He’s Snook, a St. John’s’ ‘corner-boy’ with a sharp tongue outmatched only by his even sharper wit. Putting in his two cents on the issues of the day (particularly politics, in a province where politics is three parts three-ring circus and one part full-contact sport), he brandishes a smoking butt, a greasy do, a thick gold chain, and clothes best left back in the mid-seventies. My grandmother might call him ‘silly as a bag of nails,’ but Newfoundlanders in general love him, and he proved just the tool Newfoundland Telephone needed to take on Sprint and Unitel.

The man behind Snook, and the winner of this year’s Kari Award for best performance, is Pete Soucy, a Newfoundland actor, playwright, director and set designer. His career as a writer, performer and director for radio, the stage and the small screen dates back to 1980, but Snook, while he looks about 35, is only four.

Michael Whitelaw, creative director for Bristol Communications, says Newfoundland Telephone needed a sharp, memorable campaign to tie a tourniquet on injuries caused by the entry of Sprint and Unitel into a market that was previously a one-horse show.

Snook, already a popular figure in the province due to his commentaries on the cbc supper-hour news and his weekly variety show All Of A Saturday Night, came to mind because, as Whitelaw says, ‘he’s not a pitch man, he’s objective, he stands back and evaluates things.’

The client also wanted to inject a definite Newfoundland flavor to the spots as research had shown that, beyond dialing extra numbers and getting two bills with new long-distance carriers, people didn’t want to be sending their money ‘up-along’ (i