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You Can't Do That on Television (abbreviated YCDTOTV) is a Canadian television program that first aired locally in 1979 before ultimately airing internationally in 1981. It primarily featured preteen and teenaged actors in a sketch comedy format in which they acted out skits based on a theme for that episode.

After production ended in 1990, the show continued in reruns on Nickelodeon through 1994. YCDTOTV is also known for cast members who became future performers including pop recording artist Alanis Morissette and prime-time actress Klea Scott.

History

Local television

You Can't Do That on Television debuted in 1979 on CJOH-TV in Ottawa as a low-budget variety program with some segments performed live. The show consisted of comedy skits, music videos (usually three per episode) and live phone-in contests in which the viewer could win a variety of prizes (transistor radios, record albums, model kits, etc.). The format also included performances by local disco dancers and special guests such as Ottawa-based cartoonist Jim Unger. Every week the show took its "Roving Camera" to hangouts around town, recording kids' jokes or complaints about life, which would be played on the following week's broadcast. The show's disco dance segments were emceed by a local radio DJ, Jim Johnson. Also, after a music video aired, Johnson would tell the viewers interesting facts about the artist featured in the video.

Les Lye played many different characters and was the only adult cast member that first season, though occasionally the teenaged cast members would played adult characters. The show's trademark green slime dousing prank was introduced in 1979, as was the practice of using the phrase "I don't know" as a trigger for the prank.

National television in Canada

After a successful first season, a national network version of the program entitled Whatever Turns You On was produced for CTV and debuted in September 1979 (having already aired an hour-long pilot episode in May). The format was shortened to a half-hour, removed local content, added a laugh track and replaced music videos with live performances from popular Canadian artists at the time, including Trooper, Max Webster, Ian Thomas and disco singer Alma Faye Brooks. Ruth Buzzi joined the cast, and the cast of 22 children from the first season was whittled down to seven: Christine "Moose" McGlade, Lisa Ruddy, Jonothan Gebert, Kevin Somers, Kevin Schenk, Rodney Helal, and Marc Baillon (another first-season cast member, Elizabeth Mitchell, only appeared in the pilot episode). Although the pilot, like its parent program, aired on a Saturday morning, Whatever Turns You On was ultimately placed in the 7 pm timeslot on Tuesday nights on CTV, and had poor ratings as a result. The show was canceled after one season.

Nickelodeon

In January 1981, production on YCDTOTV resumed, and a new batch of episodes aired locally on CJOH through May of that year. The format of the 1981 episodes as aired on CJOH was similar to that of the inaugural 1979 season, except that each episode featured skits revolving around a certain topic (something that carried over from Whatever Turns You On) and that the disco dancers were replaced by video game competitions. At the time the season proper ended in May, it was uncertain whether the series would continue. In the meantime, some of the cast continued to hone their acting skills through appearances in Bear Rapids, a Price/Darby pilot film that was never picked up, and Something Else, a local game show on CJOH with a format somewhat similar to the live and local episodes of YCDTOTV.

Later in 1981, the new American youth-oriented cable network, Nickelodeon, took an interest in YCDTOTV. Nickelodeon originally aired a handful of episodes in edited half-hour form during 1981 as a test run, since producer Roger Price and director Geoffrey Darby had edited the entire 1981 season of You Can't Do That on Television episodes into a half-hour format similar to Whatever Turns You On for national and international syndication (some of the sketches from the original half-hour episodes had had to be rewritten and/or reshot to remove Ottawa-centric or Canada-centric content). Toward the beginning of 1982, Nickelodeon began airing the entire edited season and YCDTOTV quickly became their highest rated show.

Production on new episodes of YCDTOTV resumed full time in early 1982, with all episodes from that point onward made in the half-hour all-comedy format. Also in 1982, Nickelodeon and CJOH had then became production partners on YCDTOTV. Over the next few years, the ratings gradually declined in Canada (by 1985, it was seen only once a week in a Saturday-morning time slot on CTV), but YCDTOTV continued to go strong in the U.S. on Nickelodeon, where it aired first five times a week and, eventually, every day.

In 1984, You Can't Do That on Television became Nickelodeon's highest-rated television program, lasting until mid-1986. Kids across America were making slime and water sounds with their mouths and sending in their own entries for the Slime-In, a contest hosted by Nickelodeon that flew the winner to the set of You Can't Do That On Television to be slimed (which was later replicated by Canada's YTV, with their version being called the Slime Light Sweepstakes).

In 1983, at the height of the series' popularity, creators Roger Price and Geoffrey Darby created a spin-off for PBS in the United States called Don't Look Now!, which had a format similar to the original 1979 and 1981 live episodes of YCDTOTV on CJOH (with features such as call-in contests and music videos). Despite high ratings, Don't Look Now!, was quickly cancelled, reportedly due to complaints from parents.

By 1987, many of the "veteran" cast members such as Matthew Godfrey, Doug Ptolemy, Vanessa Lindores, and Adam Reid had grown too old for the show. Longtime hostess Christine McGlade ("Moose") had departed the previous year, as had Alasdair Gillis (who had been promoted to co-host with Moose in 1985 before leaving towards the end of the 1986 season); Lisa Ruddy ("Motormouth"), Moose's longtime sidekick on the show, was also gone, having left at the end of the 1985 season. Only five episodes were filmed in this season, the shortest season of You Can't Do That on Television's 15-year span on the air, and one of the episodes (Adoption) provoked a negative reaction from several viewers and was susequently pulled from Nickelodeon's rotation of episodes.

In addition, by 1988, Nickelodeon had removed all 1981 episodes from rotation, reportedly because the network's contract to air the 1981 season had expired, and because the network was beginning to aim for a younger demographic and the 1981 season dealt with topics more relevant to adolescents, such as drugs, smoking, sexual equality, and peer pressure. The 1982 "Cosmetics" episode also disappeared around this time (possibly because it, too, was considered too adolescent-oriented).

Roger Price moved to France in 1988. CJOH decided not to make new episodes without him due to lack of ideas, and production was suspended. When Price eventually returned to Canada, he wanted to resume production of You Can't Do That on Television from Toronto, but was convinced by the cast and crew to return to Ottawa and CJOH.

You Can't Do That on Television resumed production in 1989, but the only child cast members to make the transition from 1987 to 1989 were Amyas Godfrey and Andrea Byrne, although a few minor cast members seen in 1986, including Rekha Shah and James Tung, returned for an episode or two. Opinions on the 1989 and 1990 episodes of YCDTOTV are mixed among longtime fans of the show, particularly regarding the new episodes' increasing reliance on bathroom humor to attract a younger audience than the show had targeted in years past. Nevertheless, many former cast members did appear during the 1989 season in cameo roles, most notably in the "Age" episode, which was hosted by Vanessa Lindores and also featured cameos by Doug Ptolemy, Alasdair Gillis, Christine McGlade, and Kevin Kubusheskie (who by that time had become a stage producer on the show). Gillis also appeared briefly in the "locker jokes" segment during the "Fantasies" episode, and Adam Reid, who by this time had become an official writer for YCDTOTV, also appeared (and was slimed) at the very end of the episode "Punishment."

The show's ratings declined throughout 1989 and 1990, as the series fell to fifth place among Nickelodeon series. The network's desire to produce more of its own shows at its new studios at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, coupled with the poor rating, cause the production of You Can't Do That on Television to officially end in 1990. Despite the ratings decline, Nickelodeon continued to air reruns until January 1994, at which point it was only being aired on weekends.

Reunion

In July 2004, a reunion special called Project 131 was produced at CJOH-TV starring five members of the original cast. These included Brodie Osome, Marjorie Silcoff, and Vanessa Lindores (pregnant at the time), with cameos by Justin Cammy and Alasdair Gillis (Also originally scheduled for the program were Christine McGlade, who had to back out due to a scheduling conflict, and Les Lye, who had to back out due to illness). Directed by David Dillehunt and produced by Josh Yawn, this was the final production ever made in Studio D, the same studio where the show had been produced fourteen years prior. The studio was sealed permanently for tax purposes following the 2004 convention. The front of the lockers and the bookshelves from the library were the only original sets still available at the time of this taping, necessitating that most of the show be shot in green screen.

In January 2007, the special was posted on YouTube. Yawn's lines in the opening scene were overdubbed.

Trademarks

Episodes of YCDTOTV included recurring gimmicks and gags. The following is a partial list.

Pre-empted shows

At the beginning of each show aired after the 1981 season, a title card would appear featuring a parody title of a TV show, with a silly (often macabre) picture and the announcer making the following announcement: "(TV show) will not be seen today in order for us to bring you this (adjective in character with the picture) production." The pre-empted shows were parodies of current TV shows (i.e. The A-Team Makes One Cup of Coffee Last Five Hours, "Hanging Out" or "Malls", 1984), movies (i.e. Top Gun Gets Put on Latrine-Cleaning Duty, "Discipline", 1986), or other pop culture icons (i.e. Boy George Without Make-up, "Halloween", 1984), and were often relevant to the theme of the current episode (i.e. "Hit and Run on Sesame Street", "Safety First", 1981). The pre-empted show announcement concept was borrowed from Saturday Night Live, which introduced their shows with similar announcements in the late 1970s. YCDTOTV pre-empted itself on three occasions (Television, Media, and Priorities). The Generation Gap episode did not begin with a preempted episode; instead, a disclaimer read "The following program contains certain scenes which may not be suitable for mature audiences. Juvenile discretion is advised". There was no preempted episode for the Success and Failure episode (1989) because the producers failed to come up with a preempt.

Opening animation: The Children's Television Sausage Factory

Originally created by Rand MacIvor working under Art Director John C. Galt, who was inspired by Terry Gilliam's "gilliamations", the opening animation sequence was a sequence of surreal images set to Rossini's William Tell Overture, performed in a Dixieland jazz arrangement by The National Press Club and Allied Workers Jazz Band. Though the theme music stayed the same throughout the entire series run (1979–1990), the opening animation itself changed in different ways.

• The Centre Block of the Canadian Parliament complex was used in the first season and in the original hour-long versions of the 1981 season episodes. In this animation sequence, a person pulls the roof off one side of the building, releasing three balloons bearing the likenesses of the three party leaders at the time: Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, and Ed Broadbent. Then, a hand from off-screen ignites the bottom of the Peace Tower with a match and it takes off like a rocket. The start of the animation features a likeness of 1979 cast member David Halpin.
• There are two versions of the "Children's Television Sausage Factory" animation. In this sequence, children are "processed" in the "sausage factory" and deposited onto a school bus at the bottom of the factory that transports them to the TV studio (a likeness of the CJOH studios on Merivale Road in Nepean, Ontario). The first version was created for the half-hour, internationally syndicated versions of the 1981 episodes. The second version, which featured larger images and cleaner (albeit less fluid) scene animation than the first version, was introduced in the beginning 1982 season and used for both the U.S. and Canadian broadcasts of You Can't Do That on Television until the end of the show in 1990.
• Both versions of the "Children's Television Sausage Factory" animation feature likenesses of Jonothan Gebert, Kevin Somers, Marc Baillon and Christine McGlade exiting the school bus, as well as a likeness of Les Lye as the security guard at the door of the TV studio. This footage was re-used from the opening sequence of 1979's short-lived Whatever Turns You On.
• The ending of the introduction saw Lye's face in a sketch with his mouth opening up, leading to a stamp put on his face reading You Can't Do That on Television, followed by the screen cracking and finally splitting in 2 pieces which the cast are seen.

Opposites

Each episode had an "opposites" segment, introduced by a visual effect of the screen flipping upside down, shifting left to fade to the next sketch, and then righting itself. Right before this happened, one of the cast would generally be giving a monologue (or several would be having a group conversation) that was interrupted by another cast member with something that would (generally) be opposite what the monologue (or dialogue) was about, all present cast would say, "It must be the introduction to the opposites", and then the inversion fade would happen; several sketches would follow that were a tongue-in-cheek reversal of the show's subject of the day, and also in which the normal principles of daily life were reversed, often with children having authority over adults or with adults encouraging children to behave badly (for example, eating sweets instead of vegetables, or wasting money on something frivolous rather than putting the money in the bank). A show on marketing, for instance, would also have a sketch or four of how not to market something.

Sometimes opposite sketches involved cast members not being hit with slime or water after saying the "trigger phrase" (see below section), as in City Life (1987) or Excess (1989). The slime or water would not fall until after the opposites were over, or sometimes not fall at all. Also, an opposite sketch in Heroes (1982) had Lisa Ruddy slimed for saying "I know," rather than "I don't know" (while other cast members said "I don't know" in that same sketch without anything happening to them).

A return to the show's daily subject was hallmarked by another of these inversion fades, and usually accompanied by one of the cast members saying, "Back to reality." These would sometimes occur in the middle of a sketch, resulting in the characters inverting whatever they were doing just prior to the conclusion of the sketch.

Opposite sketches were used in the inaugural season of the show on CJOH in 1979, but it was not until Whatever Turns You On that they became an integral part of the show.

Firing squad

Most episodes included one or more firing squad sketches, where Les would play the part of a Latin American military officer with a sword in hand preparing to order a firing squad to execute one of the children actors, who were standing in front of a post. The kids would usually find a way to trick Les Lye into walking in front of the post and saying the word "fire", thus getting shot by the firing squad himself, which was a trademark, and happened almost every time.

Every scene had the same basic format.

Captain- "Ready, aim..."

Cast Member- "Wait a minute, stop the execution!"

Captain- "What is it this time?"

The cast member would then make some attempt to stall or stop the execution. Most of the time, the cast member would be successful; however, occasionally, Lye's character would "successfully" complete the scene. On these occasions, the scene would end with "Ready, Aimm..." and the cast member flinching, which is when the squad would fire, but it wasn't shown. There is also one episode in which the cast member cries out to the commander: "Hurry up, hurry up, start the execution!" This, of course, draws the executioner's attention, and they commence fire.

Locker room

During the famous "locker room" segment of You Can't Do That on Television, cast members, residing in gym lockers with You Can't Do That on Television painted on them, would tell jokes to each other. The person telling the joke would open their locker, sticking their head out to call another cast member to tell the joke to. For the duration of the joke, those cast members would be the only ones seen with open lockers. When the punchline was delivered, there would be a laugh track and the actors would close their lockers, allowing the process to start again with different people and a different joke. This was almost certainly an homage to the well-known "joke wall" segment on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. This feature of the show was also introduced during its first season in 1979 and continued until the end of the series in 1990, with the lockers themselves undergoing a few minor physical makeovers during the show's early years.

Production company

Used in a few episodes in the first two seasons and almost every episode in later seasons, the closing credits of You Can't Do That on Television are followed by an announcement of the "company" that produced the program, with the name generally tying in with the episode's main subject. These announcements are given in the form of "'You Can't Do That on Television' is a ______ production." For example, the 1982 "Bullying" episode was a "Black Eye" Production; the 1984 "Marketing" show was a "Can't Give It Away" Production; the "Divorce" episode was a "Split Down The Middle" Production;"Project 131" was a "Changing Day" Production; The "Malls" episode was a "Hang Out to Dry" production. The announcement of the production company generally followed by one final sketch, usually taking place on the link set.

Water, slime and pies

Water

Certain key words would have the major result in cast members having substances poured on them from off-camera. This skit came on throughout every episode (along with the Slime, too). When someone said "water" or "wet", a large amount of water would mysteriously cascade onto him from above. In the early years of the show, cast members (especially Christine) were frequently nailed with pails of water physically thrown on them, but starting in 1981, this began to change to the much more mysterious motif of water falling down on the victim from above. By the 1984 season, the word "wet" had then no longer triggered the water to spray down, thus leaving the job to just the word "water" itself. This, too, was an homage to Laugh-In. Often at times, cast members would try to "dodge" getting hit with water by saying it in Spanish, French, or some other language, only to still get hit with water. (At least one sketch featured Christine even getting drenched for saying the word "Oh," which is similar in sound to "Eau," the French word for "water.")

Slime

Likewise, when someone said "I don't know", green slime, a gooey substance, would pour on him from above. This prank was known as being "slimed."

Green slime was introduced during the first season of YCDTOTV, beginning in episode six (03/10/79), in a Dungeon/Detention scene in which Tim Douglas is told not to pull on his chains by the principal. After he leaves, Tim does just that; a "toilet flushing" sound effect is heard, and the first YCDTOTV sliming occurs (interestingly, that sketch is the only extant scene from that particular episode).

The following episode, aired on March 17, 1979 (fittingly, St. Patrick's Day), was the first episode to use "I don't know" as the trigger phrase for the slime. Jim Stechyson was the first cast member to be slimed after saying "I don't know," in another dungeon/detention sketch, in which Nasti (the dungeon-master) asks Jim to name the largest lake in Canada (the Great Bear Lake) and then asks him how many fish are in it; when Jim admits he doesn't know, he is slimed. In this episode, Lisa Ruddy was the victim of six slimings (a YCDTOTV record). This was a result of a fellow cast member, Bradfield Wiltse, continually tricking her into getting slimed using the same "What's the largest lake in Canada?" tactic. (Bradfield finally received his comeuppance when he himself was slimed at the end of the show.)

Once YCDTOTV was picked up by Nickelodeon and had established itself as a hit show, Nickelodeon quickly adopted "slime" as a feature in several shows it produced, and used it heavily in its marketing. Other colours of slime were occasionally used on the show, such as red, blue, yellow, white, brown (as "mud"), orange (as "paint"), and black. In perhaps the most famous slime scene in the show's history, Christine McGlade is slimed in green, red, blue, yellow and "stripes" (red, blue, and yellow at once) in rapid succession in the 1982 "Television" episode, while trying to explain about green slime to then-newcomer Vanessa Lindores. This sketch was later seen in the opening to the hit 1987 film Fatal Attraction. Also notable is the 1986 "Enemies and Paranoia" episode, in which the studio is taken over by Russian Communists, and uttering the word "free" (as in "freedom") would send a cascade of red slime pouring over whoever said it. Price and Darby's short-lived YCDTOTV spin-off for PBS, Don't Look Now!, featured a variant on green slime called "Yellow Yuck," triggered by the phrase, "Don't blame me."

The original slime recipe in 1979 was a noxious mixture of various nasty substances (including, reportedly, sausages). However, out of concern that this slime would make its victims sick, the slime mixture was quickly changed to a blend of lime green gelatin powder and flour; eventually, oatmeal was added to the recipe, as was baby shampoo so that it would wash out of the actors' hair more easily. Especially in the later years of the show, cast members who were slimed frequently looked upward into the slime as it was falling so that it covered their faces (the same was also true of the waterings).

To avoid damage to the set from water or slime, a clear tarpaulin was placed over the main portion of the set for scenes in which an actor was to be hit with either. The tarpaulin can occasionally be seen and/or heard underneath the actors in these scenes, and in fact the loud splatter sound usually heard during a watering or sliming is due to this tarpaulin. Actors who were scripted to be slimed or have water doused on them would usually appear barefoot in the scene.

Green Slime grew to become a trademark image for Nickelodeon. They later introduced Green Slime shampoo, which was a frequent parting gift for contestants on Nick's popular game show Double Dare, where slime was heavily used, along with several variations such as 'gak' or 'gooze'. Mattel even sold Nickelodeon slime and gak in the 1990s. Nickelodeon's former studios in Orlando had a green slime geyser and green slime is still dumped on the host of the annual Kids Choice Awards at the end of the ceremony, and on at least one celebrity during the ceremony. (YCDTOTV's own Les Lye was the receipient of the first Kids Choice Awards sliming at the inaugural ceremony in 1988.) It is also still used in ads showing the network's current stars getting slimed from all sides in slow motion, and is used to slime the winner at the end of the Nick game show BrainSurge, which debuted in 2009.

Pies

The classic slapstick pie-in-the-face gag was also frequently used on YCDTOTV, although pie scenes were most common during the early years of the show. One whole episode, 1981's Drugs, was constructed completely around the pie-in-the-face gag: to avoid the wrath of the censors, the episode showed the cast getting "high" by pieing themselves continuously over and over, comparing the stupidity of hitting oneself with a pie to the stupidity of taking drugs. Unlike the slime and water, pies were not triggered by any certain word or phrase.

Cast

• Stephanie Bauder (1989–1990)
• Nick Belcourt (1989)
• Chris Bickford (1989–1990)
• Jennifer Brackenbury (1989–1990)
• Carlos Braithwaite (1989–1990)
• Justin Cammy (1983–1985)
• Stephanie Chow (1984–1987)
• Angie Coddett (1981–1984)
• Eugene Contreras (1982–1985)
• Jonothan Gebert (1979–1981)
• Alasdair Gillis (1982–1985)
• Amyas Godfrey (1986–1989)
• Matthew Godfrey (1986–1987)
• Abby Hagyard (1982-1990)
• Adam Kalbfleisch (1984–1986)
• Martin Kerr (1981–1983)
• Pauline Kerr (1984)
• Kevin Kubusheskie (1981–1984)
• Vanessa Lindores (1982–1987)
• Les Lye (1979-1990)
• Christine "Moose" McGlade (1979–1986)
• Alanis Morissette (1986, for five episodes)
• Brodie Osome (1981–1983)
• Doug Ptolemy (1982–1987)
• Adam Reid (1984–1987)
• Lisa "Motormouth" Ruddy (1979–1985)
• Vik Sahay (1986–1987)
• Klea Scott (1982 to 1984)
• Kevin Schenk (1979–1981)
• Rekha Shah (1986-1989)
• Sariya Sharp (1989–1990)
• Marjorie Silcoff (1984–1985)
• Kevin Somers (1979–1981)
• Amy Stanley (1989–1990)
• Jill Stanley (1989–1990)
• Christian Tessier (1989–1990)
• Kevin Ward (1989-1990)
• Ted Wilson (1989–1990)

Although Alanis Morissette is the show's most famous alumnus, a number of cast members have continued to work as actors after their time on the show, including Bauder, Bickford, Tessier, Scott, Silcoff, Sahay, Matthew Godfrey, and Rekha Shah. Others, such as McGlade and Wilson, have gone on to work in the entertainment industry.

References

1. "You Can't Do That on Television - Project 131". Youtube. Retrieved 2010-05-21.

External links

• You Can't Do That on Television at IMDb
• Template:Tv.com show

Template:Sketch comedies

• 1979 Canadian television series debuts
• 1990 Canadian television series endings
• 1980s Nickelodeon shows
• Canadian sketch comedy shows
• Canadian children's television series
• Canadian variety television series
• CTV network shows
• English-language television series
• Nickelodeon shows
• Television series about television
• Television series produced in Ottawa