brioux.tv: the podcast

Send us Fan Mail People of Comedy: Celebrating 30 Years of the Nubian Show starts streaming April 9 on Crave. It features this week's guest on brioux.tv: the podcast and one of the true iron men of the Toronto comedy club scene: Kenny Robinson. Since 1983, he's been performing at YukYuks as well as at Just For Laughs and other Canadian comedy venues. Close to 30 years ago, he launched Th...

Send us Fan Mail These days it is not unusual for fans to wait over a year for a second season of their favourite series. But five years?? That is the situation for When Hope Calls , the spinoff to the popular period piece drama When Calls the Heart . The shot in Ontario series returns April 6 on Super Channel Heart & Home in Canada and on Great American Family in the United States. A lot has...

Send us Fan Mail  For this episode we go back into the vault for an interview conducted ten years ago with Joe Clokey. He was the son of the man who created and animated Gumby, the most bendable children's TV character ever. Joe grew up in California as "Gumby's little brother," watching his dad and mom stamp out dozens of brightly coloured characters out of plastercine in crea...

Send us Fan Mail Ali Weinstein is the writer/producer/director behind "Your Tomorrow," a look at Ontario Place the summer before it was shut down after 52 years. For over five decades a 155-acre Toronto waterfront sanctuary, it is being radically redeveloped. Gone are 850 West Island trees. Instead we get a spa with a killer view of Cinesphere. In a moving, observational documentary,Wein...

Send us Fan Mail Podcasts were invented for guests such as Malcolm McDowell. He is a smart, funny, generous man and as terrific as ever as Pop on CBC's Son of a Critch . This conversation took place last summer in St. John’s, Nfld., in McDowell’s trailer which was parked outside the Bella Vista banquet hall. It had been an exciting 24 hours with the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau --...

Send us Fan Mail  Two of the four Baroness Von Sketch Show players, Jennifer Whalen and Meredith MacNeill, are back with a new CBC series -- and it's a period piece! The series is called Small Achievable Goals and it is about two women in midlife encountering all of the joys of menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, homicidal trendencies and more. Now, you can't swing a tampon in daytime T...

Send us Fan Mail  Claire Rankin says she's waited "a really long time...to land something like this." The PEI native is talking about her role as Mary on Son of a Critch . How she landed the role -- after one of those remote zoom call auditions -- is just one of the stories she shares on this hour-long podcast. Season Four finds Mary -- and Rankin -- out of the kitchen and in the th...

Send us Fan Mail Saturday Night Live is celebrating the big 5-0. Who better to put it in perspective than the Canadian writer who was there at the start. On this special presentation from brioux.tv: the podcast and LateNighter , Rosie Shuster tells how it all began. She was born with a funny bone as the daughter of Frank Shuster (half of the comedy team of Wayne & Shuster). She meets Lorne Mic...

Send us Fan Mail OK, Hearties, here he is, Jack Wagner who plays Bill Avery on When Calls the Heart . The former soap star has played the sheriff-turned-judge character for 12 seasons on the Langley, BC-based Hallmark and Super Channel series. As viewers will see on the Saturday, Feb. 8 episode, Avery will be re-introduced to Georgie McGill, played by special guest star Melissa Gilbert whose credi...

Send us Fan Mail  If ever we needed some candid talk from Rick Mercer, we need it now. The CBC Hall of Famer didn't hold back when I spoke with him last summer in St. John's on the set of Son of a Critch . The native son plays Mark Sr.'s new VOCM radio station boss on the CBC sitcom. Catch the episode this Tuesday (also on CBCGem). Mercer was delighted to be back before many familia...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is the second to feature a cast member from Season 4 of Son of a Critch : none other than the son himself, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth. Ainsworth, of course, plays young Mark Critch, circa 1990, on the CBC sitcom. The episode was recorded last summer on location in St. John's, Nfld. Ainsworth was shooting a scene on a residential street closed off for the production....

Send us Fan Mail Monday January 20 is inauguration day in the US. So everybody raise your right hand, and for those listening here at home, hang onto those Canadian passports. A dozen years ago The Donald was just another tanned game show host when I interviewed him in his 26th floor office at Trump Tower in New York. Now I've reached into the vault and fired up the time machine to bring you...

Send us Fan Mail The second season of the slick crime series Allegiance begins January 15 on CBC and CBC Gem. The shot-in-Surrey, B.C., drama stars Supinder Wraich ( Sort Of ), Enrico Colantoni and Samer Salem. I spoke with all three in Toronto at the CBC Winter Media Launch in December.  Wraich plays Sabrina Sohal, a promising rookie police officer who fights to serve her hometown. Rico is the se...

Send us Fan Mail  No man is an island. Allan Hawco's new series, however, is shot and set on an archipelago of eight islands represented by the French government off the coast of Newfoundland. Hawco, who played a detective on Republic of Doyle and was also on Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan , plays Donny "Fitz" Fitzpatrick. He's a cop who gets too nosy about police secrets and is t...

Send us Fan Mail This Hour has, well, not just 22 Minutes but a full hour as I catch up with Mark Critch, this week's guest on brioux.tv: the podcast. The conversation was taped last summer in St. John's, Nfld., during production on the fourth season of Son of a Critch (returning Tuesday, Jan. 7 on CBC and CBC Gem). What a trip that was, including a visit from a guy who was once Critch&a...

Send us Fan Mail Genevieve Mushaluk, a 33-year-old corporate lawyer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, had her torch snuffed on last week’s two-hour, second-last episode of Survivor. Picked as the final member of the jury, she’ll be in LA watching the finale with the rest of the castaways when the season ends December 18 on CBS and Global. Did she see her elimination coming? Does she have any regrets? Will...

Send us Fan Mail My guest this week has made over three dozen made for television movies, She also headlined Hallmark’s Aurora Teagarden series. Before that, as a child star, she was part of the long-running TGIF family series, Full House , as well as its streaming sequel, Fuller House . Of course I’m talking about Candace Cameron Bure. In 2022, she broke away from Hallmark and joined the Great Am...

Send us Fan Mail If you work in this industry you know how hard it is to keep ahead in a world that always seems to be pivoting. Streaming, fast channels, multi-platform media brands – who can keep up? Well, one fella is Jamie Schouela, President, Global Channels and Media at Blue Ant Media.  I caught up with Jamie a few weeks ago in Toronto when I was asked to moderate a CTAM panel on the future...

Send us Fan Mail As we head into another frigid  Canadian winter we bring you a podcast about a series that is set and shot in the hottest part of Australia. The series is called Troppo , a term used in north Queensland that means going mad from the heat.  Troppo is based on the best selling novel from Candice Fox titled Crimson Lake and it is about a disgraced American ex-cop played by Thomas Jan...

Send us Fan Mail  After 31 years as host of The Fifth Estate , plus another decade winning Emmys for CBS and NBC News, award-winning investigative journalist Bob McKeown is ready to retire. The Ottawa native never shied away from his assignments, especially when it came to reporting on football and head injuries. Back in the '70s, he was a CFL all-star centre for the Ottawa Rough Riders. He i...

Send us Fan Mail Tyler and Jordie Schwartz started their business of selling retro toys and gifts in 2007 as the Canadian Leg Lamp Company. The idea came after shooting their fan film “Road Trip for Ralphie,” an homage to the kid from the 1983 classic, “A Christmas Story.” Next they introduced Moose Mugs from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989). Seventeen years later, they’ve branched o...

Send us Fan Mail When Jess Salgueiro auditioned in person for the role of Eve on Frasier, she had to do it in front of a pair of sitcom legends: Kelsey Grammer and director Jim Burrows. Pressure? Yes and no says the actress, who was born in Winnipeg, Man.  She figured there must be hundreds of others lining up to try and win a role on this reboot of a TV classic. With nothing to lose by trying, sh...

Send us Fan Mail  Stop me if you've seen this kind of Hallmark series before: an enterprising and attractive single woman (Sarah Drew from Grey's Anatomy ) owns a Christmas store on the main street of a picturesque small town. She crosses paths with a handsome, newly single-police officer (Peter Mooney from Burden of Truth ). Before you can say, "witness tampering," holiday spa...

Send us Fan Mail  If only The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was still around to help us through another turbulent US Presidential election. Pat Paulsen -- where are you when we need you? A key writer/producer back on that 1967-69 comedy variety show was a Canadian -- Allan Byle. Before the Smothers, he worked for Fred Rogers as well as CBC songbird Juliette.  Tommy Smothers, who has a knack for sp...

Send us Fan Mail  In Part 2 of my conversation with Ken Levine, more evidence that the Emmy-winner is one of TV's top storytellers. One of my favourite episodes from his excellent podcast, Hollywood & Levine, is the one where he told listeners exactly what he thought of the recent reboot of Frasier. Some might see this as sour grapes from one of the authors of the original series, but I f...