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CBC over night, and Radio 2
By admin1 | December 6, 2009
[EDITOR'S NOTE: My friend, Shirley Bradley, sent this letter to CBC Radio 1’s Early Edition re: the visit of Hubert Lacroix and the phone in on Thursday morning, December 3. Published here with her permission.]
The callers to your program on Thursday morning (Dec 3) and eloquent visitors to your studio on Friday morning (Dec 4), who addressed Messrs. Casgrain, LeCroix and Stursberg, could not have been more reasonable and absolutely correct about CBC. You must realize that, like fond parents, or enthusiastic rock fans, we only carp because we love you. But this last major change could be a big parting of ways with all of your most faithful listeners and the CBC. As well as our outrage over the Radio 2 changes (which cause me, guiltily, to listen instead to two Seatlle stations, one for classical music, and the other for sometimes useful commentary–the Public Radio station), we must protest the switching to strange “World” and -”The Link” of overnight programming.
Not only do you work the young man to death, ‘host’?– and he is none too listen-able, though pleasant -sounding; just not very wide-ranging or knowledgeable– you intersperse the bits of interviews and occasional news/features with music! If we wanted music in the middle of the night we could tune in to almost any other frequency on the am or fm band. We listen because we are insomniacs or have horrible jobs that keep us up all night, and we turn to CBC, or we did, for thought-provoking and interesting feature stories as of old. That means anywhere from Finland to Australia to the excellent Netherlands, and Australian feeds. Our international service pales beside most of the others, but we here don’t need, in the over night segment, to hear Canadian features, otherwise presented much better during the day programming, before CBC 1 and CBC2 went through a conversion to jazz and ‘trendy’ gibberish pieces.
Without programs like Early Edition, including Lee Rosevere’s Earlier, and Holgar Peterson’s blues, and Ideas, book reviews with Eleanor Wachtel, and Sunday programming with Sheryl McKay, and Michael Enright, and especially the wonderful Kathleen Petty on “The House”, we would but rarely listen to CBC radio. We catch a rare burst of classical music on CBC2, and on French CBC, otherwise the delightful choices of good talk and good music are diminishing.
Evidently Mr. Stursberg assumes that everyone under 40 listens exclusively to jazz, and that no one else counts. And, as John Doyle says, “don’t get me started” about television: all of the changes to CBC television news — Newsworld that was– and local lost-dog and schlocky celeb and overdone scare stories of petty crime are just sad. We surely have had, pound for pound, one of the great news services: reasoned, excellently delivered, opinion pieces carefully identified as such. Now we’re sliding towards silly Yank-style sensationalism, narrow chauvinism of the home-booster variety – tedious provincialism.
The head honchos of the CBC did not acquit themselves very well when answering to shareholders in their recent visit. Please pass on these comments, and ask them to keep thinking, like the careful Canucks we are supposed to be, and not be too anxious for rapid, untried changes.
Sincerely, a very long-time listener,
Shirley Bradley
Topics: CBC Radio, Dispatches from CBC Listeners | No Comments »
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