The Pollock and Pollock Gossip Show

Several weeks ago I was stopped on the way to work by a woman named Natalie Pollock, who wanted to interview me about the fines for riding a bike on the sidewalk. I complied, and ended up getting on the Natalie Pollock News Show, where my video has been viewed by 156 whole people!*




Apparently, Natalie Pollock was so dazzled by my talents as an interviewee that she has been trying to track me down for several weeks. Today she ran into me in my place of work and invited me to do some comedy sketches with her and her brother. She told me how fun it would be, that it was 'definitely not porn!', that she and her brother used to do a comedy show similar to Saturday Night Live and maybe I'd heard of it (I actually had...very vaguely), and that it was 'definitely not porn!'. I was pretty sure it would turn out to be porn, but I decided to look into the legitimacy of the Pollock comedy duo anyway. I was amazed by what I found.

I suppose it's a bit arrogant to assume that anyone who wasn't cognizant** in the 80's won't have heard of the Pollock and Pollock Gossip Show, but for those of you who don't know, I'll help you out anyways: back in the 80's, before the days of Shaw cable, Videon Cable was well-known for its public access programming, which was responsible for such gems as Pollock and Pollock, which

began in 1985 and was arguably the most controversial, most watched and most discussed of the Videon shows. After this unclassifiable program was abruptly canceled in 1989, reports of its strangeness grew and grew, eventually taking on legendary proportions.

(thank you, CBC, for putting that so succinctly)

What does this legendary strangeness look like? Well, I'll show you my favourite clip:

See that woman doing questionable interpretive dance? That's Natalie Pollock! I met that woman! Nowadays, when anyone with a low-quality video camera built into their cellphone can get on Youtube, clips of big-haired women doing dance numbers to 80's music are a dime a dozen. But this was an actual, legit cable program. It's one thing to film an interpretive dance and post it on Youtube, where it will immediately be engulfed by the several billion other videos that were posted by other users in the last 15 seconds, and quite another to broadcast it on a cable channel. In fact, for someone who plans out her gym socks 12 hours before she's actually going to wear them, a show like this is nearly unfathomable.

Nowadays, it would seem that the Pollock and Pollock show is focusing all its energies on a series of improvised conversations about its interviewees' bums. If I do end up giving the Pollocks a call (and I'm sorely tempted to), I think I'd rather join Nifty's interpretive dance ensemble instead.



*and possibly several half-person, half-cat hybrids, but I'm not sure if Youtube counts them in their statistics; I get the feeling that Youtube is a rather speciesist company.

**this would describe at least a handful of my dedicated followers