Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, it’s physical time!

Episode 1.4 “X-Ray Marks The Spot”

(Dir by Stan Harris, originally aired on October 23rd, 1985)

Oh, the drama never ends in Canada!

Cobb’s has just switched over to a new insurance plan and all of the employees are going to have to get physicals to make sure that they qualify.  That means that everyone has to come in on Monday, regardless of whether it’s their day off or not.  (Since the store only seems to have 3 cashiers and one stockboy, I’m not sure they can afford to give anyone a day off.)  The physicals will be done right in the store parking lot which …. wait, what?  That’s a bit intrusive.

(Actually, I assume they have some sort of mobile doctor’s office but that’s never really made clear in the dialogue, which led me to imagine all of the characters getting poked and prodded in the middle of the parking lot.)

That’s not the only problem!  Murray the stock boy put a lot of cans in the storeroom and, after a torrential downfall, he discovered that he put all the cans underneath a hole in the roof.  The cans got wet and their labels peeled off.  Christian suggests just donating the cans to charity and taking a tax write-off but Howard points out that some of the cans were dog food.  “Okay,” Christian says, “give it to poor people with pets!”

(Actually, that’s not a bad idea….)

Howard, himself, is upset because he nearly got run over by a kid driving a car.  He tells Edna that he hates kid.  Howard picks the worst time to tell Edna this because, before coming to work, she took a pregnancy test and guess who is expecting?

Edna tries to keep the news from Howard until he’s in a better mood but then she discovers that she’ll have to get an x-ray at the physical and, when she tells Howard why she can’t do that, Howard is not particularly enthused about the prospect of being a father.  Edna gets upset and leaves Canada for Florida!

How will all of this get resolved?

Well, the mystery of the cans is solved when Murray gets them ex-rayed.  I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to sell people food that was just zapped with radiation but whatever.

Edna leaving is temporarily resolved when Marlene, who is the best character on the show, become Howard’s new secretary.  Marlene turns out to be so bad at her job that I was cringing at my own memories of my first day as an administrative assistant.  Fortunately, Edna returns and takes her old job back.

She also tearfully tells Howard that the test was incorrect and she’s not pregnant.  Edna sits down at her desk, opens the desk drawer, and discovers the stuffed Panda bear that Howard bought while she was gone.  “Awwwwwww!” the studio audience said.  And, I’ll be honest, I said it too.

The first half of this episode really didn’t work for me, largely because both Don Adams and Dinah Christie (in the roles of Howard and Edna, respectively) had a tendency to go BIG in their performances and that pretty much made it impossible for me to really get emotionally involved with their story.  It was a bit too obvious that they weren’t lovers but that they were instead just two actors reciting their lines.  The second half of the episode was a marked improvement, when both Adams and Christie dialing back their performances and actually talking like real human beings.  Shaky start aside, the episode did kind of earn that “awwww” from the audience.

Next week, a contest goes wrong!