Toronto Sun

How can we miss you when you don’t really go away?

“Well, we thought we had gone away,” said Don Ferguson, one of the founding members of Air Farce. “But then CBC said to us, ‘Would you please come back and do a New Year’s Eve special?’ ”

Thus, Air Farce will get re-acquainted with its TV roots on a new New Year’s Eve special that will air, conveniently, on New Year’s Eve.

It’s the 18th New Year’s Eve special for Air Farce, which first was a radio show, then became a New Year’s Eve TV special, then became a weekly TV show before “signing off” a year ago.

“Frankly, we weren’t sure whether we should or not,” said Ferguson, when asked about the decision to come back on a one-off basis. “We thought, ‘If it’s over, it’s over.’

“But personally, I think the younger guys we have on the show, like Alan Park and Craig Lauzon and Penelope Corrin, to me they should be on TV. I have to say, that was half my motivation.”

Ferguson said CBC first floated the idea of a return last January, but it took many months to nail it down.

“Emotionally I certainly wasn’t ready to deal with it after having done Air Farce for 35-plus years,” Ferguson said. “I had envisaged that we (veteran Air Farcers Ferguson, Roger Abbott and Luba Goy) would step back and the young guys would carry on. Oh, well.

“CBC mentioned it again in the spring, I guess, and we started thinking about it. The CBC is so understaffed, we only got the contract signed a few weeks ago. But we’ve always had a good relationship with CBC and everything came through fine.”

The one Air Farce cast member who is not part of the New Year’s reunion is Jessica Holmes. She already had committed to a theatre show.

“She signed that deal in the summer, before we knew for sure that we’d be doing anything,” Ferguson said. “She’s glad to be doing that other project, because she wanted to stretch, but she was quite conflicted.”

Speaking of conflict, guest-stars on the Air Farce special include Battle of the Blades champions Jamie Salé and Craig Simpson competing against each other in a hockey shootout, and the omnipresent cast of Dragons’ Den, who apparently would show up at the opening of an envelope (don’t these people have real businesses to run?).

Ferguson said the biggest challenge has been building everything up from scratch physically after Air Farce shut down last December.

“We had nothing, no sets, no props, no wardrobes,” Ferguson said. “We had to actually build the machine again, so it takes longer.”

In the glass-half-full department, Air Farce has a whole year of potential comedic targets, from Susan Boyle to Tiger Woods.

“In previous years, we would say, ‘We’d love to do this on the New Year’s Eve special, but we just did it two weeks ago on the regular show, so we can’t do it again,’ ” Ferguson recalled. “The good side is that there’s an embarrassment of riches.”

In other words, look out, Slap Chop guy!