Fill ’er up, eh?
Brent Butt hosts Juno Awards show packed with Canadian stars
Uptown Magazine, March 31. 2005
If the Juno Awards are a celebration of musical CanCon, it only makes sense to enlist the poster boy for television CanCon to host the affair.
Brent Butt’s sitcom, Corner Gas, is attracting almost two million viewers weekly to its Monday night slot on CTV, making it the most-watched comedy in Canada. Its ratings are higher than The Simpsons, higher than Everybody Loves Raymond, and even higher than last year’s Juno Awards telecast.
While the Corner Gas numbers suggest hosting the April 3 televised Juno ceremony will be a ratings cakewalk for Butt, the actual task involves plenty of work.
The comedian will spend the four days leading up to the ceremony in Winnipeg going through rehearsals and getting the bulk of his material ready. Fellow Vancouver-based comedians John Beuhler and Chris Finn are assisting Butt with writing duties.
“The last two days will be the intense writing,” Butt says. “The skeleton of the show and the show run doesn’t really get solidified until a couple days before. So we’ve written and prepared what we can, and then we really have to wait until the show run is finalized until we can put the last batch of my smart-ass remarks together.”
Butt won’t reveal what viewers can expect to see from him during the ceremony but says to expect a few surprises.
“We have something planned that hopefully will have people talking the next day, either in ‘Boy that was great’ or ‘Gee, what a mistake that was,’” Butt says.
So is there any truth to the cliché that all comedians secretly want to be rock stars — and vice versa?
“Yes,” Butt confirms. “And every one of us wants to be an NHL star.”
That could explain the existence of the annual Juno Cup hockey game, held April 1 in Selkirk. Butt will play goalie for an artists’ team that will attempt to hold its own against an NHL All-Stars squad featuring the likes of Dale Hawerchuk. In his youth, Butt played AA midget hockey and was the starting goalie on the A team. Despite his creds, his optimism is…rather cautious.
“I’m better than you think I would be. If you just looked at me you’d go, ‘Oh, well, there’s no goddamn way.’ I’m better than that — which isn’t really saying much.”
Besides the hockey game, Butt will be too busy preparing for the big night to partake in pre-Juno activities such as JunoFest and Juno Fan Fare. Post-awards, though, he’ll hit the town.
“I’m sure there’ll be an excellent whoop-up party afterwards,” Butt says. “There’s going to be a lot of rock stars there, so somebody's going to kick their foot through a TV. Any time I picture a group of rock stars together that’s what I imagine.”
There’s one star the comedian hopes to track down in the midst of all this hypothetical green-room trashing.
“I’m hoping that I get to — even for a minute or so — shoot the breeze with Neil Young. That would be great,” he says. “One of my cousins is crazy into the whole family tree business. She knows everything about everyone in our family, and apparently my father and Neil Young’s father were born in the same town. So we’re like family.”
If you miss seeing Brent Butt in the flesh during Juno weekend, he’ll return to Winnipeg on April 28 for a show at Club Regent Casino.