You Can't Do That on Television

Americans may know it from Nickelodeon, but YCDTOT was based in Ottawa. Produced and aired locally starting in 1979 (and through to 1990) on CJOH-TV. It was a low budget show that did sketch comedy oriented towards kids and teens - and was mostly hosted by local kids, save for a few adults who appeared on the show. One of which was Les Lye, who played over 15 different male characters!

It was one of those shows where you expected it to be low budget and campy- and that is why it was good. The kids on the show had normal lives and weren't necessarily making a life career out of what they were doing, so things were never intentionally 'perfect'. This made you feel like these were normal and real kids just having a good time. Or, maybe- not a good time every time they were slimed or had water poured on them. However the story is, they were paid extra each time they were- so I'm sure it wasn't so bad.

You can see Alanis Morissette in the main post picture, but she only was in a few episodes. Surely everyone had their favorite characters, Moose, Alisdair and Lisa are a few who come to mind.

My dad had a jewellery store relatively near the station, and he told me that Les Lye would fairly often come by to buy and look at jewellery. I always thought maybe through this I could get on the show or at least an audition - how cool would that be! Or even if I could somehow meet one of the kids from the show... wow! I did get a sweatshirt that I recall having puffy green foam lettering (mimicking the slime) on it with the name of the show, which I believe my dad got from Les at some point or another. I wore that shirt proudly and only on special occasions to school, so as to preserve it as best I could. I wonder if that shirt is still around my dads house somewhere!

Thinking back to this reminded me too of CJOH overall and the local content it produced like Homegrown Cafe with JJ Clarke. It featured local to Ottawa talent with local to Ottawa judges too. You can't ignore staple Ottawa news anchors of old, Max Keeping and Carol Anne Meehan. The studios where YCDTOT were filmed, along with the local news was shut down, as they moved to a different location. Much of the stations old videos were stored at that old studio site - and the site had a major fire a few years after the shut down - where they lost much of the stations video archives unfortunately!

There was a 2004 documentary called You Can't Do That on Film. Recorded in August 2004, the documentary toured Studio D at CJOH, which was the final production made in the original studio.

Speaking of shows filmed in Ottawa, I have to call out the Tom Green show- a story for another day. And really though that one started out on the University of Ottawa's CHUO radio station.