So I’m watching Prime TV at 4 in the morning. (Don’t ask.) Prime TV, for the foreigners, is a Canadian cable television station aimed at people so old that they don’t even bother to put up a decent website, since all of six or seven internet-savvy octogenarians will ever find it. Programming ranges from old episodes of M*A*S*H to new episodes of The Price Is Right to rip-offs of Antiques Roadshow. Along the way they’ll show programs about spa getaways, yoga for seniors, and—well—whatever they can buy on the cheap to fill 24 hours. The spiritual predecessor to Prime would be CKVR Barrie, whose lineup consisted almost solely of M*A*S*H and Three Stooges reruns, fishing shows and before-breakfast yoga.

So what, exactly, is on Prime at 4 a.m.? Only the least professional home improvement show I’ve ever seen. It’s basically a two-camera setup (and maybe even that’s being a bit generous), the sorts of projects on the show are simple things like “replace your doorbell” and “install a new thermostat,” and the host is an odd woman completely unlike your usual home improvement host. She’s no Ty Pennington, that’s for sure; while the male-model-turned-carpenter mugs for the camera at every opportunity and talks a million miles a minute, this woman’s hosting style is fairly unpolished, as though she were shooting the show on a whim in her living room.

She makes little self-deprecating jokes, does silly things to make a point (to demonstrate that nine volts won’t kill you, she takes a 9V battery and touches it to her tongue) and generally acts like your mother’s friend who’s good with tools. She occasionally uses ill-suited equipment (what, the show couldn’t afford a Phillips screwdriver?) and isn’t afraid to make mistakes on camera; while replacing said thermostat, she attacks a screw with a cordless screwdriver, and then decides she needs a smaller, manual screwdriver. So we watch as she dips out of frame, digs through her toolkit, finds what she needs, and returns to the thermostat. That’s a good fifteen to twenty seconds of dead air, folks. Once the thermostat is installed, she has to fiddle with it to get it working, and at one point remarks something to the effect of “…aaaand something’s wrong.” It’s a show that would’ve been a cult phenomenon on community cable; it’s vaguely embarassing at first, but as you watch the show you realize that at least a) she knows what she’s doing (sort of), b) she’s not wooden or pedestrian like so many other home improvement shows, and c) she’s not stupidly over the top and perky like the recent slate of “reality” renovation shows. She’s the kind of host you root for a little, because she seems like a real person, and thus her show will undoubtedly tank.

Except it didn’t. A Repair To Remember, the show I was watching, wasn’t on community cable; it was on the Women’s Television Network, later renamed the W Network. Despite its miniscule production budget and its cheesy cottage country look and feel, the show gained a fairly large audience and catapulted its host to bigger and better things. And here’s the weirdest part of all—the host was Mag Ruffman, and her previous gigs included roles in Anne of Green Gables telemovies and Road To Avonlea. Yeah, that’s right, Road to frickin’ Avonlea. A Repair To Remember was successful enough that Ruffman got a second home improvement show out of the deal, Anything I Can Do, which hopefully got some better graphics, a full-time editor and a second camera. Now she has a column in the Toronto Star and a book published by McClelland and Stewart.

And all she had to do was to pretend she was on CKVR.