This Hour Has 22 Minutes
This Hour Has 22 Minutes (or simply 22 Minutes) is a Canadian television comedy. The show focuses on Canadian politics, combining news parody, sketch comedy and satirical editorials.The show features four Newfoundlanders on the desk (Cathy Jones, Rick Mercer, Greg Thomey and Mary Walsh) making fun of the weekly news and Canadian political events.
Rick Mercer left the show in 2001 and got replaced by Colin Mochrie for two seasons then he was left to be replaced by Shaun Majumder.
Mark Critch, Gavin Crawford, Bette MacDonald and other young Canadian comics will be extra backups for Mary Walsh this season, as she has other film commitments and will only have 6 apperances this season.
The show is created by Walsh and the studio of This Hour... is in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
This Hour Has 22 Minutes is in its eleventh season. It is produced by Salter Street Films, an Alliance Atlantis Company, and is broadcast on the CBC television network and Showcase for repeats.
The show's format is a mock news program, intercut with comic sketches and humorous interviews with 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 into journalist Peter Mansbridge for insightful interviews with none other than Peter Mansbridge; Shaun Majumder visits to California, checking who will win the Election for Californian Mayor (which is Arnold Schwarzenegger); Mark Critch Trick-Or-Treating at the Parliament Hill and spooking politicians such as Chrétien, Paul Martin Jr and Sheila Copps; such luminaries as Martin and Walter Cronkite putting Greg Thomey in a head lock; Cathy Jones giving marital advice to Canadian politicians; 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, Chrétien and Lucien Bouchard 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 troupe's most famous joke was during the federal election campaign in 2000. The Canadian Alliance proposed a mechanism to call for a national referendum when roughly 100,000 voters signed a petition calling for it concerning any subject. The show called on 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 signatures. 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 [1], it did obtain international publicity for the show and contributed to the general air of farce surrounding Mr. Day's election campaign.
This Hour Has 22 Minutes is on CBC at 8:30 PM ET/PT on Friday nights.
