Jul 13, 2024
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Frank Gorshin is incredible here as Dean Martin and Tony Bennett covering the Beatles.
1972.
Alan Hamel's Comedy Bag aired on CBC in 1972.
“It was a satirical show that incorporated the elements of Laugh-In,” says Hamel. “I sold the show to the CBC and they told me it would be done in Montreal. I went to Montreal and I immediately detected that they didn’t want me there.”
The cloud of the FLQ era had barely lifted in Quebec. Tension between Francophones and Anglophones remained acute.
“The guy who held the cue cards only spoke French,” says Hamel. “They obviously assigned this guy to hold the cue cards knowing he didn’t speak English. The guy who ran CBC in Montreal wasn’t a friend of the show either.”
The program starred Hamel and Canadian actor Don Cullen. It featured American favorites like JoAnne Worley and Fred Travalena, but it was a disaster the whole way through.
“So, we do the show and we have to do some editing,” recalls Hamel. “They tell me, ‘You won’t be able to edit in Montreal because all the post-production suites are taken. So, you’re going to be doing it in Nova Scotia.’ I said, ‘Excuse me? I have to go all the way to Nova Scotia to edit a show I shot in Montreal?’ They sent me as far away as Calgary. It was very clear that somebody didn’t want this show. It was very painful. I look back on that period and I’ll never know what really happened. Someone was laying in the bushes for me. They made life as difficult for me as they could. They wanted to torpedo everything I was doing.”
“Comedy Bag will be the CBC’s single weekly enterprise of comedy this season,” reported the Montreal Gazette. “A nation already starved for humor will receive small relief. Against a horrible studio backdrop that looked like a corrugated warehouse wall, Hamel unloaded a barrage of one-liners with pauses for appropriate bits of canned laughter. From there the program went downhill with increasing speed. A bump-and-grinder in a Canadiens sweater was the recurring blackout which linked a number of sketches, remarkable for lack of both wit and taste, altogether bad, with disastrous sets, block photography and feeble editing The Alan Hamel Comedy Bag is about the last straw, the final outrage in a succession of shows that have disgraced Montreal and the CBC.”
Ed McMahon meets Peter Max.
okay impressionist wasn’t worth it
The Alan Hamel Comedy Bag (1973) was a Canadian knock-off of Laugh-In featuring Fred Travalena and Liz Torres as regulars. Among the guest stars who came to Montreal were Janet Leigh and JoAnne Worley. By all accounts, it was a festering pile of television garbage.