Andy Jones

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Andrew (Andy) Jones, actor, writer (b at St John's 15 Jan 1948). Andy Jones studied drama at the universities of Toronto and Alberta, acting in campus productions. He toured England with the Madhouse Company of London and Newfoundland with the Newfoundland Travelling Theatre Company before he joined the CODCO comedy troupe in 1974. Other members included his sister Cathy Jones, Mary Walsh, Tommy Sexton, Greg Malone and Robert Joy. They performed onstage together until 1976 and debuted their television series in 1988; it lasted five seasons on CBC-TV. The show, taped in Halifax and St. John's and produced by Salter Street Films, was an unqualified hit in the great tradition of Canadian sketch comedies such as The Wayne and Shuster Show and SCTV. Andy Jones left Codco in 1991 in protest when the network, in the wake of the Mount Cashel orphanage sex scandal, cut his sketch "Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation," which was about sexual deviancy among the priesthood. It was eventually aired in 1993 when the CBC shifted the program to a later time slot.

Andy Jones continued to perform onstage with a variety of critically acclaimed one-man shows - Out of the Bin, Still Alive, King o' Fun, To the Wall, which garnered a Gemini Award nomination, and An Evening with Uncle Val. He starred in and co-wrote the decidedly quirky satire of Newfoundland politics, The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (began in 1976, released in 1986), directed by his brother, Mike Jones. Andy Jones can be seen in Secret Nation (1992), Buried on Sunday (1993), Paint Cans (1994), Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996), Extraordinary Visitor (1998), Random Passage (2002), Rare Birds (2002), Young Triffie (2007), The Magnificent Molly McBride (2009) and Heartless Disappearance Into Labrador Seas (2009). He appeared as former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in the made-for-television movie Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story (2006). As a writer, he worked on the last two seasons of The Kids in the Hall series and with his sister on Cathy Jones Gets a Special (2002).

Andy Jones twice shared the nomination for an Emmy Award, in 1994 and 1995, as one of the writers on The Kids in the Hall. He shared both a Gemini Award in 1992 for co-writing the Codco television series and the 2002 Earle Grey Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1984 he received the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council's first Neala Griffin Award for achievement in theatre. His adaptation of the folktale The Queen of Paradise's Garden was named to the International Youth Library of Munich, Germany's White Ravens list for 2010. He has been honoured with the ACTRA Award of Excellence for Lifetime Achievement and continues to write and perform in his home province as well as taking his one-man shows on tour to various parts of the country.