Saturday, February 28, 1998By By CLAIRE BICKLEY --
Here's a tip: If you get your own TV series, you don't have to make do with one-quarter of the airtime.
"I thought I'd really like to have another TV show. Anything," says Greg Thomey, in town last week to promote his new comedy, Daily Tips For Modern Living, which premieres Monday night at 8 on CBC.
Shot during his hiatus from work as one-fourth of the on-air team on the news satire This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Tips sends up the ubiquitous lifestyle and self-help talk show genre. Thomey plays TV host Ernie Post, a chirpy twit who blindsides bewildered guests with his misinterpretations and endless interruptions to deliver dubious advice to viewers. He'd done similar tip bits on This Hour but wanted to give the routine freer rein.
"Sometimes that didn't fit so much into the format of the show. It was funny and stuff but it would take second place, be put on the backburner often, for stuff about Kim Campbell, stuff that was more particularly topical," he says.
Tips also includes slapstick silent films in which Post demonstrates his tips on travel, stress, romance, jobs, addiction and exercise.
"The stuff I like to do is very slow and long and boring, and that's the joke," he says -- a joke his 22 Minutes cast colleagues Cathy Jones, Mary Walsh and Rick Mercer don't always get.
Thomey's kidding -- I think -- when he says he's sometimes imagined a conspiracy keeping his material off the air, but he admits to feeling like the show's least-known member and the one with the most to prove.
"I don't know, I think it's a low self-esteem thing that I have. Maybe because coming from Newfoundland and being an actor you figure, 'How can you be an actor, let alone come from Newfoundland?' "
After growing up in St. John's the youngest of seven children -- "I guess that's what it is" -- he became an actor, playwright and radio performer. The film version of his play Hanlon House was named best short film at the Atlantic Film Festival in 1992 and was aired on CBC. He was a CODCO contributing writer and occasional cast member and played a pedophile priest in the acclaimed 1992 miniseries The Boys Of St. Vincent.
He'd like to star in a one-man stage comedy -- "I think people don't really like to go back after the intermission, no matter how good it is," being his theory -- and record a CD of his comic songs.
The cast's hiatus work aside -- Jones will headline a drama series for CTV next season, Mercer hosts a History Television weekly -- Thomey says This Hour remains their favorite project and predicts it will continue well past its current fifth season.
"I can't see it stopping very soon. I think it will go on but I don't know if it will hit that kind of Front Page Challenge number -- or level of comedy."
