City host goes undercover for laughs.
Undercover High series première Tuesday on YTV
Lisa Gilroy has always been a practical joker.
“I’ve always been such a little wiener. I’ve always pranked people my whole life and just upset so many people and just been so awful, so now I get to do it for a living,” says Gilroy, laughing over the phone.
As the host of a new YTV show, Undercover High, the 24-year-old Edmontonian goes into Ontario high schools to help prank students who have given their teachers a hard time.
“It’s just so funny because you know that those kids have been such wieners at some point or another and the teachers are so excited to get payback,” Gilroy says.
She first fell in love with drama at Strathcona High School, then moved on to earn an arts degree in drama and an education degree from the University of Alberta. “I’ve always been, as a kid, just so obnoxious and so loud that it just seemed like a natural progression of things to want to end up onstage.”
So far, most of her experience has been in live theatre. She starred in Spearsical The Musical last summer at the Fringe Festival, has written plays and performed as part of an improv team. Undercover High is her first television experience.
When the casting call came out for the new show, she and a friend developed videos of prank ideas and sent them in. The producers liked Gilroy — so much so, they hired her without even meeting her. The show began filming in February in Ontario and the 10-episode season will première on Tuesday. This summer, Gilroy is driving across the country with her husband to Toronto to continue hosting the show.
The premise is simple, but puts a twist on both pranking and prankster shows. Teachers and principals get in touch with the show and help come up with ideas on how to prank their students.
The weird and bizarre happens after that — from an awkward in-class marriage proposal to a ridiculous school photo shoot.
Once Gilroy meets with people at a school, they try to brainstorm ideas that fit in with the culture of the classroom. So, if there’s a class that’s too chatty, or a class that’s had a lot of students showing up late, they try to play off that.
Her background in improv and her experience as a teacher and camp counsellor have come in useful, because the outcome of a prank is unpredictable. “Really there’s no way of telling how the prank’s going to go or how the kids are going to react.”
However, that unpredictability also means it’s not entirely straightforward to pull off the prank. Instead of just fooling one person, Gilroy has to fool a whole classroom. This presents challenges, because students will catch anything that seems out of place.
“We have 15 or 20 pairs of eyes looking around the room at their classroom that they see every day and know like the back of their hand.”
This means that the cameras and microphones — they need to get plenty of different shot angles — have to be hidden carefully.”
The best part, Gilroy says, is just how trusting the students are. That’s where the comedy is found. “They just trust their teachers so much, which is awesome, but in this case it totally backfires on them. When things just start going so weirdly wrong, they still just hold on to the bitter end.”