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Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster delighted Canadian television viewers for over forty years with their witty, literate brand of sketch comedy. In a career marked by such impressive achievements as the most guest appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, one skit in particular stands out as the best loved, the most often requested, the epitome of the intelligent, gently satiric Wayne and Shuster style.
Rinse the Blood Off My Toga, a Shakespearean spoof with film noir elements stars Johnny Wayne as Flavius Maximus, private Roman eye, hired to solve the murder of Julius Caesar. Shuster plays Brutus, Roman Senator, friend of the deceased, and spouter of such immortal zingers as "He was stabbed, yeah. They got him right in the rotunda". In this sketch, Wayne and Shuster are supported by the talented regulars of their show, and one line, uttered by Caesar’s widow, as played by Sylvia Lennick, "If I told him once I told him a thousand times, Julie don’t go!" became a national catch phrase. As early trailblazers in the world of sketch comedy, Wayne and Shuster showed their fellow Canadians that we could be funny, we could be successful, we could be stars.
Awards:
At the 1998 Gemini Awards, Frank Shuster and the late Johnny Wayne received the Margaret Collier Award presented to a writer or a team of writers for a body of work or for a significant contribution to the international profile of Canadian television.
Holdings:
Two incomplete kinescope recordings (16mm film copies of the original broadcasts) were combined and digitally re-mastered to D-Beta and are held by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The original kinescope recordings are held at the National Archives of Canada. The kinescopes are 16mm black and white films shot from a television monitor at the television studio. Kinescopes don’t have the crisp contrast that 16mm film prints do. When colour television came along in the mid-1960’s, the usefulness of grainy black-and-white kinescopes seemed to be in doubt, but today they constitute the principal means by which Canadians remember the first decade of television. | 
