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!

Attention shoppers, tonight’s episode is weird.

Episode 1.11 “Love on Sale”

(Dir by Alan Erlich, originally aired on December 11th, 1985)

Weird episode.

Mrs. Cobb (Barbara Hamilton) wants to open up a store in Saudi Arabia so she assigns Howard to give a speech to a group of “Arab investors,” while she spends the night seducing a sheik.  Howard agrees and is told that, if everything works out, he could end up as the President of Cobb’s International.  Going from being the manager of grocery store to an international business tycoon would be quite an accomplishment.  Of course, Mrs. Cobb also expects Howard to dress up like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.  This leads to both Edna and Murray punching him out because they initially don’t recognize him in his costume.

Meanwhile, Murray is trying to raise $150 so that he can buy Howard’s old car, which is apparently sitting on a bunch of milk crates somewhere.  Murray is a teenager who doesn’t even know how to drive but he really wants that car.  How can Murray earn $150?

(Just consider that apparently, Murray doesn’t even make $150 a week from his job at Cobb’s.)

After a customer gives Murray a five dollar tip after Murray introduces him to a female shopper, Murray decides that he’ll start hooking up the single shoppers in return for a ten dollar payment.  Howard thinks that this is a fine idea, as long as Murray doesn’t try to hook up anyone who is married.  (Personally, I can’t think of anything that would make grocery shopping more awkward than having a 15 year-old bagboy trying to convince me to date someone while I’m looking over the produce but whatever.)  Soon, Murray is making all sorts of money but then a Vice detective shows up and arrests Howard for running an escort service.

While dressed like Lawrence of Arabia, Howard is thrown in jail.  In his cell, there are two burly men who continually threaten to beat him up, a skinny guy who talks about how he ate someone’s face, and a male lawyer who is wearing hot pink high heels.  Murray, Christian, and Alf show up at the station and explain that they were all involved in getting people dates at Cobbs and, as a result, they’re all tossed in the cell as well.

Somehow, Howard and his employees do get released because, the next day, Howard comes to work and discovers that every swinger in the city is eager to shop at his store and Mrs. Cobb is not upset about Howard missing the meeting with the investors because Mrs. Cobb was able to seduce the sheik.  Howard says that he can’t wait to be in charge of Cobb’s International because then he’ll be able to get a harem, which leads to Edna punching him.

Weird, weird episode.  It’s hard to even review this episode because it really does take place in its own rather surreal reality.  That said, I kind of appreciated the episode’s nonstop jokiness.  There wasn’t a serious moment to be found here and, while some of the jokes fell flat, some of them worked surprisingly well.  It’s an extremely silly episode that doesn’t add up to much but it’s just weird enough to be entertaining.