Writing His Rants
This Hour's Rick Mercer puts it all down for posterity
By
CLAIRE BICKLEY - Toronto Sun
Wednesday, April 22, 1998
Some books are best read aloud. And some books are best read LOUD aloud.
"Maybe while storming around the house," Rick Mercer suggests of Streeters: Rants And Raves From This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a new collection of scripts of five seasons' worth of his TV walk-and-talks.
All appear as originally written.
Ladies and gentlemen, the hardest working man in showbusiness!
"Hey -- there's photocopying costs," Mercer protests, on the phone from his home in Halifax.
The compilation is somewhat meant to set the rant record straight. Mercer had seen too many half-remembered, half-right versions of what he said on This Hour posted to the Internet. The real thing is surprisingly scant when seen on the page and their author did toy with rewriting them into full-length, more thoughtful columns. But he found them changing and losing a little of their original fire.
Besides, "these are not columns, they're rants," Mercer says firmly.
Slagged are the usual suspects, from politicians to bigots to banks to baby boomers: He compares Brian Mulroney to the Ebola virus ("He's actually been called worse," he says on the phone), scorches then-Liberal MP Roseanne Skoke's anti-gay hatemongering, mocks boomers who believe where they were when JFK died is a fascinating fact, and turns the Bank of Montreal's faux-friendly slogan ("One of the most bizarre and irritating ad campaigns in the history of television") back on itself in a streeter titled Can A Bank Change?
"I dunno, but they can't sink much lower, I know that," was his own answer on-air.
Over the years, he's occasionally heard back from his targets.
"I think the bank just generally wasn't that happy with our approach. We have gotten letters sometimes from people explaining their situation, just to point out that things aren't that bad, or the reason why they make, you know, four-billion dollars and yet their front porches smell like urinals. They just can't control it. 'It's the damn homeless. Not our fault'."
Mercer will be signing copies of Streeters at Chapters Yonge & Steeles outlet tomorrow night at 8 and at their Bay & Bloor store Friday at 12:30 p.m.