The McMadden Family Speaks Out On a Northern Interior University

This is hardly the best piece of old writing I've uncovered, but it has a bit of a story behind it that is worth telling.

In the years before I started touring Canada I had gone through a series of different comedy troupes - most of which spawned directly from th Prince George Theatre Workshop's Summer Stage project.

One of them - The Machine Gun Canaries - ended up getting a coveted TV gig.  There was a local TV magazine called 54-North.  The producer and host decided that a comedy troupe would be an interesting addition to the weekly commentary.  We got the job.

On about our second or third week the subject of the week was the debate over whether Prince George should be the home of the planned fourth university in BC.  Locals variously supported and criticized it.  At least one other city was trying to get the University built there.  It was all up in the air.  But we were young homers, naturally we were in favour of it being in PG and the arguments against it were silly - what better way to support our position than to stuff a few strawmen in the mouths of our opponents?

We put together two sketches .  One poked fun at the proposed names for the University - I don't recall it clearly, but I know at one point we referred to it as UPiG and there was something about UNBC "proud as a peackock."  ...the eventual university would in fact be named UNBC.  They left out the rest of it... not that anyone would get the joke anymore.



The second sketch follows below:

ELBERT: (Slowly with a hesitant drawl.)  Hi.  My name is Elbert T. Mc Madden Jr., and this is my wife, Ma.

MA: Or 'Ma' for short.

ELBERT: Ma and I run my hay farm in the Blackburn area.

MA: Where we farm... hay.

ELBERT:  The farm has been in my family since my great grandaddy came and arrived here when he came and... arrived in 1889.

MA: One hundred years ago.

ELBERT: Of course Great Grandaddy hasn't been around for a few years now.  (Pause.)  I have come here today to express my concerns about a Northern Interior University.  I think that a university at Fort George.

MA: That's Prince George now, Elbert.

ELBERT:  Oh, that's right. "The times they are a changin'" as that hip folk song does say.  I think that a university in Prince George would be a waste of tax payers' money.  I feel that money could go to better causes.

      (Enter their son.)

SON: Pa!  Pa!

MA: Now hesh up a second there boy.  Your father 's speakin'.

ELBERT: No, Ma.  Let me introduce my boy.  Afterall our youth is our future.  This is my boy, Elbert T. McMadden Junior Jr.  Junior Jr., we is on TV.

SON: Golly!

MA: Now what did you want to ask your father, boy?

SON: Pa, I got a real hot date tonight.  An' I was wonderin' if I could use the tractor to go to town?

ELBERT: Sorry Junior Jr, but Ma and I was goin' to take the tractor to town to watch them buildin' that new fangled hockey rink.

MA: Now, that's progress.

ELBERT: I'm afraid that you'll have to take the combine.

SON: The combine!  Pa, I'll look like a geek!

MA: Now Junior Jr., don't argue with your father.  Run along now.

      (Junior Jr. leaves, upset.)

ELBERT: The money we save on taxes could be out towards buying a new tractor so that we could be a two tractor family.

MA: Now, that's progress!

ELBERT: An Interior University would be about as much good for the city as that new fangled cultural centre they wanted to build.  Why I got plenty enough culture just sittin' round watchin' Wheel of Fortune on the television.

MA: ...Actually Elbert, we could use a new TV set...

ELBERT: What in tarnation are you talkin' about Ma?  We just bought a brand new enormous 12 inch black and white in 1959.

MA:  Of course, we couldn't receive any channels back then... But it sure was nice to put something up where we used to stare against the wall in the evenings.

ELBERT: Yeah Ma, we always have been ahead of the times, ain't we?

MA: Shore have.  We believe in progress.

- End -



Now I'll be the first to admit that I can think of a dozen ways to improve this sketch - if it were still relevant.  It's really not even close to being one of the best of the old pieces I dug up.  But it is special for another reason...

A day after it aired, the TV station recieved a number of complaints about the sketch.

Some people in the Blackburn area of town were upset about the portrayal of Blackburn farmers... a complaint I still feel is kind of quaint, sort of misses the point and if anything kind of serves to further the point.  I should also add... my Grandmother's maiden name?  Blackburn.  NOT a coincidence.  My uncle and cousins still operate the Blackburn farm in the Blackburn area of Prince George.

Anyhow... I don't know whether the producer of 54-North buckled under his own weight or under pressure from above at the station, CKPG, but we never appeared on the show again.

UNBC (proud as a peacock) DID get built in Prince George.  (As did one in the Okanagan - UBCO.)  The "New" arena is now in need of replacement, and they did eventually build a new cultural centre.

Somewhere along the way my adolescent brain got the message that comedy can push buttons and effect change.  Perhaps I don't practice that as much as I ought to... but if someday I can convince someone to green-light my TV series "Big Wig" - I'll be back to pushing buttons, making points and effecting change on TV.  Or maybe TV producers are too scared.

The Tragedy of Pebbles

Expect a bunch of this over the next week or so.  I've uncovered a bunch of old short-writing that amuses the hell out of me that isn't amusing anyone locked in a box, so I'm transcribing it.

The first time I appeared on Loose Cannons happened to be the day that Dana Plato from Diff'rent Strokes died.  I got the call in the afternoon asking if I had anything I could present on the show that night.  I said I'd write something.  What follows is what I wrote.



   Pebbles would have turned forty-one today.  But like many a child str, things got complicated - dense - after she'd gone supernova at such a young age, during the hey-day of Hanna-Barbera, when "The Flintstones" was the best on the box.
   Former co-star Bam-bam Rubble, now a stock promoter in Aristona remembers her fondly...

BAM BAM: Peb was so sweet.  Always popular on set, shewas everyone's favourite with her innocent charm.  I've often wondered if that was where things started to go wrong.

  Certainly that is a distinct possibility.  Pebbles' downward spiral began in the show's fourth and last* season when he began a Lolita-esque relationship with character actor Edwin Slate who played Fred's boss on the show.  It is generally assumed that the child starlet - who was once described as having 'all the innocent delights of Shirley Temple combined with the girl-next-door charms of Annette Funicello' - was introduced to drug use by Slate.  Slate died destitute in 1974 in  freebasing accident.
   The signs of drug use on the set of the landmark animated sitcom were thin, but by the time spin-off show "The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Hour"** tried to cash in on the beach-party-rock craze, Pebbles had developed a habit estimated to be costing five to six thousand dolars a day.  Her star falling, and her blood toxin rising, the young teen became difficult...

BAM BAM: She ws denying everything, but it was clear just how strung out she was.  You could see it in her eyes.

   Says Rubble...

BAM BAM: Somehow, her natural charm masked what was going on inside her head from the camera.  But off screen things were ugly.

   Things got so bad during one hallucinogenic episode that she attacked the show's director - a young Robert Zemeckis - with  chair, breaking his wrist...

ZEMECKIS: We were shooting a scene at a roller-derby event.

   Recalls the director, who has since won an Oscar fr his efforts on "Forrest Gump..."

ZEMECKIS: Pebbles kept charging at the camera, insisting that it would look 'groovy and psychedelic.'  It was getting really tiresome andI kept asking her to stop.  Next thing I knew, she was throwing a stool at me... uh, a chair - not the uh... other thing.

   The incident was prety much the end of the show.  Pebbles was fired.  And in site of the program's impressive showing at the Emmys in that, it's freshman season, without Pebbles, the sponsors didn't expect the show to fly.  A simple equation: no backers - no money; no money - no show.
   Following the show's demise Pebbles spun into a seedy descentwhich somehow managed to maintain her celebrity. She spent the majority of the seventies rubbing elbows - and possibly other body parts - with the likes of Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley and Keith Moon.  Not the most auspicious of company. She even recorded an updated version of her novelty hit "Let the Sunshine In" with Sly and the Family Stone...

SLY:  Yeah, Pebs was so hip and that was such a funky little groove we got a good twenty minute jam out of that on wax.  But it seems like everyone already had enough of that repetitive little ditty the first time 'round.




   Her image as a celebrity groupie was forever etched in stone when her two-year marriage to consumate party-animal John Beushi started in a dramatically public manner - with a headline stealing indecent exposure trial.

   Pebbles and Belushi had been separated for over a year upon his death in 1981.***  His family employed top civil litigators when it came to dividing his estate.  Belushi died intestate and by the prevailing law of the time all of his worldly trappings became possession of his wife.  The Belushi family won the case in precedent setting fashion - citing her role in advancing his ultimately lethal drug addiction and the fact that she and Belushi had not shared an address for thirteen months.

   Pebbles public image limped along for a few years supported by guest appearances on shows such as Love Boat and Hollywood Squares, a few cereal commercials and a cameo in a John Waters' film.  The entire time she struggled with her addiction and appeared to have cocaine beaten in 1983 when she spent six months in rehab after she was found naked in a delusional state wandering the Santa Monica Freewat.

   Things went well for several years during which she gave birth to twins out of wed-lock to her then boyfriend Bib Goodyear.  Then in 1989 it looked like Pebbles was poised to make an enormous comeback.  Cartoonist Matt Groening...

GROENING: Fox had offered us an excellent development deal but they told us they weren't going to move further forwards without a star.

   Groening went to Fox with the suggestion of building a sitcom about a chroncially dysfunctional family around a retro-nostalgia celebrity.  Groening suggested Pebbles.

GROENING:  Fox went nuts.  They thought the idea was inspired.  We started negotiations and set her up with an excellent pay or play deal where whether the show went ahead or not, Peb was in the green.

   Pebbles sudden fiscal liquidity was ultimately her downfall.  An alcohol and prescription drig dependency quickly accellerated out of control.

GROENING: Peb started not showing up for meetings and soon Fox got worried.  But they were liking the potential of the show we were creating and started looking for options.

   Fox changed the show concept and instead of a shrewish matriarch for the "Plimpton" family, they found an ex-steeplejack turned stand-up comedian and renamed the show after him.  Homer Simpson was an overnight success. 
  
   Pebbles took the news hard.  Leaving her twins behind, alone in her Venice Beach home, she disappeared for thirteen days before being found in a Tijuana jail where she'd been arrested for driving a car through a poncho stall at the public market, and firing a gun into the air.  Luckily for her, The Flintstones was, at the time, the top rated show in syndication on Mexican television.

   Her sentence was reduced and she was transferred to the United States and put on probation.  Due to her abandonment of her twins she was declared an unfit parent and was denied access to her children.

   In November of 1990, shortly after the start of The Simpsons' second successful season**** a despondent Pebbles started making rounds to old friends.

BAM BAM: I feel I should have known.  Should have sensed something was wrong.

   Says Bam-Bam from his split-level in Phoenix...

BAM BAM: If I knew the truth about what was going on for her - the show falling through; the probation; the twins - I might have seen that she was saying goodbye.  She just... I remember - sh just kept on telling me how she'd quit.  How she had finally beat the drugs.  When she left I couldn't help but think how good it was that she was back on track.

   Then on November 13th - a Friday***** - she missed her meeting with her parole officer.  The next morning she was found in her bathtub, drowned.  No note.  No sign of foul play.  No immediate trace of drugs or alcohol in her system.  A traic and confusing end to a life long streak of bad luck which plagued a desperate and insecure woman who had once won herself a place in the hearts of a country, and a page right out of history....





*Ah the days before Google... the show ran six seasons.
** Was actually called The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show and was not an hour.  Though there was a show called The Flintstone Comedy Hour which incorporated it.
*** It was 1982.
**** I did get that date right.
*****November 13th 1990 was a Wednesday - you can check it out on your computer's calendar.