Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 105

by Brian Gorman a is Praam job Eric Peterson enjoys the benefits of two TV shows rl'. 77 A 1 Oscar salty Julius and Delilah: 21st-century teens Spy games There's a nifty flavour to Delilah Julius he nice thing about a cartoon i show is that you don't need I a huge budget to create big ILJ special effects. As Delilah Julius illustrates, you can do a James Bond-ish weekly adventure series on a Canadian TV budget. Created for Teletoon by Halifax-based Collideascope, which produced Rock Camp for CBC last year, the series got a preview telecast last Sunday on Teletoon and settles into its regular slot on Saturdays beginning Sept. 3.

Aimed at teens and adults, Delilah Julius follows the adventures of a spy team made up of a couple of sleek, attractive teenagers. Orphaned at birth, they were raised by a shadowy intelligence service and trained to be super spies. The show is completely Canadian -sometimes strangely so with the spy agency headquartered in Halifax, and the first episode dealing with a missing Montreal subway train. (The locations are introduced with onscreen subtitles, allowing for an easy change for international sales.) As their handler, Al, says, Delilah and Julius are "masters of disguise, martial-arts experts and fluent in 20 languages -and they're saving the world one crime at a time, baby." As you may have guessed from the "baby," Al talks like a refugee from a California beach in the late 1960s. Delilah and Julius, on the other hand, are pure 21st-century teens, with all the cool and irony that implies not to mention a fair bit of sexual tension.

Malone, who presides over the Mental Health Court. tarring in Corner Gas seems to have made Eric Peterson something of an expert on jackasses. It's not that the actor is surrounded by idiots in real life. In fact, Peterson sounds like a man living a dream when he talks about his job on the hit Canadian sitcom. His character, however, is not quite as at peace with the world, and his favourite word is "jackass." He can roll the word off his tongue, cough it up from the back of his throat or snort it out his nose to indicate a range of stupidity as wide as a Prairie horizon.

"It's a great word," Peterson says. "You can say a lot with You can give it degrees of stupidity all the way from incredibly stupid to just a bit stupid." Peterson plays Oscar Leroy, the father of Brent Butt's character. Brent Leroy, and husband of Janet Wright's Emma. Oscar is a salty, miserable old wretch who is constantly at war with a world he believes is out to get him. Although Peterson comes across as soft-spoken and good-natured, he says he has more in common with Oscar than the fact that they're both from Saskatchewan.

understand Oscar to a certain extent," Peterson says. "When you get old, the world does seem to be full of jackasses. I'm starting to get like that myself. The world just doesn't seem to be the rational and together place that I remember growing up. I think Oscar's anger comes from a place that I can understand." Like Butt and Wright, Peterson grew up in Saskatchewan, in the town of Indian Head, just down the Trans-Canada Highway from the village of Rouleau, where Corner Gas is shot.

Although he started his career in theatre in Saskatoon, Peterson had to wait until he was middle-aged to come back to his home province to work. Now, after three decades on the stage including the international hit Billy cinidt.comtvtims9 "I enjoy This Is Wonderland for its connection to a real world that is trou bled and needs to be seen," Peterson says. "And I feel happy to be part of something that's trying to do something about that. It's a good use of television especially when so much of TV is try ing to do the opposite." And, Peterson says, Wonderland is a sort of homecoming for him in a couple of different ways. After all, his first big TV role was as a lawyer in Street Legal, Peterson as Bishop Goes to War and in films and television, Peterson finds himself in the happy position of being a regular on two successful TV series.

In addition to the CTV sitcom, which brings him home to Saskatchewan every summer, he's also in the CBC drama This Is Wonderland. Even though Corner Gas takes him away from his wife (social activist and former actress Annie Kidder) and their two daughters, Peterson says he loves spending time on the Prairies every year. "The actual thrill of coming out of the lunchroom in Rouleau and looking at this horizon and this sky, it was just so familiar to me in every cell of my body," he says. "And I'm thinking, 'Gee, I'm on this great TV I was terribly moved by that." As a longtime veteran of the Toronto theatre scene, Peterson has appeared in a number of plays by George F. Walker, who co-created This Is Wonderland.

So, he says, he jumped at the chance to play the calm and humane Judge a CBC drama that was a hit in the 80s "My virtual legal career is alive and well," Peterson says with a laugh. "I've gone from playing a lawyer to a judge. Now, if only I had the pensions." PHOTOS: CTV, TELETOON CORNER GAS Mondays; CTV and Saturdays; The Comedy Network DELILAH JULIUS Saturdays, beginning Sept. Teletoon THIS IS WONDERLAND Returning to Wednesdays (midseason); CBC.