ON STAGE
What: This is That Live — Farewell Tour
When: Thursday, Nov. 15, 8 p.m.
Where: McPherson Playhouse, 3 Centennial Square
Tickets: $46.75 at rmts.bc.ca
Note: This is That Live — Farewell Tour also stops Friday, Nov. 16, at the Cowichan Performing Arts Centre
Despite their success over the past nine years, co-hosts Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring of CBC Radio One’s This is That have been quietly talking about the show’s eventual end for several years.
Now, the time has come for the satirical news program to exit the airwaves.
“We really wanted to choose a time for ourselves and go out on a bit of high, on our own terms, as opposed to allowing the show to go on indefinitely until someone gives you the tap on the shoulder and says: ‘That’s enough,’ ” Oldring said.
“We’ve always really enjoyed a strong audience with the show, but somehow, in our minds, this felt like the right time.”
Kelly and Oldring, along with longtime producer Chris Kelly, will broadcast their last episode of This is That on Dec. 29. They likely could have continued unabated, having written 165 episodes and a bestselling book during their nine-year run, but the culture of news has changed dramatically since the program first aired as a summer fill-in replacement on CBC in 2010, Oldring said.
“The notion of fake news is a little different than when we first started. It has a slightly different connotation.”
The team will continue to work on new projects together, including a television pilot “similar in tone to This is That,” Oldring said, but they don’t technically know what’s in store for them, broadcast-wise, following their final adieu. Their immediate focus is on the farewell tour that winds down in Ontario at the end of January.
This is That Live — Farewell Tour stops at the McPherson Playhouse tonight and the Cowichan Performing Arts Centre on Friday, events that are expected to hit capacity, as with most dates on the tour. The night is separated into two acts, the first of which will feature skits familiar to longtime listeners, Oldring said. The second act will leave the outcome in the hands of audience members, who are asked to submit ideas for the duo to tackle.
“If it’s a good story, great,” Oldring said, before quipping, “but if it’s a bad story, then the audience did a horrible job of writing it, and we still come out fine.”
Oldring and Kelly know the value of a good story. They’ve been performing comedy together for 20 years, dating back to their days as an improv act at The Loose Moose Theatre Company in Calgary. Oldring never could have imagined as a twentysomething that those humble roots would lead to a career with Kelly as one of the best improv teams in Canada.
“We never have considered ourselves satirists. We’re comedic storytellers. One of the things that I would say we learned from doing This is That is that we enjoy riding that line of telling a ridiculous, comedic story, but telling it in a relatively deadpan way.”
Satire “engages a critical muscle in the brain,” Oldring said, and is a really important tool both inside and outside the confines of comedy.
He’s almost lost his appetite for it, on account of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose antics are almost as unbelievable as some of the satirical stories reported as truth on This is That.
“Given the current landscape, it’s kind of treacherous out there. Satire is about the sense of comedy and holding up a mirror against ourselves, but in the larger context of news, it’s dangerous. [Fake news] changes elections and has an impact worldwide.”
Audiences were unsure of what to think of This is That during its infancy. Kelly and Oldring’s convincing portrayals, interspersed with feedback from real listeners who called in response to the stories, left many people believing they were true. CBC eventually put a disclaimer on the show’s website, but even that failed to convince some gullible listeners.
“We were definitely confounded by it in the very beginning, but that has become part of the show that people really enjoy.”
Mainstream media wasn’t immune, either. Fox News covered the legendary This or That bit about an Ontario soccer league that removed the soccer ball from its games, in order to diminish the negative effects of competition in youth sports.
The team also fooled Harper’s magazine into reporting on the student at the so-called University of Nanaimo who sued the school because it failed to accommodate her visual allergies, which included tall people and the colour mauve.
A story that ran in the National Post was retracted after the newspaper learned the This or That story about a Canadian TV network’s unique purchase — the sets from the TV sitcom Friends — was, in fact, a joke. “We said this station once and for all wanted to make a television show in Canada that did not look Canadian,” Oldring said with a laugh. “The paper retracted the story, but that didn’t disguise the fact that they reported on it as true.”
Their routine about a standing room-only airline hoping to cut costs by omitting seats was so preposterous that everyone knew it was fake.
However, Oldring said he has read that an airline has since kickstarted a plan to create that very thing.
“Those airlines are being developed in Japan and Europe. What we thought was pretty silly is sometimes stranger than fiction, or certainly as strange.”
In an age where clickbait drives page views, and podcasts have taken over, Oldring and Kelly did the unexpected. They created an old-fashioned news broadcast, and populated it with real callers and fake stories. The fact they did it so well and convincingly is a large part of their legacy.
“We never really thought that people would take anything we are doing as real. For us, it was a funny way of creating crazy characters and outrageous stories, but telling them in a deadpan, dry way. We found that juxtaposition funny, but we never thought people would believe it to be true. It was just too ridiculous.”
