While I was growing up, one of my favourite shows was The Red Green Show. Despite being Canadian, it always ended the Saturday evening Britcoms on my local PBS affiliate, taking the slot right before Austin City Limits, and then the station went off the air until the farm report at 06:15 on Sunday morning. My gran introduced me to it when I was staying over one night in grade school; I always liked being able to laugh at mature humour--not like "rated TV-MA" mature humour, but jokes that were aimed at people far older than me. Since Red Green's target audience was definitely middle-aged men, I jumped at the chance to learn to appreciate humour that my classmates wouldn't understand for the next 25 years. Occasionally, I'd meet another Red Green fan at school, but it wasn't very common. It was only when one of us made some kind of oblique reference to the show that we would find each other; like, I wrote an essay for my AP English class where I made a reference to Winston Rothschild's Sewage and Septic-Sucking Services, and I could tell which kids knew what I was talking about when I read it out loud to the class.
The show ended a couple years before I graduated high school and the PBS affiliate decided not to show it in repeats. They searched madly for something to fill the time, including doubling up on Are You Being Served? and, to my particular delight, airing Monty Python's Flying Circus for a season. Eventually, they restructured the programming block and now they show news programmes there. The Possum Van drove Red Green out of my life for good in spring of 2007, and I never even realised it had happened. Catchphrases like "if the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy" and "keep your stick on the ice" passed into my common vernacular, and I never really thought much about the show again until I rediscovered it on the Internet Archive in August 2024. In the intervening time, I'd amassed a significant datahoard of TV programmes and films, and I'd been looking for shows I remembered from the old days so I could audit them for inclusion in the collection. I don't have a lot of money, so extreme amounts of storage aren't available to me; I only have 2 TB and that's it, so I have to be kind of choosey about what I put in. I was randomly scrolling the Unsorted Television category of the Archive's Video section and found the complete programme of The Red Green Show. Still stinging from the time I let The Joy of Painting slip through my fingers, I decided "we need this. We need this now." The last thing I ever downloaded from the internet on Windows 7 was The Red Green Show from the Internet Archive.
However, another thing happened in the intervening time that is probably unique in amongst all the various people who watched the show when it was new: I transitioned. I took the Man's Prayer literally, and I changed. My decision had nothing to do with Red Green--in fact, while I was agonising over whether I was actually transgender or not, the show stood out as one of the bright spots of being a man. I felt a degree of kinship with the members of Possum Lodge; they were variously-skilled men with varying degrees of intelligence, all uniting under one roof every week to say "quando omni flunkus moritati" in unison. They were all pretty close to each other without being friends, but they all had each other's backs. I felt like I could say I was a member of Possum Lodge because I claimed to have skills that I did not have, and I felt validated by the fact that none of the other guys at the lodge had any measurable skill either; Red Green's handyman skill ends when the duct tape runs out; Winston Rothschild parrots advice from self-help audiobooks while simultaneously smelling of raw sewage; Edgar K.B. Montrose tries to solve every problem with explosives; and the only marketable skill that Mike Hamar possesses is stealing things.
Now that I'm on oestrogen, I revisited the show since, hey, it was in my datahoard now. When I got to Red's first "North of Forty" segment, I burst into tears when he said, "Remember, I'm pullin' for you--we're all in this together." This was for a couple reasons. It was the first time I'd heard him say that for almost 20 years and it brought back a flood of memories of watching the show in my sitting room of my old flat, surrounded by my Nintendo consoles with my school backpack and shoes sitting next to the island countertop. It was also like he was a long-deceased grandfather who I loved very much, and I was watching a long-lost videorecording of him giving me advice for my middle age. But, also, inescapably, I realised that he was speaking to a man. No matter how old I get, his advice will never apply to me because I'm not a man anymore; however, he had no way of knowing this and recorded this advice for me under the assumption that I would always be a man. I feel a little bit like I've let him down; since I have no idea whether he would accept me as a woman the same way he accepted me as a man, I don't really know how to react. On one hand, I could think that he would accept me as I am... but, on the other, he comes from a time when transgender people were considered less as people than as jokes. Indeed, a couple of "sex-change operation" jokes were cracked on the show, as well as that business with the transvestite masseuse. I know the standards were different back then, but I can't help but think that my lodge membership has been revoked by reason of not being a man.
All this talk of men, the show's purpose is not to extol the virtues of being a man and celebrate manhood while beating the female voice into submission. In fact, toxic masculinity is frequently lampooned: the manly tendency to keep your feelings private, insisting you have skills and then making some excuse to not demonstrate them, or insisting you have skills and deluding yourself into believing that you actually have them, and giving bad advice. All of this and more facilitated most of the programme's jokes. On later series, the show had a segment where Red and a couple of other lodge members would sit on a couch and discuss a purported "letter from a viewer", and the discussion often turned to women and relationships. Within the span of that single 5-minute segment, they often voice some stereotypical male opinion of women and have it refuted or turned around on them. It certainly doesn't qualify as "feminist" in any sense of the word, but it uses masculine social morés to comment on the male psyche in a way that other men would understand. As for "beating the female voice into submission", the characters' wives, girlfriends, and daughters are a constant presence in their conversations, even if they don't actually appear. The only thing the show may at times be guilty of is treating wives as "the old ball and chain".
In general, I don't really find any part of the show objectionable as a transwoman. Sure, there are places where it could have been improved, but that's a 21.2nd century viewpoint; not in that things are "more P-C now", but in that society is more accepting of differences now than they used to be. Governments don't change, certainly; but the people who live in the country do. All the queer kids who got clocked and subjected to beatdowns in school have grown up, many of us have kids of our own, and we're teaching them to be better people than we were. It's easy to look at media from the '90s and even the turn of the millennium and say, "where are the gay characters?", but the answer is a resounding "there aren't any because the show would get cancelled and our cars would be torched".
Apart from queerness, The Red Green Show is one of those "Whites Only" programmes. Not insofar as it's blatantly racist at any point, but in that none of the show's cast is Black. Graham Greene would show up occasionally, and his character of Edgar K.B. Montrose wasn't treated any differently than the white people, but there's something to be said about tokenisation here. However, being whiter than sour cream, I can't really speak to whether a Black or Brown viewer would get turned off by the subject matter.
However, as the woman who used to be the boy who would watch the show to age his sense of humour like a fine cheese, I'm sort of conflicted about it now. There's a test I conduct whenever I want to find something in a piece of media simplistic or objectionable: I ask myself, "Am I the intended audience?" The Red Green Show was made to showcase the foibles of the middle-aged man to the middle-aged man and his wife. I am never going to be a middle-aged man, but having been a young man at one point, I can still relate to the show on that level. Even at the time, I couldn't relate to the show in any way other than being familiar with it, because I've never considered myself very mechanically-minded. I took great pains in high school to avoid learning how cars worked, because I associated cars with crass varsity football rejects who listened to hard rock and would drink beer and watch sports at the weekend. I didn't want anything to do with that. So, when Red Green would start talking about cars, I couldn't relate. I never attempted to build anything or fix anything, so I couldn't relate to "Handyman Corner". And, I was a teenager, so I couldn't relate to the advice Red would give in "North of Forty". The only bit of the show I could relate to was being a man. Therein lies my dilemma. At the end of the day, if I could only relate to being a man, then I must answer myself, "No, I am not the intended audience." What's past is past, but I think I can only relate to it through nostalgia anymore.
I guess, when Red says "we're all in this together", he means life. We're all living this life at the same time on the same planet, mostly acting the same way. So, in that way, I guess he's also pulling for me, even though I'm a woman now. So, all things considered, I'm going to continue to think he's got my back, just as he always did.
I was a man, but I changed,
because I had to. That's right.