A reminder, as mentioned in Monday’s January issue preview, that the Canadian comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie returns to television screens tonight (8:00pm ET, CBC) with a curling flourish.
Jihad On Ice sees the local Imam assemble an all-Muslim curling team to challenge a well-known club team. And the episode also features a well-known curling celebrity making a cameo appearance (any guesses?).
This isn’t the show’s first brush with the sport. As blogged almost exactly one year ago, and also written up in the March 2007 issue of The Curling News, last year’s inaugural season saw the cast film a curling promo at the York Curling Club in Newmarket, Ontario. Only some 10 seconds of content was aired, but it had a huge impact.
“As soon as the curling promo piece aired just before season one, people would stop and ask me when does that episode come out?” said actor Manoj Sood, who plays the character Baber Siddiqui (photo by Sophie Giraud).
“I told them that it was just a promo piece and there is no curling episode as such. So many people asked us about the promo and if it pertained to an episode, that production eventually made a decision to make a curling-specific episode in season two.”
And this time, the cast and crew went all-out.
“The promo piece took a a day to make, basically doing a few shots over and over again... there was no real story attached to (it),” Sood said. “In this new episode, we spent almost a week at a curling rink.”
We’ll have more on tonight’s episode tomorrow on the Blog – and extra content in the upcoming February 2008 issue – including a quote from the mystery celebrity. And Sood, for one, sees tonight’s episode as a benchmark “CanCon” moment.
“Until I filmed the promo, and the actual Jihad On Ice episode, I had no idea how many people curled in Canada,” said Sood. “My dad told me that when we first moved to Canada in 1964 that even he had joined a local curling team and curled for quite a few years until we moved to a large city!
“It’s interesting to see and appreciate how important curling is to our country’s cultural and pastime fabric. When people see curling I feel they see Canadian. Our show is very much Canadian and so I feel that Canadian curling and Little Mosque On the Prairie make a great pair. Watch the episode and you will see what I mean!”
Jihad On Ice sees the local Imam assemble an all-Muslim curling team to challenge a well-known club team. And the episode also features a well-known curling celebrity making a cameo appearance (any guesses?).
This isn’t the show’s first brush with the sport. As blogged almost exactly one year ago, and also written up in the March 2007 issue of The Curling News, last year’s inaugural season saw the cast film a curling promo at the York Curling Club in Newmarket, Ontario. Only some 10 seconds of content was aired, but it had a huge impact.
“As soon as the curling promo piece aired just before season one, people would stop and ask me when does that episode come out?” said actor Manoj Sood, who plays the character Baber Siddiqui (photo by Sophie Giraud).
“I told them that it was just a promo piece and there is no curling episode as such. So many people asked us about the promo and if it pertained to an episode, that production eventually made a decision to make a curling-specific episode in season two.”
And this time, the cast and crew went all-out.
“The promo piece took a a day to make, basically doing a few shots over and over again... there was no real story attached to (it),” Sood said. “In this new episode, we spent almost a week at a curling rink.”
We’ll have more on tonight’s episode tomorrow on the Blog – and extra content in the upcoming February 2008 issue – including a quote from the mystery celebrity. And Sood, for one, sees tonight’s episode as a benchmark “CanCon” moment.
“Until I filmed the promo, and the actual Jihad On Ice episode, I had no idea how many people curled in Canada,” said Sood. “My dad told me that when we first moved to Canada in 1964 that even he had joined a local curling team and curled for quite a few years until we moved to a large city!
“It’s interesting to see and appreciate how important curling is to our country’s cultural and pastime fabric. When people see curling I feel they see Canadian. Our show is very much Canadian and so I feel that Canadian curling and Little Mosque On the Prairie make a great pair. Watch the episode and you will see what I mean!”
2 comments:
The episode was filmed last year at the fabulous Richmond Hill Curling Club
http://www.cbc.ca/littlemosque/curling/game.html
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