Little Jimmy Gullage is a loser at poker and Pis Parsons’ a ‘bit of a low-life.’

Just a brief introduction to some of the characters from Gullage’s, the first national cbc tv drama series to hail from Newfoundland.

Written and directed by Bill MacGillivray and produced by Terry Greenlaw, Gullage’s is a half-hour comedy/drama series, one of the three six-part pilot series for cbc along with The Rez and Straight Up. Budgeted at just under $300,000 per episode, it tells the tale of a fictional St. John’s cab stand (perhaps not so fictional, if you’re familiar with the city) and the chaotic existence of the drivers and the people around it.

‘Calvin Pope is a cab driver with a very small cab company called Gullage’s,’ says MacGillivray, ‘and his boss loses it in a game of cards to a bit of a low-life named Pis Parsons.’

With Parsons at the wheel, quite literally, the company starts to go downhill. In one episode, Pis decides to convert the cabs from gasoline to propane on the cheap, with corresponding disastrous results.

Having just wrapped after six weeks, the timing for shooting a series which is outdoors half of the time could have been better.

‘The series was written to take place in the fall,’ says MacGillivray, ‘but by the time we got the go-ahead from the cbc, we didn’t start shooting until December.’ There are warmer places to be than St. John’s Harbour in January, and the cast and crew suffered a couple of 17-hour days in -17 temperatures, -45 with the damp and the wind chill. ‘Awful stuff, but we had a fantastic crew, so we stuck pretty much to schedule and it all worked out well.’

A number of Nova Scotians crossed the gulf to lend their hands to Gullage’s. The crew of 40 was split evenly between the two provinces. The cast, however, an ensemble of 13 ranging in age from two-and-a-half to 80, were primarily Newfoundlanders.

Some of the better-known faces amongst the cast belong to Byran Hennessey, a veteran of The Boys of St. Vincent who plays Calvin Pope, Ray Guy, and Liz Pickard, chosen as one of the Globe and Mail’s young artists to watch last year.

While the cab company itself might be a fly-by-night operation, the series has a five-year history. Developed in 1991 by MacGillivray and Greenlaw’s Snig the Goat Productions under their parent company Picture Plant, it almost went into production in 1993 before the cbc decided against it.

Putting the series aside, the team worked on other projects, one of which was a feature-length documentary for the nfb dedicated to Canadian families called For Generations to Come. A year and a half ago the cbc renewed its interest and asked MacGillivray to write some more episodes. It was on the strength of the new episodes that the network decided to give the green light.

Buoyed by the distinction of ‘the first national drama series’ to come out of Newfoundland, the Far East of the western world, as the tourism posters call it, the series gave itself a mandate to show as much of ‘Canada’s oldest city’ as possible. Only two sets were built, a kitchen and the cab stand itself.

‘We also put the cab stand on location so we could shoot inside and outside. It looks out over the harbor. We show as much of St. John’s as possible so there are a lot of streetscapes and the cabs drive by some really beautiful architecture.’

The series was financed by cbc, Telefilm Canada, the Cable Production Fund, Enterprise Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation.

No air date has been confirmed, but MacGillivray thinks Gullage’s may hit the mainland sometime this fall.