This Hour Has 22 Minutes takes its title from the controversial CBC newsmagazine This Hour Has Seven Days, which ran from 1964 to 1966.
22 Minutes originally featured Cathy Jones, Rick Mercer, Greg Thomey and Mary Walsh in satirical sketches of the weekly news and Canadian political events.
Rick Mercer left in 2001 and was replaced by Colin Mochrie. Mochrie, in turn, left in 2003 and was replaced by Shaun Majumder.
During the 2003-2004 season, it was agreed that the number of appearances by Mary Walsh would be reduced due to her film comitments, and that 22 Minutes writer Mark Critch and other young comedians would fill-in for her.
This Hour is in its eleventh season. Until the 2003-2004 season, it was producted by Salter Street Films, but Alliance Atlantis will produce the series from 2004 through when the series is officialy finished.
22 Minutes is broadcast on the CBC Television network. It is taped before a studio audience in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The show's format is a mock news program, intercut with comic sketches and humorous interviews of public figures. These have included such well-known segments as Rick Mercer going out to eat at Harveys with Jean Chrétien; Colin Mochrie disguising himself as journalist Peter Mansbridge for insightful interviews with none other than... Peter Mansbridge; Shaun Majumder wishing to be the Prime Minister of Canada so he could give students a three-day school week and get rid of the GST as a Christmas gift; such luminaries as Paul Martin and Walter Cronkite putting Greg Thomey in a headlock; Cathy Jones as the sassy suffragette "I'm just goofin' around" Babe Bennent; and a variety of segments with Mary Walsh's character Marg Delahunty crashing press conferences, hosting a "sleepover" for the nation's leading female politicians, and threatening to "smite" the likes of Mike Harris, John Manley, Lucien Bouchard and Sheila Copps as Marg, Princess Warrior.
Another of its regular segments with Rick Mercer was turned into an enormously popular one-hour feature show titled Talking to Americans; the hour long special became the highest rated comedy special in the history of Canadian Television.
The troupe's most famous joke was during the federal election campaign in 2000 and was a rant by Rick Mercer. The Canadian Alliance had proposed a mechanism to call for a national referendum on a particular subject when at least 100,000 voters signed a petition. The show asked viewers to sign an online petition for a referendum to change Alliance leader Stockwell Day's first name to Doris. The show claimed to have obtained well in excess of 1,200,000 online votes. Although this was cheerfully admitted to be a stunt unhampered by the rigours of an Elections Canada-controlled petition, and although it had no effect on Alliance policy, it did obtain international publicity for the show and contributed to the general air of farce surrounding Day's election campaign.
The show has also had specials such as: This Hour Has 22 Minutes: News Year'98, This Hour Has 22 Minutes Direct Hits, This Hour Has 22 Minutes: Holiday Special 2000 and other specials.
This Hour Has 22 Minutes airs on CBC at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on Friday nights.
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2 Video Clips from the series 3 Photos from the series |
External links
Video Clips from the series
Photos from the series
For more pictures of the series please visit 22 Minutes Photo Gallery
