If you don’t know Graham Clark, are you even from the lower mainland? You know, the Juno-nominated guy from Stop Podcasting Yourself, The Laugh Gallery, Ring-A-Ding-Dong-Dandy? He’s hosted events, including the Vancouver Comedy Awards. Maybe you remember him from the last couple times he did 24 straight hours of stand-up comedy!
You’ll recognize Clark. He’s been on every telephone pole in the city at one point or another. If you’ve ever hung out on Commercial Drive, Clark’s probably flashed you a smile. He’s a pretty distinctive guy, his beard enters a room before he does. Stand-up fundraisers aren’t the only work Clark’s done for charity: he’s used that beard to create paintings that he’s sold to benefit various causes over the years.
Always advocating for others, Clark pushed back against Just For Laughs’ exploitative contracts for Canadian comics, and successfully campaigned for the return of the Juno category for “Best Comedy Album”.
In 2021, Little Mountain Gallery, the beloved volunteer-run Mount Pleasant comedy venue, were evicted from their building on Main Street. So shortly after the closure of Toast Collective, another comedy venue, the eviction brought the future of local live comedy into question. That’s when Clark decided to stand up for local comedy in a major way.
For a full 24 hours, Clark performed at LMG as a fundraiser for the Little Mountain Gallery Eviction Fund, reading jokes written for him by a rotating panel of comedians seated at a table and people on Twitter to a rotating audience. For accessibility and to expand reach, the fundraiser was also livestreamed.
The success of the first “24-Hours of Stand-Up” fundraiser inspired the comedy community and created global buzz, with remote viewers and donors from all over the world. So Clark did it again. Last year, in the new Little Mountain Gallery in Gastown, Clark raised $3000 for WISH Drop-In Centre Society with another 24 hours of stand-up comedy.
This year’s fundraiser is for Filipino BC, in response to the attack on the Lapu Lapu Festival. The event will start at 8 p.m. on Friday, May 23 at Little Mountain Gallery, and continue until 8 p.m. the following night. The panel will once again be made up of local comics, including Dave Shumka, Clark’s partner and co-host of Stop Podcasting Yourself, at noon on Saturday. Funds are accepted through GoFundMe or ticket sales. Tickets are sold as 75-minute blocks. Multi-hour passes are also available.
Summer is the most beautiful time of year for us in BC, but when it gets smokey out and you’re stuck inside, you need ways to pass the time. It’s the weakest time of year for TV, nothing new is on! But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to watch. These Canadian sitcoms will help you pass the time and put a smile on your face.
Corner Gas (2004-2009)
It’s a classic for a reason. I don’t know a Canadian who doesn’t like Corner Gas. It’s both evergreen and a perfect time capsule: the fashion, tech, and décor are all so 2000s Prairies. But the humour holds up, and it’s family-friendly! I remember Brent Butt, the creator and star of the show saying it’s like a cartoon… nobody learns or grows, and every week everything resets. I love that in a sitcom! And with six seasons of live action, a 2014 movie, and four seasons of an animated series, all on Crave, you can start anywhere!
Mr. D (2012-2018)
You’re gonna think I lived under a rock, but I hadn’t seen a full episode of Mr. D until this year! I was shocked how raunchy it is: for a show about elementary school, they blur some crazy stuff. Gerry Dwyer (Gerry Dee), a private school teacher, clumsily navigates both his work and home life. The first of two shows on this list with my favourite standup Chris Locke, the characters in this show are what makes it so great. Even the child actors who play Gerry’s students are hilarious and stick around throughout the series, growing up alongside him. Mr. D is available on a few streamers: Global TV has the first five seasons, Netflix has the first seven, but all eight are available on CBC Gem.
Schitt’s Creek (2015-2022)
The cast are what makes this show great. When wealthy Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) is swindled out of his fortune, he and his wife Moira (Catherine O’Hara), and daughter Alexis (Annie Murphy), are all forced to live in a town he bought for his son David (Dan Levy) as a bad joke. Okay, yeah, it’s kind of weird that they created a rural Canada without any Indigenous people. But there is still heart to this show: everything Eugene Levy touches has warmth to it! Watching Alexis learn how not to be selfish is surprisingly moving: Annie Murphy is as compelling as she is gorgeous. It’s on Amazon Prime, Netflix, and CBC Gem.
Run The Burbs (2022-2024)
I was so upset when the CBC cancelled this show! In many ways, it’s the perfect antidote to Schitt’s Creek. A celebration of diversity and community! You’ll remember Andrew Phung as Kimchi, the best character in Kim’s Convenience. In Run The Burbs, Andrew plays Andrew Pham, a supportive young father of two. The show is seriously fun: an all-star lineup of Canadian comedians come together to create a neighbourhood in suburban Toronto that feels just like suburban Vancouver! At first, you might even think it’s New West. You’ll wish you had neighbours like the Phams. All three seasons are on CBC Gem!
You know how it is, students can never seem to get enough time in bed. But BCIT Radio Arts & Entertainment students aren’t too tired for a little friendly competition! Tomorrow, May 15th, BCIT’s newest unsanctioned club, The Bedracing Club, will come together in Cloverdale to compete in the Annual Pre-Rodeo Cloverdale Bed Races.
Lead by captain and founder Noah Schmidt, the team is called the EVOLUTIONARIES, named after the Evolution Storytelling Company. Runners will also include Filip Budd, Matthew Lin, Makena Schmidt, Jessica Smithson, Caleb Trepanier, and myself, Lizz Kerschbaumer.
None of the other Radio Arts & Entertainment students have participated in the Bed Races before, but this isn’t Schmidt’s first rodeo. In 2023, he started a bed racing team for his high school, École Brookswood Secondary School, who still compete to this day. He competed with Brookswood twice, once as a student, and once as alumni. This will be his third time competing in the races. Schmidt’s past teams built their own bed frame on wheels, but this year, he will be assembling a loaner frame from the event staff.
Schmidt, pictured above in the Canadian-flag cowboy hat, poses with the team he founded for Brookswood Secondary.
Schmidt will also be representing the Radio Arts & Entertainment program in the 77th Annual Cloverdale Rodeo Parade at Cloverdale Town Centre soon after, on Saturday, May 17th at 10am. Anticipation has been building for months. With a majority-radio department club, it’s no surprise we can’t shut up about this event.
This is the 47th annual Bed Race. People of all skill levels participate. The Pre-Rodeo Bed Races began as a race between the RCMP and the local fire department in 1976 to promote the rodeo. Both of those jobs require being fitter than we have to be… The competition’s pretty strong, so we might not place, but that won’t stop us from giving it our all and showing some Evolution spirit! We have custom T-shirts and handmade paper hats, and we’re already doing our stretches. We’ll be easy to spot in our Evolution colours, black and orange.
Teams in the Cloverdale Bed Races have 7 members. 6 runners push a bed frame on wheels with a rider atop it. The main event will be made up of six heats run elimination-style, and we will be competing as a “mixed” gender team. The races will begin at 6:15, and you can watch from 176A Street, between 60th Avenue and 64th Avenue. Come out and show us some love!
[This article contains life-and-death spoilers for The Righteous Gemstones.]
Mama won’t you look how I’ve been good now. I’m behavin’
Daddy won’t you listen, don’t go missin’. I’m behavin’
–Aimee-Leigh Gemstone and Baby Billy Freeman, Misbehavin’
The Righteous Gemstones ended with a bang. And another bang. And another bang. A lot of bangs, actually. Maybe too many bangs. There was a lot of ground to cover, a lot of resolution for the characters. But was it satisfying? The Gemstone kids might be behavin’ now, but a story about a secretly debaucherous family of megachurch-owning monsters should probably have ended with real justice!
Much like he did with Vice Principals, Danny McBride front-loaded The Righteous Gemstones. The first season’s resolution was wonderfully tense—Gideon was welcomed back to the family, sure, and Jesse and Amber were working on their (and countless people’s!) marriage, but the megamanipulation continued. Jump ahead a few seasons, and even though they continue to mass-market religion for their own profit, a lot has changed. Kelvin has come out as gay, Gideon’s a pastor, Judy’s had a kissing-only affair, Jesse’s in a secret society, and Eli is finally moving on from Aimee-Leigh.
In Vice Principals, the titular characters burn down their rival’s house in the very first episode. The Righteous Gemstones is no different. Just about everything that can possibly be used for shock has been used for shock, another classic emblem of McBride’s storytelling style. Threats of murder and rape haunt the Gemstones at every turn. I truly cannot decide if I like it. I like that it’s different! The series finale is overpacked, so I will recap the part most important to me: the lake house trip.
At the lake house, the Gemstones kids’ childhood friend (and sometimes victim) Corey is very distraught. He is reckoning with having killed his own father to protect the Gemstones’ father and uncle and stop their cycle of jealous murder of his mother’s boyfriends.
Surrounded by both of their families, Corey asks the Gemstones for seven million dollars. He wants to buy his father’s gator farm. The Gemstones deny him the money. Jesse sends the rest of their family out to the lake on a boat, and invites Corey to play cornhole with him and the other siblings.
A vision of Aimee-Leigh appears to Kelvin when he goes inside to change his shirt and guides him into Corey’s room. He snoops through Corey’s things and discovers the Gemstone family heirloom gold bible, the one stolen by Elijah Gemstone in the season premiere, and then again by Corey’s father in Interlude IV.
When Corey’s secret is revealed, he turns the music up on the stereo. The rest of the family, safe on the boat, kind of enjoy it. It’s clever cover: Corey wants to shoot the Gemstones. Judy first. When we see her again, it looks like it’s in her shoulder. Corey shoots Jesse three times through a closet door, and Jesse slumps lifelessly to his knees, then collapses face first onto the floor. He looks for Kelvin under the bed, and we remember in Interlude IV when Kelvin hid under the bed to hide from Corey’s father when he robbed them so many years ago. Not a scared kid this time, Kelvin jumps out at Corey, who promptly shoots him.
Corey assumes, like I had when I watched it, that the Gemstone siblings are dead. But they’re not dead.
Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin are alive, barely. They crawl to each other, and I really believe they are going to die there, bleeding out on the floor of their lakehouse in their designer clothes. To me, that is the most fitting end for the Gemstones: a horrific betrayal. Finally, someone to do unto them as they do unto others…
Judy calls on her rival, Dr Watson, the monkey doctor who’d helped BJ in his recovery from paralysis. He brings Jesse’s gun to them, and Jesse shoots Corey with it when he walks back in.
When Corey bleeds out, he asks the Gemstone siblings not to try to save his life or call for help, but to pray for him. Jesse starts out quite stilted, but as they pray, the kids’ prayer becomes more and more authentic. For once, I truly believe they are in touch with God. They forgive Corey.
The rest of the finale happens fast… it fits the rest of the episode: so much plot you wonder why the rest of the season was so fucking slow. And the ending is so happy, you wonder who it’s happy for. The Gemstones don’t deserve it, but maybe that’s just life. The very rich can, and do, get away with murder. Even Jesse’s petulant sons find their places in the family’s congregation, but the show is not really about the importance of family: it’s about the benefits of conforming to upper-upper-upper-class life.
A show that began as a clear condemnation of extravagant wealth and megachurch financial abuse resolved everything but that crux, and let its evildoers off the hook for the price of minor growth. They don’t learn much, it’s not a soft show like Schitt’s Creek, but the characters do become slightly less evil. In many ways, this finale was a grand disappointment. A happy ending for miserable people.
“He said it’s not over. The evil is still here.” –Maggie Holvey, The X-Files S2E21 “The Calusari”
As I gaze out over the clear night sky from my chair in the backyard, I can’t help but feel apprehensive. I want to see the stars, but I really don’t want to see anything else. But it’s not up to me! I’ve seen The X-Files, I know the deal. You stargaze, you see an alien spacecraft, nobody believes you, you go crazy, an FBI agent comes to visit you at the asylum, but you disappear before you can tell him what happened.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit fantastical. But that show stuck with me: the infinity of the universe, the darkness, the glowing light… all on the backdrop I’ve shared with them my whole life. In the first episode of The X-Files, there is a shot that takes place on Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in New Westminster, just one block from my childhood home!
Our city is a chameleon. The X-Files turned the Lower Mainland into the whole world. Surrey as Maine, New Westminster as Boston, Vancouver as a random city in China. Or DC. Or South America.
My favourite X-Files location means a lot to me because of its proximity to where I grew up. It’s the house from the exorcism episode (season 2, episode 21, The Calusari).
You can find it at 417 Fifth Street, New Westminster.
When I was a kid, my dad, brother, and I used to ride by the house on our bikes. As kids we hadn’t seen the show, but the place still gave us the creeps. There was a big sign from a company called Gemlevy in the front yard, so we called it Gemlevy Manor, and we believed it was haunted. Word travelled through the neighbourhood, and other kids got on board. We’d ride low over our handlebars, crouching down so our heads wouldn’t appear above the hedge.
I wonder: did the X-Files location scouts feel the same sense of doom we did when we rode our bikes past Gemlevy Manor? Could the house really be haunted? Or is it just an old-fashioned manor house? In New Westminster, old builds are a dime a dozen. But there’s something special about Gemlevy Manor: its stately build, dramatic columns, and white exterior give it a dignified, but aloof aura.
The X-Files changed how I see a lot of the lower mainland: visiting my grandma in White Rock reminds me of Scully on her Maine vacation, the Clark drive overpass near (now-defunct) underground venue 333 unsettles me (Deep Throat died there), and when I go skating at Robson Square, I always pay for a locker, to feel like I’m making a covert drop in DC.
What’s the most important X-Files location in your life?
