at 20:16 on April 5, 2007, EST.
By LEE-ANNE GOODMAN


The Trailer Park Boys Julian, left, Bubbles, centre, and Ricky. (CPimages /Aaron Harris)

TORONTO (CP) - The Trailer Park Boys have been a fixture on Canadian television for so long that Robb Wells, better known as Ricky on the Showcase series, figured their celebrity would soon start to fade.

No such luck for the surprisingly soft-spoken and borderline bashful trio from Atlantic Canada. The Boys, played by Wells, John Paul Tremblay and Mike Smith, have never been bigger thanks to the critical and box-office success of "Trailer Park Boys: The Movie," the rollicking Ivan Reitman-Mike Clattenburg collaboration that introduced a whole new set of fans to the kooky degenerates who inhabit the fictional Sunnyvale trailer park.

"Seven seasons in, you'd think that the popularity would be diminishing a little bit, but it's even crazier," Wells, trademark pompadour and tracksuit intact, said Thursday in an out-of-character interview to promote the seventh season of "The Trailer Park Boys."

"We get recognized everywhere now."

Tremblay agrees.

"It takes quite a bit longer to get gas and groceries now," says Tremblay, better known as Julian, the hard-bodied petty criminal who's never seen without a rye and coke in his hand as he dreams up one doomed get-rich-quick scheme after another.

Season 7 premieres Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET on Showcase, and fans of the show won't be disappointed. The first five minutes of the episode show the Boys at their hysterical best as they steal cuts of meat from a supermarket immediately after taking long hits from a bong.

Bubbles, unfortunately, smokes more than he can handle, and vintage Trailer Park Boys chaos ensues.

This season promises, as always, more hare-brained plots to make illicit money - like the Boys' decision to cross the Canada-U.S. border and sell marijuana to Americans in exchange for smokes.

"Ricky thinks his dope is so superior that he refuses to sell it at the same price as crappy shopping mall dope, and Julian comes up with this brilliant idea to find a market where we can get more money by exchanging it for cigarettes," Wells says.

"It works well," Wells says, then reconsiders: "Well, it kind of works well."

There's another shocking sub-plot as well: Ricky deals with the knowledge that Lucy's unborn baby very likely isn't his, since she conceived while he was on a return visit to jail. Who's the daddy? Prepare to be stunned.

The Boys are, for now, focused on the new season but don't deny they'd be delighted to film a sequel to the Trailer Park Boys movie - one that's darker and racier than the first one.

"If it was the right script and people wanted to make it, I'd be game and I think these guys would be too," Wells said as Smith and Tremblay nodded in agreement.

"The next one could be even better - we could kick it up a few notches, for sure," added Smith.

"We were working with a man who was incredible," Wells says of the legendary Reitman. "You have to trust his judgment, but there were times when we wanted to be a little more hard-core. There were very few guns in the movie, for example, (compared with) the series, and a lot less dope."

The film could be truly great if Clattenburg, who directed the film, was freed up to make a movie more similar to the series, Wells said.

"Mike Clattenburg needs to make Mike Clattenburg's movie instead of a joint project. He really needs to do his movie and not be restricted in any way."

And in the meantime, Wells said, the Boys will work on handling their ever-burgeoning fame.

"You've always got to be nice to fans and have your game face on, but there are certain times when you just don't feel like dealing with it, you just want to go to the store and get a carton of milk and you're there for 40 minutes," he said.

"It can be inconvenient, but still you gotta love it and embrace the fans."

Tremblay adds: "We're pretty happy living here, in Canada ... Our lives would be screwed if we were in the States and being photographed everywhere we went. It would suck."


©The Canadian Press, 2007