Radio: Turn It Up!

As Van Morrison said. I’ve always been a radio listener, perhaps because my father built a crystal set when he was just a kid and then grew up to fix radios for a living. I can remember lying in bed at night, listening to big, powerful stations that came through only in the dark: Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Seattle. I used to be a big public radio listener, as well, but now I’m down to ‘To the Point’ (KCRW), ‘Prairie Home Companion,’ ‘Saint Paul Sunday,’ ‘The Jonathan Schwarz Show’ (WNYC), and ‘This American Life.’ And I listen to them all on the computer.

When I came to Canada, I discovered the CBC and a kind of radio that was really quite different from radio as I knew it. The 3-hour morning show, called ‘Morningside,’ I believe, might as easily have been called ‘Here’s What You Need to Know to Be a Canadian.’ It was run/hosted by a long-time CBC radio person named Peter Gzowski and he was a national treasure. Smart, funny, amiable, welcoming, interested and interesting, and indefatigable. Five mornings a week for three hours a morning, he carried on interesting conversations with people from all over the world and always with a view to my better understanding of how a Canadian would approach the topics that were covered, whether it was popular music or world peace. From Gzowski, I learned what it was like to be--that is, how the people of Canada were affected by-- living next to a behemoth like the United State. Some of living next door to the U.S. was good, some of it was bad, some of it was neutral. He never tried to create conflict for entertainment value or to increase conflict in those areas where there was already too much conflict for clear thinking. One of the best teachers I ever heard and one, of course, I never saw. What Gzowski showed me was how it is possible to teach without arrogance, to be a ‘pundit’ (which he would have denied he was, of course) without arrogance. And when I listened to American radio, I would hear that arrogance in so many of the voices, even on the public radio.

A national treasure, but he died anyway. And the CBC decided it didn’t want to spend quite so much money keeping the national culture before the population on a regular basis, and maybe there wasn’t anyone who could live up to Gzowski’s legacy. Michael Enright tried for a year, but it’s a brutal schedule and he moved to a more forgiving Sunday show. Then the CBC decided that young people didn’t listen to the kind of shows they had on: smart, literate, educated programming. So now, the CBC is largely populated by younger people who are hip and hiphoppy or whatever. In any case, now I rarely turn it on.

Except for ‘Ideas,’ an equally wonderful and strange throwback program that is remarkably un-American in its very nature, or at least since the U.S. got out of the 19th Century. ‘Ideas’ is like having Chautauqua every weekday night in your living room. You turn it on at 9 p.m. and you listen to a lecture on monetary policy that some smart dude is giving in Montreal, or a documentary about how to cultivate and eat oysters in the waters of B.C., or how women live in cloistered convents, or whether the idea of progress in human affairs is a reasonable idea to an Oxford historian, or even five consecutive lectures by Michael Ignatieff on human rights. When I first started listening, ‘Ideas’ was run by Mr. Sinclair. I thought it strangely Canadian to call him this, but it was sort of like Mr. Rogers, I thought. Certainly Mr. Sinclair was to adults as Mr. Rogers was to children. Eventually, I realized that his name was “LISTER” Sinclair, not Mr. Sinclair. Not the first nor the last time that I misunderstand something because I thought of it as being peculiarly Canadian.

Lister Sinclair, too, was a national treasure, and he also died anyway. But the program goes on still, Monday through Friday nights. Michael Enright fills one regular slot and the rest has the same kind of variety that Lister Sinclair gave it. And I seriously doubt that it appeals much to a younger audience, so its days may be numbered. But for now, you too can listen to (some of) it, because one program/week is podcast. Go to cbc and then to ‘ideas.’ Or you can listen every night on the net. Radio: turn it up! And about progress in moral and political affairs? ‘Not a chance,’ says the Oxford professor.