes. It’s like a stock market. A stock doesn’t just go up. A stock goes up a bit, it goes back a bit, goes up a bit, goes back a bit. And at the end of the year, if we have more people watching than we did at the beginning, then I guess we’ve done something right. There just might be a limit to the number of people who will watch a show on cbc, without stars, on a Friday night. There may be a ceiling to that.

‘Everybody in this country seems to have an idea about how this show should run. They all have a platonic conception of what a show like this should be. And to make it worse, we’ve made our own problems by not delivering on any of these expectations and forging out in another direction. There’s a lot of criticism and we’re under the microscope a lot.’

Conversation shifted to his handling of this immense media pressure. At this, Breslin barbed. With the sly look of a veteran battler, he smiled and said, ‘I try to ignore the critics. In fact, I try to come up with ways that we can include them in the show itself. We haven’t quite gotten there yet. But if they go back to attacking Ralph again, oh, we might have to draw them into the drama. And you know we will. We’ll fight back.’

Not wanting to be drawn into the drama myself, I asked for any advice he might have for someone starting out in television. Breslin offered, ‘Watch as little tv as you possibly can. How else will you bring something new to it? Too many people are coming into tv now and that’s the only world they know. So naturally, they’re doing everything in a derivative way. It’s like I tell my comics, `If you want to feed your creativity go to the art gallery, read a good book, go watch a good movie or go to another country.’ ‘

With the kind of rough ride modern Canadian television gets, perhaps I will.

dave lazar is a second year media writing student in the Radio and Television Arts program at Ryerson Polytechnical University, Toronto.