Red Green found the exit ramp, but now he’s back on the road
Hapless handyman is no fan of retirement
Steve Smith is 67 now, but his engine is still idling smoothly, to put it in terms his fictional alter ego Red Green would get.
“I’m pretty much showroom condition here, and low mileage,” says Smith, adding he still has all his original parts. “I never did much: Golf is not that strenuous.”
It’s been seven years since Smith wrapped production on TV’s Red Green Show, in which he created, wrote and portrayed the hapless wannabe handyman of the show’s title.
But Red Green does still call him back, for the occasional one-man show.
“We went for 15 years, and I ended it,” Smith says of the folksy CBC comedy series. Reruns still air on the Comedy network and on more than 60 TV stations in the U.S.
The show stars Smith as the tinkering leader of the motley eccentrics at a rural lodge, with each episode turning on ill-conceived repairs and renovation projects.
“We’d always meet, the CBC guy and I, about what was going to be next,” Smith says.
After the 13th season, Smith suggested they go another two years, ending the year he turned 60.
“I pride myself in recognizing an exit ramp,” he says. “What it meant was, I got a two-year deal, and I could give the crew and the cast two years’ notice.”
Smith moved with his wife of 46 years to Florida, where retirement didn’t stick.
“I tried to stand idle when I finished the show,” he says. “I went to Florida that winter and played 162 rounds of golf. There’s something wrong with a person who would do that. I would turn whatever I was doing into a job.”
Later, back on a Canadian golf course, he met a book publisher who offered him a deal to publish a book written in the Red Green character. So Smith wrote How To Do Everything, which sold well.
“It ended up with me having to do a book tour,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever done one of those things, but you go a thousand miles to a book store and you sign 10 books. I would have bought 11 books not to go.”
He figured if he was going out on tour, he might as well have a show. He put together a one-man show in which Red Green chairs a lodge meeting, with the audience as the lodge members and a projector showing slides.
The first show toured the U.S. and Canada, and now Smith is on his second tour, with a new book as well, this one titled Beginner’s Guide To Women, For Men Who Don’t Read Instructions. A sample nugget from the book: “If your wife is having fun and you’re not, you’re still having way more fun than if you’re having fun and she’s not.”
He’s done 139 live shows, and says he’s always surprised who comes out.
“We have 10 times as many people under 30 as you’d expect,” he says, recalling one under-30 male fan who came up to him after a show and said: “You make me look forward to getting old.”