The Ottawa Citizen

A lifetime of Willy and Floyd

Their popular TV show ran on CJOH for a staggering 22 years. The budget was small, and the concept simple: a bit of vaudeville to make the kids laugh. But in many ways, it was so much more than that, writes Tony Atherton.

by Tony Atherton [Tuesday, November 25, 2003]

Comedic team Les Lye and Bill Luxton are being honoured tonight with lifetime achievement awards from the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Radio and Television Artists. The two played Uncle Willy and his buck-toothed sidekick, Floyd, for 22 years on CJOH.

It ran for 22 years, two seasons longer than Gunsmoke, the official North American title holder as the most-enduring entertainment-TV series. Syndicated across Canada, it counted among its guest stars Rich Little, Bruno Gerussi, Margaret Trudeau and Alanis Morissette.

It began on CJOH in 1966 as a wrap-around for a 15-minute cartoon series, but by the time it went off the air in 1988, it was a full-blown, half-hour kidcom.

At any length, it was never much more than a slice of silly video vaudeville shot on a shoestring. Yet Klea Scott, sultry star of such U.S. dramas as Millennium, Brooklyn South and Robbery Homicide Division, still proudly includes her guest stint on the show in her resume, and John Kricfalusi, father of Spike TV's incorrigible Ren & Stimpy, thinks of the series as formative.

It was called Willy & Floyd, and it starred Ottawa broadcast stalwarts Bill Luxton and Les Lye. Their varied radio and TV careers -- ranging from serious public affairs to topical satire -- will be honoured tonight with lifetime achievement awards presented by their union, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Radio and Television Artists.

But to a generation of Canadians, the pair will always be best remembered as the bewigged Uncle Willy and his buck-toothed sidekick, Floyd.

Sometimes, says 76-year-old Luxton, "I'd like to be remembered for the more serious things I did," like keeping Charlotte Whitton under control when the feisty former mayor had her own TV show in the '60s, or his decades-long contribution to a string of CJOH morning shows, or the years he spent as the unflappable host of a mind-bending mentalist series called The Amazing Kreskin.

"But," he says, "as along as they remember you, that's the main thing."

ACTRA, which is honouring longtime members in each of its districts this year to mark the union's 60th anniversary, might have chosen to recognize better known Ottawa alumni. The rolls include Peter Jennings, onetime CJOH host; Lloyd Robertson, an erstwhile CBC Ottawa staff announcer, and ballet icon Celia Franca.

But no one represents the breadth of the Ottawa ACTRA experience better than Luxton and Lye. Both are graduates of Lorne Greene's Academy of Radio Arts, and both came to TV through radio. Luxton was working at Kingston radio station CKWS in 1954 when the station expanded into TV as a CBC affiliate. It was here he created Uncle Willy, a bargain-basement Captain Kangaroo who introduced cartoons for the station when Luxton wasn't hosting magazine shows.

He moved to Ottawa's new private station CJOH just before it launched in 1961, and was soon busy with a clutch of shows, including a morning magazine.

Among the occasional contributors to the morning show was Lye, a popular DJ on CFRA. Lye had made a name -- or rather, two names -- for himself by co-hosting each of his radio programs with a cheeky alter-ego named Abercrombie.

He had also taken to collaborating with a talented young impersonator named Rich Little. In the '60s, the pair wrote and performed a political-comedy album called My Fellow Canadians, in which Little performed the voices of politicians such as Lester Pearson, John Diefenbaker and John Kennedy, while Lye filled in as various journalists and backbenchers. The album would become a Canadian bestseller and set Little on the path to international stardom.

Meanwhile, the inventive Lye was creating comic characters for Luxton to interview on his morning show. His catalogue included a teenaged hayseed distinguished by a set of snaggle-toothed choppers purchased from a joke shop.

When puppeteer John Conway, whose puppet-character Uncle Chichimus had been a Canadian TV fixture since the birth of CBC, decided to give up hosting the CJOH kids show Cartoonerville in 1966, the station's programmers asked Luxton and Lye to team up and take over. Willy & Floyd was born.

It was a haphazard production at first, says Lye. There was no script; the pair would tell their director the gist of what they would do just before going on air. But as the years rolled by, the comedy evolved and the production became more ambitious, Lye says.

Originally the relationship had a hint of Laurel and Hardy; Uncle Willy was the wise authoritarian figure who was regularly outwitted by Floyd, who was "17 years old with the brains of dead elm," according to Lye. Eventually the pair became owners of a hotel and partners in a talent agency, a conceit that allowed them to bring on performers from time to time, though never too many. The budget didn't stretch that far, Lye says.

When The Beachcombers' Bruno Gerussi was making his cooking series Celebrity Chefs at CJOH, Luxton was his announcer. He asked to do a Willy & Floyd cameo, and was quickly cast as a testy pizza-delivery man. A 14-year-old Alanis Morissette played a teen performing in a benefit concert on the show.

Margaret Trudeau, who had spent two years as Luxton's co-host on CJOH's Morning Magazine, was coerced into a final-season appearance as a German spy. Rich Little would show up on his old friend's show whenever he was in town. Baseball hall of famer Ferguson Jenkins was convinced to appear as himself while passing through town on a promotional tour.

Willy & Floyd would be the springboard to even bigger success for Lye. Spotted in the role of Floyd by TV producer Roger Price, he hired to play a number of disreputable adults on You Can't Do That On Television, the rude CJOH sketch comedy for kids that in the late '80s would become the most successful program on the U.S. cable channel Nickelodeon. Lye's celebrity broadened; he made regular promotional tours around the U.S., including an Easter-season appearance at the Reagan White House.

At 79, Lye says his vision has dimmed and he doesn't get out much anymore. The last time he and Luxton donned the personnae of Willy and Floyd was two years ago at a comedy extravaganza held at Barrymore's night club. The pair were feted by younger Ottawa comics who felt they owed something to the duo.

Animator John Kricfalusi, who fondly remembers watching Willy & Floyd in his Ottawa South rec room growing up, would agree. He once said the show and its contemporaries -- unlike latter-day children's shows -- " weren't designed to sell toys, or to make networks happy, or to teach moral lessons. They were made to entertain people."