Cornwall’s Ruffo family made its national-television debut Thursday, and it was a win.
The family appeared on CBC’s Family Feud Canada, and there’ll be a sequel for the Ruffos, with their next appearance on the show televised on Monday at 7:30 p.m.
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With watch parties being held throughout the city, and in Kingston where team captain Maddie Ruffo is in her senior year at Queen’s University, the Ruffos brought a lot of energy to the set and rallied to defeat the Tucker family from the Fredericton area of New Brunswick.
In the Fast Money round, the Ruffos did come up a bit short, Maddie and older sister Brittney – who’s in teacher’s college in Potsdam, N.Y. – not collecting enough survey points for the $10,000 prize, but with no shortage of laughs and hi-jinks during the taping that actually occurred in mid-September, in Toronto.
Under the gun to name a popular boy band from the 2000s, Maddie answered 5 Seconds of Summer.
Host/comedian host Gerry Dee joked Maddie had made up that name, then he said “I don’t know if a lot of people know 5 Seconds of Summer – are they from Cornwall?”
Said Maddie: “It’s not made up!”
It’s an Australian band that actually formed in 2011, and when Dee revealed the top survey result for the question – Backstreet Boys – Maddie said “Backstreet Boys – before my time.”
Earlier and during get-to-know the family banter, dad Perry Ruffo told the host “I’m a crier Gerry, and I’m a girl-dad,” saying that when he recently turned 50 and Maddie and Brittney made him a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation, “I cried for 20 minutes.”
When a few minutes later the Ruffos were about to win the all-important fourth survey round, Dee said “make sure we have a camera on Perry if they win because he’s probably going to ball his eyes out.”
During the $10,000 round, Dee briefly disappeared off set, came back with a box of tissues and tossed it over to Perry.
The Ruffos had taken a 68-0 lead in the first round with a steal of the board, but the Tuckers won the next two rounds, including when they stole the points for the second survey question, “Name something that can ruin your day if it leaks?”
The Ruffos correctly guessed a few of the answers on the board, but they left a big one up there, a part of a house that sounds like their last name – a roof.
With triple points awarded in the fourth round, it was Brittney who stepped to the podium, buzzed in first to give her family control of the board, and the Ruffos would go on to correctly guess all four hidden answers to the question, “Name something in nature that changes colours?” the answers being leaves, flowers, the sky, and a chameleon.
During chats with the host, Dee told Maddie’s boyfriend, Joah Vaillancourt, of Alexandria, he’d never heard that great first name before.
“I think my mom wanted Joey and my dad wanted Noah, so they just kinda (combined the two),” Vaillancourt said.
Dee talked to mom Kim Ruffo about her 24-year teaching career, suggested she could probably retire pretty soon, and he read a good luck on TV card from one of her young students.
And, the Ruffo team captain impressed the host with the details of why she became known as ‘Alphabet Maddie’ at Queen’s, where she once won the frosh week talent show for having the ability to quickly put the letters of a word in alphabetical order.
Said Dee pithily: “Truck.”
Maddie almost immediately responded with “c-k-r-t-u.”
Said Dee: “That’s a pretty good trick!”
thambleton@postmedia.com
twitter.com/FreeholderTodd