Rick Mercer had his limits. Anyone who watched those zany sequences from Rick Mercer’s Report, where the comedian would turn up in some distant corner of Canada, might be surprised to hear that. Here is a man who, of his own free will, was thrown out of airplanes and skidded the length of a snowy Rossland, B.C., road on a bobsled made from a snowmobile that looked as if “a Ski-Doo caught fire and burned for an entire day,” he says in a phone interview about his latest book, The Road Years: A Memoir, Continued. He was even tasered at one point, although that stunt didn’t air. “The pain racked every part of my body,” he remembers.

Then there was the time he put his foot down. “There was a group of people who were constantly asking me to join them and they had – I don’t know what you would call it – a sport or an act or whatever, but they would stand on the back of horses, while the horses would run around barrels.” They were dismayed when he said no. “I know me,” he told them. “I’ll fall off onto my head and then I’ll be in a wheelchair.” He didn’t want to perish in what he calls a “comedy death,” where the listener’s first instinct is to laugh when they hear about your tragic demise.

 

 

The Road Years picks up where Mercer’s 2021 memoir, Talking to Canadians, ends: with the launch of the Rick Mercer Report. He writes about 15 incredible seasons he spent as host of the CBC show, where he and his small crew would leave Toronto and crisscross the country, taking in chainsaw carving event here and participating in a celebrity pumpkin boat race there. In the book, he recounts how his partner, Gerald Lunz, sold the show to CBC. “He promised them ratings and promised them gold, but wisely didn’t commit to anything beyond ‘Rick will be on the road.’” Mercer writes that Lunz always said, “This is a show about celebrating the country. As long as you do that, we can run forever.’”

This memoir, unlike Talking to Canadians – which started with Mercer’s childhood in Middle Cove, Nfld., and covered his formative years and early career – is not a linear narrative. He originally wanted to start the book with the “Train of Death” episode, a nightmarish race featuring “trains” of cars that are chained together. “It was in Varney, Ontario,” he writes, “that I realized I was about to die.” The problem was the sequence was a “host in peril” scenario, which they didn’t start doing until two or three seasons in, so that pretty much ruled out telling the story chronologically. (He and his editor, Tim Rostron, ultimately shifted that story further into the book, but the non-linear approach stayed.)

“I knew there would be certain stories that people would expect, like Bob Rae naked. And I wanted to come up with a structure that moved around the country, and also covered the different type of people that I encountered.” The result is a sort of greatest-hits package of the most memorable stories about the show’s 255 episodes.

What’s fascinating was how much they did with so little; there were just four people in the crew, including Mercer. “That’s a philosophical way of approaching television that I feel really strongly about and so does Gerald,” says Mercer. “There’re others who feel that there’s nothing that an extra piece of equipment or a crew member won’t solve. We didn’t feel that way. We were three and then we became four, and we were never going to go to five because we’d need another vehicle.” That portability made it easy to get into places larger crews might not – for example, the prime minister’s official residence a at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa – and to travel light. It wasn’t unusual for them to be out west filming a sequence and head to the Maritimes the same week.

Geography aside, The Road Years is really about people. There are rock stars, like the members of Rush, Mercer’s childhood idols, whom he managed to nab one by one: singer and bassist Geddy Lee on the importance of toboggan safety; guitarist Alex Lifeson, who went indoor skydiving with Mercer; and the late, often elusive, Neal Peart, who treated him to an impromptu drum lesson. There were prime ministers, too, from Jean Chretien (who, Mercer says, had incredible comic timing, equal to that of Martin Short or Eugene Levy) to Paul Martin to Stephen Harper. “Most politicians try to come across as much more fun and down-to-earth than they really are,” he writes. “Harper is the opposite.” He went head-to-head with Justin Trudeau, who proved surprisingly good at Canadian Trivial Pursuit. But, especially, there were ordinary Canadians, like Mark Winston, who helped Mercer don a beard of bees, or the fellow known simply as Reg Greg, who captained the homemade bobsled Mercer rode at the Rossland Winter Carnival. And, of course, the story about that bit where he and Rae went skinny dipping in Georgian Bay is there, too. That was a brainstorm on Mercer’s part, to salvage a boat trip where the fish failed to bite. Rae, then running for the leadership of the federal Liberal party, was understandably reluctant. Mercer’s line, “Bob, if you take your clothes off, I promise you: you will beat Michael Ignatieff,” convinced him.

There was a real generosity of spirit in Mercer’s show, and it comes through in The Road Years as well. As he puts it, they weren’t there to “sh-t on Thunder Bay.” He liked the people he met, and that feeling was reciprocated. The show’s ratings were consistently in the 1.4- to 1.5-million range, he says, and before long, people started sending story ideas that found their way on air. “I think the show had a reputation or a vibe where people felt comfortable to reach out,” he says. Mercer is a fan of Canadian history, and no Pollyanna when it comes to the country’s troubles. “I’m not saying that you should look at the country with blinders on, but I think it’s okay that, once a week, for half an hour, we just celebrated.” But by 2018, he and Lunz felt it was time to pull the plug.

These days he has no desire to return to television. “When I think about television projects, they are all encompassing,” he says. When he was working on the show, “there was no question of work life balance, it was all go, go, go. And I loved it, but I’m not eager to go back to that now.”

He thinks he’s found his next act. “Even though I’ve written six of them, I’m just starting to think of myself as a guy who writes books.” He enjoyed the 18 months he spent writing The Road Years, dividing his time between Toronto and his place in Chapel’s Cove, Nfld., where he spent his days writing in a shed equipped with a small wood stove. He’s not sure what the next book will be about, but “I don’t think it will be about anything I’ve done.”