Jonny Harris on the road again
Still Standing host throws caber in Middleton, samples blueberry desserts during Oxford visit
Comedian and actor Jonny Harris was happy to have Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again return as an earworm when production for season 7 of his award-winning series Still Standing got underway in 2021.
The new season began airing on CBC on Jan. 5 with a ray of hope — or rather, a visit to discover why Hope, B.C., is more than just a roadside pee break between Kamloops and Vancouver — and continues with profiles of scrappy Canadian towns that have fought their way through adversity and kept their unique civic spirit.
The Murdoch Mysteries star admits making season 7 was a strange time, trying to stay out of the way of COVID-19 while also abiding by whatever restrictions might be in place wherever the crew happened to be filming.
But at the same time, he feels the past two years underscore why Still Standing remains so important to him, as a vicarious way for viewers to travel across the country and take heart from fellow Canadians who are going through the exact same things while having a few laughs in the process.
“I feel like ultimately, we’ve just stuck to what we’ve always done,” says the Pouch Cove, N.L., native from his current Toronto home. “We’ve looked for things that are optimistic and fun and interesting and unique and hopeful.
“For half-an-hour during the week, people can tune in and take a break from the doom and gloom of the six o’clock news, and hopefully feel good about something.”
Harris has brought the show to his home turf on the East Coast on numerous occasions, and Nova Scotiathemed episodes from towns like Bear River, Mabou and Canso can be readily revisited on the CBC Gem app and website, along with the latest instalments. For this season, he and his crew spent a few weeks in the fall of 2021 in Middleton, for a show airing on Wednesday, Feb. 23, and, Oxford, which will be profiled on Wednesday, March 9.
“It was the perfect time to be there,” he says of his first stop, in the heart of the Annapolis Valley. “It was in October and the leaves were all changing, yet it was still very warm and sunny, so all our shots of town are going to be beautiful because of the colour in the leaves and the sunlight — the sun is a bit lower at that time of year and it looks good on camera — and everybody was out and about, it was really ideal.
“But when we shot the live show there, everybody was freezing their ass off, because we sort of got hooped. We were all set to do our indoor live shows without restrictions on audience numbers, and they wouldn’t have had to have masks and whatnot, and then COVID numbers were on the rise right before we left. “
In order to allow as many Middletonians as possible to see his comedy set inspired
Newfoundland comedian Jonny Harris’s never-ending roadtrip brings him back to Nova Scotia for two shows in season seven of Still Standing, airing Wednesday nights on CBC and streaming on CBC Gem. by his visit, he took his giant Canadian map backdrop out to the parking lot of the local hockey arena so they could enjoy his jokes about the Valley, and good-natured ribbing of residents like Highland Games athlete and Guinness World Record-holding caber tosser Danny Frame.
Harris jokes that “the word caber is the ancient Gaelic word for telephone pole” and reveals a bit that was left out of the episode, describing how so much Scottish culture revolves around donning a kilt in order to do some of the most difficult things in the world, like tossing a caber, playing the bagpipes and making and eating haggis.
“It’s superhuman,” he says of Frame’s pole-tossing prowess. “And he mentored under another guy (Middleton athlete and principal Jamie Peppard) who was ranked third in the world. Both really nice guys, and the whole team there was great. They taught me the basics of how to flip a caber, and I ended up flipping one.
“It was much smaller than your competition caber, they started me light, but it was a blast.”
For his trip to Oxford, it was a given that Harris would be delving into two things that have made the town famous, its world-renowned blueberry crops and the sinkhole that threatened to swallow up the Lion’s Club community centre and park on the shore of Salt Lake when it appeared in 2018.
“There’s certainly more to Oxford than that, but those are ... it’s a difficult thing to address, because it’s not really something where people can say, ‘Oh well, you’ll pull out of it.’ These are geological circumstances that are well beyond your control,” says Harris.
The property with the sinkhole was sold to local developer Mervil Rushton, who then devoted much time, energy and money to filling it in with old torn up pavement, concrete, and whatever else he could chuck into it. But the loss of the centre, which Harris says hosted most local social events from weddings to retirement parties, is still keenly felt.
“I think the issue is that you just don’t know, the town can’t take the liability and still have a children’s playground there,” he says. “You can plug the hole but you never really know if you’ve just plugged it until it washes away again, and it’s not the kind of risk a municipality can take on.”
On the plus side, the Still Standing crew was able to take part in a fundraiser for a new community centre that involved Oxford’s main claim to fame, and Harris got his fill of local blueberries after learning all about their use and nutritious benefits from some local producers.
“It was a bake-off, and local businesses sponsor various people, and it was a friendly outdoor competition. And I got to sample everything, and I’m a big blueberry eater, but not a big dessert eater, and I had my fill that afternoon, I tell ya,” he chuckles.
“I think I became delirious from blueberries and sugars and carbohydrates. It was interesting.”