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Eric Bunnell's People: Still Standing in St. Thomas

The hit CBC show's St. Thomas episode will air this Tuesday

Hey, St. Thomas. Ready for our close-up?

Our town gets its turn in the spotlight on Tuesday next, when StT is to be profiled by CBC’s Still Standing.

Eric Bunnell's People: Still Standing in St. Thomas Back to video

The episode is the finale of Season 11 of the long-running television show that celebrates community resilience through visits with locals and a live stand-up comedy routine by host Jonny Harris.

Still Standing stayed in St. Thomas a few years ago when the program dropped by Port Stanley, but Jonny said in a recent interview he had to rethink his comedy routine after getting to know St. Thomas better.

“I think the most interesting thing for me was that I got the Jumbo thing wrong.

“I thought it was just going to be sort of a, ‘Oh, this is the town that killed Jumbo’ joke.

“When I got there, I thought, ‘No, I need to treat this with a bit of respect.’”

And Jonny got a standing ovation from the largest crowd his stand-up routine ever attracted, last September at the Joe Thornton Community Centre, when he revealed his own, personal tribute to Jumbo – the elephant’s profile shaved into the back of his head by community booster Malachi Male, whose clothing line features the image.

“The haircut was definitely the biggest conversation piece I took home from St. Thomas.”

(Malachi, a Toronto hip-hop artist, moved to St. Thomas after discovering the town by accident. He’s been joined here by fellow musician Choclair, which Jonny calls “kind of neat.”)

Apart from Fort McMurray, Alta., which the program detoured to showcase following a devastating 2016 wildfire, St. Thomas is the largest community Still Standing has visited. “The closure of the Ford plant is probably the biggest loss of jobs for any one community that we have covered.”

Ford’s St. Thomas Assembly Plant in Talbotville shuttered in 2011. At its peak, the plant employed about 3,600 workers, but the closure also resulted in many indirect job losses through supplier layoffs.

But, Jonny says, he........

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