Million-plus audiences for 70 consecutive original broadcasts make Corner Gas the hands-down success story on English-Canadian TV.

Seven-figure ratings also make Corner Gas ripe for urban folklore.

To set the record straight, we must unravel the persistent yarn that Corner Gas was turned down by the CBC before it was pitched to CTV. It wasn’t. The smash series was pitched to The Comedy Network first.

Comedy prexy Ed Robinson should know. Before joining TCN in 1996, he was a comedy exec at the CBC. Now also CTV executive VP programming, Robinson tells Playback how it happened:

‘A local producer by the name of David Storey was moving to Vancouver. We met before he moved and he wanted to know who in Vancouver to meet, and I hooked him up to meet [CTV exec] Louise Clark.

‘I let him know there’s a list of comedy people in Vancouver including Brent Butt. So we asked Brent to meet with David in Vancouver, toss around some ideas, and tell us what they came up with. Free form is often how we do it.

‘On a parallel track to these discussions, [CTV honcho] Susanne Boyce had challenged [TCN VP] Brent Haynes and I with the statement: ‘If you could work with anybody in the country for the next comedy show, who is your dream team?’

‘On our list was Brent Butt and a writer named Mark Farrell. Then Brent himself came to Toronto with the two pages of ideas that he and David had talked about, and met with us. [Butt met with Haynes, who followed up with Robinson and Clark].

‘One of the ideas was about what his life would have been if he’d never left his home of Tisdale, Saskatchewan to become a stand-up comic; he would have been running the family business. And that’s the one we explored with Brent, and that’s the one that became Corner Gas.

‘It was a two-liner on the page amongst a bunch of ideas. So Brent went away with David and developed a full idea of the characters that we now know – and a script – and when he came back to us, we said: ‘This is great. Let’s do it.”