Rocking the Rock

The cast of Hatching, Matching and Dispatching (from left to right): Shaun Majumder (Cyril), Mark McKinney (Todd), Susan Kent (Darlene Furey), Sherry White (Myrna Furey), Mary Walsh (Mamie Lou Furey), Rick Boland (Phonse Furey), Adrianna Maggs (Alma), Joel Hynes (Nick) and Jonny Harris (Troy Furey).

Mary Walsh confirmed her status as our cantankerous village elder at the recent Gemini Awards, when she disrupted a solemn procession of celebrants who talked of “telling our own stories” as if producing a Canadian TV show was an ennobling act. Called to receive her own trophy for performing in the 2005 pilot to her new series, Hatching, Matching & Dispatching, the St. John’s writer-actor scolded her self-satisfied peers, at one point pleading, “Just grow up out of it!”

Walsh has made a career taking the piss out of the pompous and achingly sincere. And her fellow satirists on CODCO (1987-93) and This Hour Has 22 Minutes have always been allergic to treacle. I can't hear Snowbird without thinking of CODCO’s Tommy Sexton clad in a demure miniskirt, trilling a fishy version of Anne Murray’s hit:
“Beneath the frozen water cold and drawn/The rainbow trout lies waiting for its roe to turn to spawn/The rainbow sings a song it always sings/And speaks to me of frying pans and boil-ups in the spring.”

But perhaps Walsh had another reason to be grumpy during her Gemini win. The pilot for her series, which begins its first season on CBC on Friday, Jan. 6, proved successful with test audiences and critics, who responded with glee to the story of an unruly Newfoundland outport family, the Fureys, proprietors of an all inclusive wedding-ambulance-funeral service. Everyone delighted in the show’s mordant humour.

Everyone except Walsh’s fellow citizens, many of whom figured the show’s celebration of sex and sacrilege (one of the show’s grave diggers digs sex in a coffin) perpetuated an unfavourable stereotype of Newfoundlanders. Walsh was accused of being politically incorrect by her own people.

Could it be that our youngest province has finally been afflicted by bourgeoisie respectability? The result of a recent economic boom that has seen offshore oil drilling, nickel mining in Voisey’s Bay and a record $28-million slate of film production in 2005?

Mark McKinney (left) co-stars as Todd Meaney, son-in-law and ambulance driver.

If so, let’s hope the phenomenon is a passing fever that won’t affect native storytellers, for as the opener of Hatching, Matching & Dispatching proves, Newfoundland humour at its blackest, scabrous best is a wondrous, liberating thing. The season begins with the Furey family business operating at top speed. Matriarch Mamie Lou Furey (Walsh) oversees a gay wedding in the banquet hall while her dimwitted daughter, Darlene, applies makeup on a corpse downstairs with a trowel and son-in-law Todd Meaney (Kids in the Hall grad Mark McKinney) is off in an ambulance fetching another customer.

All the sketches are presented as if captured by documentary filmmakers, a contrivance that allows Walsh to refine her most famous character from 22 Minutes, Marg Delahunty, the princess warrior who crashed legislative assemblies, camera crew in tow, to give our political leaders what for. Like Marg, Mamie Lou Furey is the town busybody who shoves her way to the front of every line, muttering and complaining. The acknowledgement of the camera’s presence both stimulates Mamie Lou and provides a delicious tension, forcing her to articulate her concerns with uncharacteristic delicacy.

“Sure, if you stand back a bit you can’t tell that it’s a same-sex occasion at all,” she tells us, smiling nervously, while overseeing a dance floor alive with handsome, gliding male cross-dressers, “just a bunch of tall women who happen to put their makeup on with a stencil.”

The mockumentary shtick works even better a few scenes later, when Mamie Lou’s wayward son, Troy Furey (Jonny Harris), gingerly explains the pleasures of gay sex to the homophobic, twisting-squirming Meaney. “They say a fella’s G-spot is up his prostate,” Troy begins, on way to delivering the show’s most satisfying belly laugh.

Perhaps fellow citizens were upset with Walsh because they are fans of 22 Minutes, which tends to set its satirical sites on central and western Canada. Whereas Hatching, Matching & Dispatching is truer in spirit and performance to Walsh’s previous CBC effort, CODCO, a series prone to homegrown mischief. It also got into more trouble. The 1990 sketch “Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation,” which dared to comment on the sex practices of Catholic priests, was cut by the network in the wake of the Mount Cashel Orphanage sex scandal.

Like Walsh’s earlier landmark series, Hatching, Matching & Dispatching exhibits both a delight in gender confusion and determined stampeding of moral order. In some ways the series is more daring. Many scenes are detonated with F-strip bombing. Then there are those coffin trysts. Some viewers might object to the depiction of Darlene (Susan Kent), a barking lunatic who, in the words of prim and proper sister, Myrna, would “need a tutor to work her way up to retarded.”

Still, there is something thrilling in Kent’s glad impersonation of a madwoman beyond all inhibitions. Darlene may be foolish, but she’s also marvelously alive (even when she’s waiting for her lover in a pine box). There is a joy of tomfoolery in all the performances here that is consistent with the best of contemporary Newfoundland humour, from CODCO to Wayne Johnston’s uproarious coming-of-age saga, The Divine Ryans (1990), a book that, come to think of it, is also set in a deranged funeral home.

As to the suggestion by some that Walsh’s new series demeans common folk in her new series, it should be pointed out that her character, Mamie Lou, calls fellow citizens “Lover.” The appellation is hardly incidental. For it is clear Walsh and co-writer Ed Macdonald (This Hour Has 22 Minutes) sympathize with every one of their bewildered creations. With only a pilot and now a first show under its belt, the series shows signs of being a classic Canadian sitcom, a series that might grow to stand tall beside SCTV or Trailer Park Boys. As Mamie Lou Furey might say, only a “square arse” would fail to appreciate the warm-hearted pleasure that is Hatching, Matching & Dispatching.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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