hubbards, N.S.: ‘Little blackfly, pickin’ my bones, in North Ontar-eye-oh eye-oh, in North Ontar-eye-oh…’

It’s an irrepressible tune, a pulsing, bzzz-ing romp from Wade Hemsworth and the National Film Board animated short, Blackfly, and on this blazing morning in mid-July, its staccato sticks in my head.

Cappuccino quells the urge to hum or sing aloud, though, out of deference to Salter Street Films’ Deborah Carver who gamely concentrates on driving – rather than lost sleep – as we roll 40 highway minutes outside Halifax to the set of Salter’s new ‘historical farce,’ surprisingly also titled Blackfly.

Tune-deprived but properly caffeinated, we arrive at Mill Cove Park, which Carver says may once have hosted a military listening post.

Just down the road by Mill Cove Lake is a military installation of the tv kind, the set for 13 half-hours of Blackfly, complete with newly made, freshly aged fort/fur trading post, bar, commanding officer’s quarters, lookout tower, longhouse and faux birch bark canoes, circa mid-1700s. All of this rests where the accoutrements of the now-defunct cbc series Black Harbour used to be.

The tour of the Blackfly exteriors proves that, farce or no, the series – set in fur trading post Fort Simpson-Eaton and following the adventures of Benny Blackfly (series creator Ron James) and his ‘harebrained henchmen from the Canadian hinterland’ – will look authentic. Art director Mark Laing has gone so far as to design four ‘period’ outhouses for the ‘Fool’s Gold’ episode being taped as we visit, based on research gleaned from outhouse websites. No fooling.

Back at the fort, the buildings have been ‘aged’ during four weeks of construction. The oldest, the trading post, is to look thirtysomething when the action begins in 1781. Part of the rustic charm comes from the rough-hewn beams, an effect achieved by the ‘wizard’ device carpenters attached to their chainsaws. (Laing here notes there are ‘fabulous film and theatre carpenters in Nova Scotia,’ some of whom worked on the feature The Weight of Water.) Less charming tour-stoppers are the log walls enclosing the post in which 4 ft. x 10 ft. sections weigh 400 pounds.

In the spirit of equal opportunity stereotyping on the show, the trading post is vaguely based on the Hudson’s Bay of legend, its emblem a pair of leaning beavers over the words ‘The Company Inc.’

The animals fit, of course, with the show’s spirit of caricature. Executive story editor Leila Basen says creator James ‘is a history buff and he really wanted to set a sitcom in history. He wanted to make fun of some things that some people regard as sanctimonious. We insult all [social] groups, in every episode.’

As we speak, James and the Blackfly cast are a short distance away in the studio, busily mocking several Canadian historical standards under the direction of David Storey and production supervisor Mike Mahoney. Everyone feels the script’s digs and slings – the colonial everyman (Blackfly), the stalwart sidekick (Colin Mochrie as Entwhistle), the incompetent British officer (Richard Donat as Colonel Boyle), the aristocratic bauble (Shauna Black as Lady Hammond), the wise but laconic native (Cherie Maracle as Misty Moon), the ‘garrulous Scotsman’ (James Kee as MacTavish), and even smart-ass voyageurs and altruistic Jesuits. It’s one of the final scenes in the episode, wherein Misty Moon derisively informs Blackfly and Entwhistle the nuggets they’ve found are fool’s gold.

Yellowed, a bit, like the dreams of breakthrough which evaporated in front of James over a few ‘hungry’ years in l.a. So he came home, and eventually made the pilot of Blackfly – which was a drama – for Global, then went with the flow when the one-hour drama evolved into a half-hour comedy. He says his years as a standup comic, with all the travel and characters, such as Little Ronnie Canada, taught him what types of jokes will fly in Atikokan or in Halifax or any size place in between.

‘I like what Blackfly [the show] represents,’ James explains. ‘It’s capitalizing on the universality of our experience, the juxtaposition of current experience with history. There’s a certain anachronistic shading of the show that’s going to help people hang a hat on it. It’s marrying the erudite with the slapstick.’ And it does so by making fun of all the founders of this country.

Blackfly is set to debut on Global this fall. *

-www.salter.com