It takes more than 22 Minutes to amass 700 episodes of a Canadian TV series — or any North American series for that matter. Saturday Night Live, after 50 years, is inching towards 1000 episodes. (It’s at 991.) The Ed Sullivan Show, from 1948 – ’71, was a really big variety shew for 1,068 Sundays. The Simpsons is at 805 and counting.
This Tuesday, March 3, CBC will air the 700th episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The satirical sketch series began way back in 1993. Beyond SNL, compare that to other sketch shows: The Royal Canadian Air Farce may be next but the math is complicated. As a series it ran about 320, but factor in annual New Year’s Eve shows and then 25 years of weekly radio and I’m going to have to ask Don Ferguson for a final count.
Then there is Wayne & Shuster, who ran on CBC from 1954 right through until the late ’80s. Counting episodes is tricky, however, as they ran once a month for many years and later did about four specials a year. It is said that they logged 67 Sullivan Show appearances. I’ll ask CBC Research to help me with the math.
Mad TV is close behind at 329. Let’s duct tape sketch onto The Red Green Show which ran an even 300.
Some had maximum impact over a shorter time. Going way back to the ’50s, Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar logged 160 episodes (over four seasons!) Spread over several networks, SCTV did 135. In Living Color sparkled for 127. Back in the ’80s, The Frantics made 113. The Kids in the Hall, the original series, crushed 109. Then there was CODCO (63), Baroness Von Sketch Show (46) and Monty Python’s Flying Circus (45).
There are more, and please catch me up in the comments. But for now, congratulations to This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Tuesday’s 700th will feature the current front five: Mark Critch, Trent McClellan, Aba Amuqandoh and my special guests on this podcast, Stacey McGunnigle and Chris Wilson. In support is former Kid, SNL player and now killing it as prime minister Mark Carney, Mark McKinney, as well as original member Greg Thomey.
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Over the past five seasons, Chris and Stacey been having great fun slipping under the skin of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry (above); Pierre Poilievre and Karoline Leavitt; and Galen Weston and Pam Bondi, among many others. We had so much fun doing this episode we did it twice! (Well, that was mainly because I didn’t record it the first time.) The good news is that this second version is twice as fun!
To listen, click on the white arrow in the blue dot above. To watch the full video version of this podcast, follow this link to it on YouTube.
