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Greg Thomey has a weekly tip for modern viewing: Watch his new show, Daily Tips For Modern Living.
"Time the VCR, because it's going to be a classic. I think," said Thomey, taking a break at his Halifax home between taping segments of This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
"Hide the remote," Thomey said. "Watch the whole thing, because there will be a quiz after."
The self-help talk show parody premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on CBC (Cable 4), with the rest of the episodes in the experimental six-pack airing over the next five weeks.
Like a successful and long-standing rock band, the members of 22 Minutes are prone to pursuing side projects when they're taking time off from raking politicians with their award-winning news satire.
For Thomey, last year's break was a chance to flesh out an idea and character that had been bubbling since his CODCO days.
Thus was born Ernie Post, host unextrordinaire of a small-town cable TV talk show aimed at improving its viewers' quality of life.
"I find it kind of ironic, because he's supposed to be showing you the correct way to live your life, and he's probably one of the rudest hosts," Thomey said. "He can barely sit on a chair. He wouldn't be the sharpest knife in the drawer. He'd be two sandwiches short of a picnic."
Daily Tips sees Ernie Post query knowledgeable but utterly unsuspecting guests on their fields of expertise, from stress to jobs to addictions. But because Post is as dumb as his namesake, he rarely pays attention to his guests' helpful advice, and interrupts them every few moments to offer another insight to the "tip camera" or segue into a baffling pre-filmed vignette.
In the first episode, Post can't let go of the fact his hapless guest has never seen the show, and offers tips on everything from how to be gracious when people say they haven't seen your show, to the importance of looking up postal codes when, say, you want to courier some tapes of your show to a guest who has never seen it.
(The episode co-stars Mark Farrell of The Newsroom, one of three other writers on Daily Tips.)
Thomey is hoping the six-pack of episodes will prove successful enough that CBC will let him rattle it out a little longer.
"I think we'll probably end up going and doing a bunch more," Thomey said. "I'm not really in on the decision making, but I think it's going to be kind of an easy show to produce. Once it's up and running, I think we're going to get a few people watching."
Not that Thomey needs the extra work. This Hour Has 22 Minutes is in its fifth season, and shows no signs of slowing.
"It feels like we've really hit the stride now. It seems the last couple of years it's just gotten stronger and stronger."
The half-on, half-off annual schedule also helps, especially as the end of the season draws closer - the "light at the end of the tunnel" as Thomey put it.
"It seems like there's enough time to get away from it that you don't feel so burnt out."
The misadventures of Canadian politicians always help, said Thomey. Some weeks it's a struggle to find something to poke fun at. While others ....
"My God, sometimes it doesn't rain but it pours," Thomey said.
That includes, of course, the now famous ambushes by the likes of 22 Minutes character Marg Delahunty (Mary Walsh), who put Ralph Klein on the spot last month when she confronted him in a Legislature corridor.
The ambushes are all in fun, of course, though the incident did raise some concerns about the state of Legislature security, what with the costumed Delahunty packing a pair of toy six-shooters and all.
Thomey said the 22 Minutes gang hadn't heard of the post-ambush backlash, but he pointed out that any media coverage of the show's antics generally doesn't hurt.
"As long as they're telling the time and date of the show," he said.
Then he adds, with a laugh, "and maybe they could mention Daily Tips For Modern Living, too."