Frantic Press Clippings

Here are some clippings from the CBC Radio Guide that I was able to track down.

The Frantics with Caroline Scott The Frantics - Jul 10 1982
"Frentik, Frenetique, phreneticus" - in any language it adds up to four very talented comedians: The Frantics.

Four different shapes, four different backgrounds, four individual outlooks on life. Add one very talented lady, and you've got instant comedy on the air waves. Topical humour and satire are the driving forces behind their half-hour "newspaper" radio show now replacing the Royal Canadian Air Farce for the summer.

Paul Chato remembers little of his past life in the advertising world. After doing many successful Toronto comedy revues, he and his friend Rick Green became professional comedians. Rick's credentials include a degree in physics, a screenplay and a stage comedy, I Hate Science, that packed the house. Dan Redican spent his youth crouched behind overturned tables using handpuppets to tell twisted tales with incomprehensible morals. Now he's a professional puppeteer besides being a Frantic. Peter Wildman enrolled in the famed Second City workshop and then pestered the staff so much they put him on the original SCTV. Guest Caroline Scott has just completed a run with the Second City Touring Company.

Starting Saturday, July 10, at 10:35 a.m. (11.05 NT) on CBC Stereo, and Sunday, July 11, at 1.05 p.m. (2.05 AT, 2.35 NT, 4.05 PT) on CBC Radio, listen in to Frantic Times - laughs and a good time in any lingo.

The Frantics - A Short History (from the back cover of their first album - 1984)

The Frantics have come a long way in the past five years, since their first professional gig as opening act for the Police Attack Dog Fusiliers. Back then it was still necessary to supplement their income by sitting on corks in tubs of water, pretending to be compasses.

Their first solo stage show was at a little club called "The Going Out of Business Soon Cabaret". Unfortunately, it soon went out of business and they were left holding the bag. The bag's name was Hilda Van Spewing, a rabid fan with pointy teeth. Hilda immediately opened up a new club for the Frantics to play in called "The I Don't Know What the Hell I'm Doing But I've Sunk An Awful Lot of My Parents' Money Into This Place Cabaret." Unfortunately, it stayed open.

The critics were taken aback and a little to the side. They gushed, raved, enthused, and dribbled: "A show" "Four people, all male I think" "Do they accept Visa?" The Frantics' success was confirmed, then baptized, then sent to a private school.

Since then, their career has taken off and their bottoms have broken out. They have produced many hit stage shows, including "Numb Grunties", "The Trouble with Anvils" and "Sacrilegious Filth".

Then in 1981 the Frantics made it to radio. Okay, so it was only CBC radio but Frantic Times was nominated for an ACTRA award in its very first season. Of course, so was the Littlest Hobo. Think about it.

Bunch o' Frantics The Frantics - December 19 1987
After a brief hiatus, comedy favourites The Frantics, return to CBC in December with the first of several new programs, a three part spoof of Anne of Green Gables entitled "Fran of the Fundy." The basic premise, according to Frantic Rick Green, centers on the desperate attempts of fictional New Brunswick Premier Buddy Wentworth to improve his province's ailing tourist industry (and his political fortunes) by coming up with competition for Anne of Green Gables, the only thing, according to Wentworth, that could attract anybody to "dirt island."

The story follows the Premier's search for a provincial symbol "more heart-warming, cuter, and more lovable," than P.E.I.'s Anne; a "Fran of the Fundy" whose story Wentworth has promised to film and have on television before election day.

"More than anything it's a send-up of the Canadian entertainment industry," says Green, who with partners Dan Redican, Paul Chato and Peter Wildman satirizes the trials and tribulations of producing a television program in Canada. Over the course of the lunatic narrative few prominent people in the industry escape unscathed. Included is a scene in which Wentworth and Fran encounter a suspiciously familiar Berton Peters, who, with the help of "hundreds of unpaid researchers," is able to write three books a week and churn out a two-hour television script in about two hours.

"We're very pleased with it," says Green of the three half-hour episodes, "It's a definite step forward for us." In addition to "Fran of the Fundy," Green and company are working on something called "The History of the Future," for broadcast in January, and are planning a touring theatrical show, "The Frantics Walk Upright," for the spring of 1988.

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