A radio enthusiast, having worked in the medium on and off for over twenty years—here, and out of London, for the BBC—I make a point of tuning in to local radio wherever I travel.

On the Digby Neck, I listen to the Acadian radio station transmitted from Nova Scotia’s French Shore, County Clare—or Klahr, it would be, if I had the accent—and its Cajun music and Zydeco, outrageous ads for lobster suppers, insurance brokers, car tire sales and Tim Horton’s. Along the Mississippi, where I used to gather material for documentaries about blues players once in a while, the radio is a gorgeous mix of rich R&B that could not be more local, and classifieds that illuminate the workings of the place because they are so personal.

In Iqaluit, it’s the same thing. (“Minnie, Bob says he’s sorry and it’s okay to come home now,” “George is looking for someone to accompany him for the caribou hunt,” and so on.) Under the radar of the CBC mandarins in Toronto, radio can be quite hilariously casual. In fact I find that CBC Radio is often more interesting directly in proportion to its makers’ distance from the authority at the centre. Like the time one late-night Inuk host started to choke on the food he was eating, excused himself to get some water, leaving that nightmare of any radio producer—which is “dead” air—and then came back and, in a raspy voice, said, “It’s the orange.”

It’s an abominable cliché to say that “the pictures are better on radio,” so let’s just agree that they can be very good. The image of that bright orange in the announcer’s hand, one that had travelled a ludicrous distance, at least in the imagined landscape of this listener’s brain—an Inuk in the booth after midnight, the white expanse of Nunavut in January outside—stood out like the scarlet jacket on the kid who’s rescued from an oncoming car in that otherwise black and white TV commercial for a Toyota, I think it was. (Bad ad, I can’t remember the brand.)

In Toronto, we’re well served. We don’t have the mischief of Québec’s brilliant guerilla telephone callers, hoodwinking the Queen and Sarah Palin, etc., but the morning gives us a pretty marvellous choice of very talented presenters that run the full gamut of radio styles. My favourite, these days, is Jazz FM 91.1’s Ralph Benmergui—wry, urbane and knowledgeable, occasionally needling and funny, too. And he’s proved that if you don’t manage to be under the CBC radar all the time—he left the Corp. on bad terms, I think it’s fair to say—that there is the possibility of another radio home. Jazz FM 91.1, incidentally, available on the web, is run by another CBC alumnus, the gravely-voiced Ross Porter.

And about the spectre of dead air and all those late nights on the radio—many of you will have read Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, of course, but how about these lines from “On the Air,” in The Earliest Memory by Julian May, an old BBC colleague of mine who wrote this poem while he was doing a World Service night shift at London’s Bush House:

Once upon a time
the voice of truth calmly announced
‘There is no news tonight.’
Now the slots must always be filled,
on the hour, every hour.
So at dawn on this thin Monday
the talking head reads once more
the bulletin he read all night before.

Then, having a few seconds to fill,
tells me what I need to know—
it is the first day of spring (official)
but here in London there is heavy rain.
I think how beyond these soundproof walls
its acid digest the stone carvings
of Saint Mary-Le-Strand
and spreads in waves like radio to the Urals
blighting Europe’s trees…

and miss my cue. Silence,
and the red light glows.
I hit a switch then fade
The sig. to time.
Time may come
when again there will be no news;
the producer’s recurring nightmare,
dead air, endless dead air.

I like this poem for many reasons. Not least, because once, many years ago (when Julian and I shared offices, briefly), a presenter for BBC Radio 3, the classical music and arts talk channel considered by some as hopelessly elitist, inadvertently read the news from the day before.

Out of more than one and a half million listeners, just one person complained.

Worth a laugh, and we did after we realized the program’s gaffe, though I have wondered many times since whether the lack of an outcry was a comment on just how not new and inured we are, in our effort to satiate “the slots that must be filled,” to most of the stuff we call “the news.”

Noah Richler’s Our Man In Toronto column appears regularly on Rover. Read Noah Richler’s review of The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands.
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Photo by Barbara Stoneham.