Steve Kerzner regards the green-haired, grey sock puppet with great affection as he tries to light its cigar. After a couple of tries, the brown stub finally takes and soon smoke from the stogie and the smoke machine fill the new set of the Ed the Sock! show. To Ed’s creators, the haze is another fitting addition to the revamped atmosphere on set, an Ed-friendly look and feel which, until now, have never seemed quite right.

For Ed’s fourth season on Citytv, Kerzner, Ed the Sock!’s creator/co-executive producer, and his crew (comprised mostly of City staffers and freelancers) have gutted a band rehearsal space north of Toronto. They have made room for a new night club set, which has been dubbed the club beneath most of Toronto’s underground clubs. With plush tiger print banisters, a wall of monitors mounted in purple brick, sexy girls dancing on a staircase over strategically placed lights, and the ever-cheesy ‘dogs-playing-pool’ painting, Kerzner says Ed the Sock! is finally home.

‘This is the set I’m happiest with in the entire life of the show,’ says Kerzner. ‘It never should have gone the direction it did after cable, and so now we’re taking it back where it belongs.’

Kerzner, producer Liana Kitchen and the Ed crew work with a budget of under $300,000 for 28 episodes of Ed the Sock!, which includes funding for excursions to l.a. for location interviews.

‘I learned in cable how to stretch a dollar so thin that you can see through it,’ says Kerzner. ‘Dollar for dollar, we are the best value at Citytv.’

Ed the Sock! is currently looking for syndication deals in France and Latin America, with format licensing initiatives also in the near future. Already seen in England on itv, Australia on the Comedy Channel and New Zealand on TV4, Kerzner is also hoping for a u.s. deal.

‘Hell, we’ve been ripped off enough in the u.s. that we might as well give them the original,’ says Kerzner, sighting how Conan O’Brien, Ben Stiller and mtv all managed to work obnoxious hand-puppet segments into their programs after Kerzner sent tapes of the Ed character to them.

Kerzner based Ed’s character on the father of a friend and debuted him in the early ’90s on Newton Cable Television, then the last family-run cable station in Toronto, now part of the Rogers empire.

After developing a loyal local following on cable, he took Ed to City, giving birth to Ed’s Night Party. There, Ed was less of a host and more of an antagonist speaking with guests such as Dennis Franz, Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman and Carmen Electra, while receiving praise from a live studio audience inside the ChumCity building. This was not what Kerzner had envisioned for his sock.

‘The whole idea of this show is that it’s an anti-talk show,’ says Kerzner. ‘We don’t like the glitz or the glamour or the phoniness. When we talk to guests there is a legitimate rapport there. There is a spark of life there because it is real – the exchange is really happening. When it works it’s great, but when there is tension it’s even better.’

On Ed the Sock!, Ed reprises his role of host. His abrasive and honest interviewing style will be shot more with a film style than specifically for television by director/dop and csc award winner Tony Wannamaker.

Ed the Sock! will begin airing episodes with its new look on City in late May, with more attitude, more sex appeal and no ‘clapping seal’ audience in sight. Kerzner maintains that having a studio audience which laughed and applauded on cue created a talk-show feel, as opposed to an anti-talk show.

‘We know they are laughing at home,’ he says.