Rick the Temp’s off-camera antics chronicled

Tempted: My Story. By Rick Campanelli. HarperCollins Canada, 336 pages, $39

FOR many elder millennials and young Gen Xers, Rick Campanelli was the face of entertainment television.

Campanelli got his start on MuchMusic after he won a competition to become an intern, because of which he earned the long-standing nickname Rick the Temp. It wasn’t long before that internship turned into regular on-air hosting gigs at the nation’s music station, and the fresh-faced 20-something was cemented as a pop-culture icon in Canada.

In his new memoir, Tempted, Campanelli details his life before and after Much, but with a considerably darker throughline than his jolly persona would indicate. For much of his adult life, Campanelli dealt with a crippling gambling addiction.

But first, Campanelli chronicles in exhaustive detail his early life in Hamilton, Ont., growing up as a first-generation Canadian in a large Italian family. These early chapters move slowly, but it’s easy to discern how important the anecdotes, descriptions and family members are to him.

During his time at Brock University in the early 1990s, Campanelli’s gambling really took off; he was placing sports bets regularly, and had a regular bookie. Things progressed further as he eventually started at MuchMusic in 1994; relocating to Toronto and travelling for work expanded his opportunities to make wagers, and the creation of online gambling in the late ’90s and early 2000s made losing (and sometimes winning) money very easy.

By the time he moved over to Entertainment Tonight Canada in 2005, it was a full-blown addiction that had impacted every facet of his life: his first marriage crumbled; a Las Vegas casino scheme ended up with Campanelli getting arrested and missing a work assignment; he was forced to put up his condo as collateral; and it almost cost him his second marriage.

Despite his many calamities, and a bit of clunky writing in this biography — which was co-written by his former Entertainment Tonight Canada colleague John Meyer — Campanelli remains an unshakably likable guy.

In Tempted, Campanelli is almost painfully honest about his trials and tribulations dealing with his addiction. In that way, Tempted reads like a public mea culpa, the ultimate form of accountability for his mistakes, which has great potential to feel insincere but instead is endearing.

Don’t expect any behind-the-scenes photos, though; despite the common celeb-biography practice of including pictures from the archives, there’s nary a visual to be found. Campanelli recently told the Free Press’s Jen Zoratti it was the publisher, HarperCollins Canada, that said Campanelli’s social-media presence was sufficient.

So we can collectively wait with bated breath for the day he posts his Vegas mugshot on Instagram.

Erin Lebar is an audience engagement manager at the Free Press and former music journalist. She spent thousands of hours watching MuchMusic in the ’90s and ’00s; George Stroumboulopoulos is still her favourite (sorry, Rick).