COMEDY SHOW
Executive Producer John M. Florescu
PBS comedy show mixes humor with current events. David Frost is presenting a hilarious show featuring Jimmy Carr, Olivia Colman, Hugh Dennis, David Mitchell, Jimmy Tingle, Mary Walsh. The idea was to create a topical comedy and variety show hosted by Sir David Frost, recorded in London and adapted transatalanticaly for broadcasting by WGBH Boston (and then on to all the Public Broadcast Service channels in the States) and the Canadian Broadcasting Company in Canada.
The show was co-hosted by Jimmy Tingle a US comedian and a Canadian comic actress, Mary Walsh, the star of one of Canada’s most successful and long-running comedy shows, “This Hour Has 22 Minutes”.
And if that sounds complicated, it was. Written and created by the London team, but with inserts recorded in the US and Canada in concert with us, taped in advance and then satellite-linked over to the UK to be edited in time to show to the London audience, the show then had three different versions of itself edited for the UK, UIS and Canadian versions.
This led to long long three or four-way Conference Calls, where we quickly discovered that there was no love lost between the US and the Canadian production teams, so we tended to sit back and let them tussle a bit before coming up with a possible solution.