Articles - Live It Up! (Series) (1978-1990)
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Live it Up — life's little foibles make good TV
According to all predictions, it shouldn't have worked. The show features a man dressed up in a bug costume, another guy who you never actually see, plus a pseudo-legalist, dressed up like a Halloween version of a judge. It has been hosted by a constantly changing cast of hosts, and to top it all off, the show has bounced around the schedule like a drunken ballet dancer. Despite all these potential obstacles, the show has managed to survive, and even prosper. In fact, after 13 seasons, Live It Up is the longest running series of its type anywhere.
There is no hard reason for the show's staying power, but a good guess would hearken back to the old maxim which says "variety is the spice of life". For 13 seasons, the show has travelled from one end of the country to the other, searching out the unusual and the offbeat. Inconsistent it may be, but it is also highly entertaining.
Diane Buckner, who joined the show a couple of seasons ago to replace the departing Liz Grogan, agrees that the show has something to offer for just about anyone.
"Of course there are whimsical elements, but what people get out of the show is solid information," Buckner told writer Bob Remington. A good case in point is the weekly "What bugs you?" feature. Viewers write in with their complaints about various products, laws and what-not, and then the show provides some sort of response. Occasionally it is an explanation of some annoying aspect of life, but many of the bits have featured embarrassed corporate spokespersons trying to mitigate for the flaws of their product design. Trivial it may be, but you can't argue that it is great fun.
Another popular spot on the show is the "Watchdog". Still unseen after 13 years, each week the "Watchdog" tests the veracity of advertisers claims. In practice, this has translated into activities like counting the pieces of meat in competing bowls of soup, and testing the fun potential of skateboards.
This year the show saw yet another of its many changes, when it made the switch from film production to the more immediate and newsy video-tape. Another innovation this season was the arrival of co-host Sharon Seto. Seto, a former producer and on-air person with CTV and the Global network, was tapped as the third reporter when mainstay Alan Edmonds retired after 11 years with the show.
In a special retirement article in TV Guide, Edmonds expounded at length about what it was that has made the show so successful. "I'm committed to the belief that you don't have to be solemn to be serious," he said. As a quotation, Edmonds' thoughts could stand as an apt axiom for the entire show.
After all, variety has been the prime attraction of the show from the very beginning. Highlights include a nation-wide joke contest, an effort to see if a giant piece of paper could be folded more than eight times, and a test to see which type of banana peel (Dole or Chiquita) would be the slipperiest. Edmonds, the veteran of many a mishap, filled in TV Guide on one of the most disastrous.
Perhaps the most unusual of all involved a test of whether or not a bank would cash a cheque written on a raw egg. "They refused on the grounds that an egg could be alive," Edmonds said. The wily journalist responded by cutting a hole in either end of the egg, and then blowing the contents out into a bag. "The teller accepted the now distinctly dead egg, and dropped it," he said. "Then she refused to cash the cracked shell because it was ineligible."
Antics like this have made the show a mainstay on Canadian TV. Each of the hosts has a similar parcel of unusual anecdotes, all gathered while in the process of pursuing the most imaginative stories possible Buckner, the other third of the trio which includes Seto and originator Jack McGaw, is particularly fond of a piece done in response to a query about the Flintstones Vitamins choice of characters.
They have Fred, Wilma, Barney, Bamm Bamm, Pebbles, Dino and even the family car- but no Betty," Buckner explained in her TV Focus interview. "When we contacted the company, they said the machine that stamps out the vitamins is only capable of producing seven characters and could not handle Betty's shape."
All laughter aside, there is also an element of serious journalism to the show. As consumer advocates, the Live It Up crew has been second to none. In fact, the show has broken some of the bigger consumer stories of the past decade and a half. For example, the show was the first one to note that there were no government regulations covering the condition of rental cars. Another big one concerned the lack of protection for consumers from credit companies. Live It Up was amongst the first to point out that consumers could put themselves into almost limitless debt.
Although the word "infotainment" has come to have negative connotations in TV circles, the staff of Live It Up are proud to march under that banner. The combination of the two has proved to be a winning formula for the CTV network. Everyone connected with the show has had a lot of fun; and better still, at the same time they have managed to make a real difference in people's lives, hopefully for the better of all concerned.
Host Diane Buckner has tried to justify the show on technical grounds, arguing "the information you communicate is more important then the way you do it." The departed Alan Edmonds, as always, managed to say it just a little bit better. "Like the poet said, laugh and the world laughs with you, but cry and you cry alone. So, we look at the world with a tongue in our collective cheeks."
From The Newfoundland Herald, February 24, 1990
Live it Up — life's little foibles make good TV
According to all predictions, it shouldn't have worked. The show features a man dressed up in a bug costume, another guy who you never actually see, plus a pseudo-legalist, dressed up like a Halloween version of a judge. It has been hosted by a constantly changing cast of hosts, and to top it all off, the show has bounced around the schedule like a drunken ballet dancer. Despite all these potential obstacles, the show has managed to survive, and even prosper. In fact, after 13 seasons, Live It Up is the longest running series of its type anywhere.
There is no hard reason for the show's staying power, but a good guess would hearken back to the old maxim which says "variety is the spice of life". For 13 seasons, the show has travelled from one end of the country to the other, searching out the unusual and the offbeat. Inconsistent it may be, but it is also highly entertaining.
Diane Buckner, who joined the show a couple of seasons ago to replace the departing Liz Grogan, agrees that the show has something to offer for just about anyone.
"Of course there are whimsical elements, but what people get out of the show is solid information," Buckner told writer Bob Remington. A good case in point is the weekly "What bugs you?" feature. Viewers write in with their complaints about various products, laws and what-not, and then the show provides some sort of response. Occasionally it is an explanation of some annoying aspect of life, but many of the bits have featured embarrassed corporate spokespersons trying to mitigate for the flaws of their product design. Trivial it may be, but you can't argue that it is great fun.
Another popular spot on the show is the "Watchdog". Still unseen after 13 years, each week the "Watchdog" tests the veracity of advertisers claims. In practice, this has translated into activities like counting the pieces of meat in competing bowls of soup, and testing the fun potential of skateboards.
This year the show saw yet another of its many changes, when it made the switch from film production to the more immediate and newsy video-tape. Another innovation this season was the arrival of co-host Sharon Seto. Seto, a former producer and on-air person with CTV and the Global network, was tapped as the third reporter when mainstay Alan Edmonds retired after 11 years with the show.
In a special retirement article in TV Guide, Edmonds expounded at length about what it was that has made the show so successful. "I'm committed to the belief that you don't have to be solemn to be serious," he said. As a quotation, Edmonds' thoughts could stand as an apt axiom for the entire show.
After all, variety has been the prime attraction of the show from the very beginning. Highlights include a nation-wide joke contest, an effort to see if a giant piece of paper could be folded more than eight times, and a test to see which type of banana peel (Dole or Chiquita) would be the slipperiest. Edmonds, the veteran of many a mishap, filled in TV Guide on one of the most disastrous.
Perhaps the most unusual of all involved a test of whether or not a bank would cash a cheque written on a raw egg. "They refused on the grounds that an egg could be alive," Edmonds said. The wily journalist responded by cutting a hole in either end of the egg, and then blowing the contents out into a bag. "The teller accepted the now distinctly dead egg, and dropped it," he said. "Then she refused to cash the cracked shell because it was ineligible."
Antics like this have made the show a mainstay on Canadian TV. Each of the hosts has a similar parcel of unusual anecdotes, all gathered while in the process of pursuing the most imaginative stories possible Buckner, the other third of the trio which includes Seto and originator Jack McGaw, is particularly fond of a piece done in response to a query about the Flintstones Vitamins choice of characters.
They have Fred, Wilma, Barney, Bamm Bamm, Pebbles, Dino and even the family car- but no Betty," Buckner explained in her TV Focus interview. "When we contacted the company, they said the machine that stamps out the vitamins is only capable of producing seven characters and could not handle Betty's shape."
All laughter aside, there is also an element of serious journalism to the show. As consumer advocates, the Live It Up crew has been second to none. In fact, the show has broken some of the bigger consumer stories of the past decade and a half. For example, the show was the first one to note that there were no government regulations covering the condition of rental cars. Another big one concerned the lack of protection for consumers from credit companies. Live It Up was amongst the first to point out that consumers could put themselves into almost limitless debt.
Although the word "infotainment" has come to have negative connotations in TV circles, the staff of Live It Up are proud to march under that banner. The combination of the two has proved to be a winning formula for the CTV network. Everyone connected with the show has had a lot of fun; and better still, at the same time they have managed to make a real difference in people's lives, hopefully for the better of all concerned.
Host Diane Buckner has tried to justify the show on technical grounds, arguing "the information you communicate is more important then the way you do it." The departed Alan Edmonds, as always, managed to say it just a little bit better. "Like the poet said, laugh and the world laughs with you, but cry and you cry alone. So, we look at the world with a tongue in our collective cheeks."