Vasco da Gama, episode #1 (or, “Meet me at the back of the blunderbuss”)

    As promised, here is the first episode of Vasco da Gama…well, a link to it, at any rate.

Vasco da Gama, episode #1

     See? There it is. I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to The Cousins Lad, who was there at the time, and knows all the juicy details from behind the scenes. Let ‘er rip, Ricky m’boy.

Uncle Fun  

WHAT DIFFERENCE WILL SIX MINUTES MAKE TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW?

     Quite a lot, actually. Skip to the six-minute mark of the first episode of Vasco da Gama, and you won’t even hear Vasco da Gama. You’ll hear him mentioned once, and you’ll hear a show called Vasco da Gama mentioned a few more times than that, but, if you’re waiting for Vasco himself to show up, you are sure as sherbet out of luck, Jack.

     Why is this?

     Think about it: the show’s called Vasco da Gama, and for the last four-fifths of its first episode, its title character is absent.

     I repeat…

  WHY…

                 …IS

                           …THIS???

     The answer’s simple— in fact, it’s so simple you’d expect to encounter it meeting a pieman en route to a fair and saying “let me taste your ware”. You see, Vasco da Gama isn’t a show about Vasco da Gama—it’s a show about making a show about Vasco da Gama.

     Okay, now I’ve got to explain that, I suppose. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, someone came to you and asked you to write a sitcom. You with me so far? Now let’s say they told you the sitcom had to be about Vasco da Gama…you know, the Portuguese explorer who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope…maybe you read about him in school or something. Fair enough. Okay then—here’s where it starts getting a little complex—they want it to be as much like a certain other “classic” sitcom as possible. I won’t spoil things by telling you which one…let’s just say that Vasco is supposed to have a best friend named Norton.

     Oh yes—and there’s one more thing that’ll make your job as the writer of the “Vasco da Gama” sitcom an absolute paradise on earth and a joy surpassing even the most heavenly of joys.

YOUR STAR THINKS HE ACTUALLY IS

VASCO DA GAMA.

     And he could actually be Vasco da Gama, for all you or anyone else involved with the show really knows. And that’s Vasco da Gama, from minute six to minute thirty. Well, sort of. Back to that in a second…or six minutes…or however long it takes you to read what I’m about to write.

     So, those first few minutes of Vasco da Gama give you the pretext for the show, without yet giving you the show’s premise. The premise, like the pretext, is pretty simple-minded: something goes wrong with the making of an episode of Vasco da Gama, and it’s up to the show’s head writer to fix it…or, more likely, to find out why it can’t be fixed.

     Something did go wrong with that first episode of Vasco da Gama. Because I was the show’s writer, I had to help fix it. Because I was the show’s writer, I was also responsible for it.

     Here’s what went wrong: the show, as originally recorded, ran six minutes long.

     There’s that magic “six minutes” again. Twenty percent of our allotted half-hour of air time. One minute out of every six we were about to offer up to the unsuspecting audience was superfluous. We had two options: open the show with an announcement—“special offer to first-time listeners of Vasco da Gama—20% more show!” or start cutting. The first option wasn’t likely to endear us to the show that followed us on The Mighty ‘KCU’s broadcast schedule, so out came the razor blades and grease pencil (for those of you who grew up in the digital age, that’s the analog equivalent of a left-click-and-drag and a CTRL+X).

     The easiest way to do this was to find six consecutive minutes that could be cut without making things more confusing than they needed to be for the listener—simple enough to do in this case, because the second half of the show was a series of stand-alone sidetracks from the main plot. In the end, the choice came down to a pair of scenes, either one of which could be jettisoned without their absence being noticed.

     Thus it was that our pilot episode became a Pilate episode, as we happy few who remained in the studio at some ungodly hour (I forget exactly who, or what hour), were forced to wash our hands of six minutes of perfectly good (well, reasonably good)—and already edited—material. The Barabbas we pardoned was an extended jag on the ambiguous labelling practices of a certain peanut butter manufacturer. Cast member Kel Pero (Kel Morin as she then was), recalls the genesis of the whole thing:

We were on a break in the unicentre, and Rick was talking about how Squirrel brand peanut butter only said "Extra Smooth Squirrel" on its label. He riffed about how confusing this could be to, say, new Canadians whose English was perhaps uncertain--they'd see the label, see these little creatures scurrying around everywhere they looked, and would figure, "Hey! I could make that myself!"

I refused to believe that the label was so . . . potentially misleading. I knew that we had that brand of PB at home, so I remember right there ringing my parents, while we were on our break, and saying to my mother, who was watching something on TV with my dad, "Would you please go and get the peanut butter and bring it to the phone?" My mother was pretty used to odd requests from me by that point, having raised me and all, but this one still struck her as extra-strange. Nevertheless, bring the PB to the phone she did.

"Okay," I said, "now read the label out loud to me."

"Extra . . . smooth . . . squirrel," she said.

Laughing almost unto barfage, I conceded the point to Rick. And, as I recall, a sketch was born out of that.

     Well, that’s probably as much as you need to know for the time being…and then some. If you haven’t already clicked the link at the top of this posting and listened to Episode #1 of Vasco da Gama, now’s the time for it. Sit back, put your feet up, and by all means enjoy a nice squirrel—um, peanut butter—sandwich while you do. Unless you’re allergic to peanuts—in which case, by all means don’t.