During the pandemic, everyone was told to work from home; in show business, that usually just means you’re unemployed. I was lucky I had a job to do: writing, which I realized I liked a lot. Talking to Canadians opens with my childhood and ends just before we launched the Report—basically when my editor said, “Okay, stop, you have a book now.” The Road Years isn’t so much a memoir as stories from travelling for 16 years. I could’ve written five books about that, but I wrote one. I didn’t go the Barbra route. Have sympathy for your reader! What if they want to bring your book in the tub?
At the end of his memoir Talking to Canadians, Rick Mercer was poised to make the biggest leap yet in his extraordinary career. Having overcome a serious lack of promise as a schoolboy and risen through the showbiz ranks—as an aspiring actor, star of a surprisingly successful one-man show about the Meech Lake Accord, co-founder of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, creator and star of the dark-comedy sitcom Made in Canada—he was about to tackle his biggest opportunity yet.
The Road Years picks up the story at that exciting point, with the greenlighting of what would become Rick Mercer Report. Plans for the show, of course, included political satire and Rick’s patented rants. But Rick and his partner, Gerald Lunz, were also determined to do something that comedy tends to avoid as too challenging: they would emphasize the positive. Rick would travel from coast to coast to coast in search of everything that’s best about Canada, especially its people. He found a lot to celebrate, naturally, and was rewarded with a huge audience and a run of 15 seasons.
