could no one have shouted “Wait, Wait, stop the execution!”?
Les Lye has died. This makes me sad.
He was the guy who played most of the adults on You Can’t Do That On Television, a Canadian kids’ show that got picked up by fledgling kids’ cable network Nickelodeon, and introduced both green slime and Alanis Morissette to the world.
It also had this guy, holding the business together, as Barth the burger guy, Ross the Station Manager, the “Dad”, the bus driver, and the guy directing the firing squad. Always playing the butt of the jokes as the kids got the better of him.
I remember the great revelation in my neighborhood when I was 10 or 11, when the local cable system added Nickelodeon, flooding through the kid community like a virus as we discovered it. Sure, it was mostly Canadian cast-offs, Mr. Wizard (yay!) and stupid pre-school stuff, but it was TV for kids, all the time, it was new, different, and, as 80s kids in my particular cultural backwater, like totally awesome, dude!.
We all watched it, particularly YCDTOTV, repeating catch phrases and jokes, constantly, and we pre-teen boys pining (and, in the pre-internet world, not realizing that every other kid with cable in the western world was too) for Christine McGlade – it’s probably one of the first cultural touchstones that a lot of us of a certain age have, regardless of where we grew up.
So, you folks of a certain age, have a Barthy burger, and raise a nice tall glass of cold, refreshing wat…, uh “clear liquid”, to the memory of Mr. Lye, who entertained so many of us.
Just don’t ask what’s…IN THE BURGERS!
