So, because I am fairly heavily involved in the history of drugs and alcohol, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a producer of the Jon Dore Television Show about being interviewed by their title character and real life individual, Jon Dore (pronounced like Door).
Well, before I even saw the show, I said Oh Yes! (in my best Doctor Who impersonation).
Then I saw the show, checked out a few clips at Youtube and the show’s website, and realized that this was not what I expected.
You see, the show is a sort of fictional, or maybe better yet, exaggerated reality: Jon Dore plays an everyday guy, maybe slightly dumb (it’s a character, not really him) who wants to learn more about an issue. For example, getting fit, getting over a phobia, finding love. While Jon is a real guy, his persona is a little exaggerated, but he interviews real people, experts of a sort. For the losing weight issue, for example, he interviewed among other people, a plastic surgeon about liposuction, and a behavioural therapist about his bat phobia.
Two weeks later, I was sitting in a trailer in Burlington outside of a townhouse that had been coopted as a set. I wore my own clothes, vetted by the very friendly costume person, covered in makeup to make my skin less shiny and blotchy (I looked far better than normal, I have to say), and chatting about movies, TV and drugs with a couple directors, a producer, and a few other people who seemed important, but whose job was never clear to me. I had a tiny microphone in my lapel and its cord running down my leg to a remote transmitter strapped to my ankle. I felt like I was wired for a sting operation.
Now, on his show, Jon speaks to the experts for maybe five minutes. So I was wondering why I was scheduled to arrive at 8:15 and be there for four hours. Well, let me tell you: the edit is 5 minutes, but for us it took three hours to shoot. This is simply the magic of TV. Jon would ask a question several different ways. We’d play around with answers, how I delivered them and how detailed I got. Given the length of some of my posts, you can imagine how much I can ramble on when on camera. Then they’d change the cameras around and we’d go back for another run at the interview. Jon would try various jokes out, he’d make fun of me or himself (usually himself, the schtick of the show is basically Jon plays a simple everyman with a somewhat base sense of humour – works for me) and then we’d wrap up, sti downstairs for five minutes while they fiddled with the camera, get our makeup touched up, and go back for more.
I tell you, I have not had that much fun in a long time. Not only did the staff make me feel like a star, but Jon and I seemed to get along pretty well, which made for a very easy to do interview about a topic I know quite a bit about. Of course, I inevitably got some stuff wrong, because Jon took me into topics I knew less about (how long has pot been cultivated in North America) or I was just a little camera nervous and said stuff like cocaine had been around for most of the nineteenth century – not true. But it was a lot of fun. We broke each other up a few times, and they seemed to like how well it went.
The tragedy of the whole thing was that we were shooting for the last episode of the show. It has not yet been picked up by Comedy for another season, so everyone was bittersweet. Happy to be done with it, but going to miss all of their new friends.
It was also a drag for me, because I enjoyed it so much, I wanted to go back on another show. Maybe “Jon wants to know more about alcohol” or “Jon gets addicted to crack.” I could be a regular character, like his shrink.
The next morning, I got my letter from ACTRA (Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists) congratulating me on my first gig and inviting me to join my local ACTRA branch. Given how much they paid, I’d be up for it if I though there was much of a market for historians of medicine.
“I’m a historian of medicine and I play one on TV.”
