Floyd Robertson was presented as the respectable, well-dressed member of SCTV's news team, who reported on the important national and international news stories (including a series of natural disasters in the semi-fictional African nation of Togoland); while the bespectacled, nerdy and obliviously self-important Earl Camembert – dressed in loud checkered jackets and matching bow ties, and his black hair in a semi-afro style – was stuck with the more trivial and frivolous items (such as a fire at a doily factory).
Besides the difference in journalistic credentials, Robertson's lucrative annual six-figure salary was a sore point with Camembert, who was paid only union scale and was forced to anchor or co-anchor all of SCTV's newscasts from sign-on to sign-off.
[2] When not informing viewers of the news of the day, Robertson served as a straight man to Camembert's antics, including playing tape music to accompany news items he was reading,[3] or doing an entire newscast while under the influence of marijuana,[4] or eating dinner on the set during a newscast,[5] or filing a report from a recently opened local delicatessen when he was supposed to travel to New Delhi, India,[6] or entering the set on roller skates and wearing what Robertson aptly called "Jimmy McNichol hand-me-downs.
"[7] More significantly, after Camembert served as campaign manager for the ultimately unsuccessful political run of SCTV personality Johnny La Rue (played by John Candy), Robertson announced on the air that his colleague was being reported for violations of journalistic ethics and election laws, and for conflict of interest.
[10] Another time, when Camembert was in severe pain from an impacted wisdom tooth, Robertson decided to make him laugh by ending the newscast with a humorous item about a man and his wife visiting a pet shop.
[11] On one of the few occasions where SCTV News had commercials, the sponsor was a toy company run by Robertson himself, whose only product line was the "Mr. Earl" doll (which was clearly patterned after Camembert, and also a spoof of Saturday Night Live's Mr. Bill).
Another was in the very last edition of SCTV News (from series 6, episode 17), where an obviously inebriated Robertson showed up late to the newscast after a Monster Chiller Horror Theatre taping, still wearing his Count Floyd makeup.