Things sure have changed since outfits like CHUM and CFRB would not only have all night live jocks, but newscasters and sports people too, into the wee small hours, a true full service radio station.
 
No one’s suggesting we can ever go back to those days given altered listening habits and the pervasiveness of the Internet. It doesn’t matter so much for music formats, but why wouldn’t stations that specialize in spoken information programming – like the talkers at 1010 and 640 – at least consider bringing someone in live to handle key shifts on a long holiday weekend?
 
Consider how many people are in their cars on Monday afternoon heading back from the cottage. They turn on CFRB or CFMJ at the start of what promises to be a very long trip back into Toronto only to hear either canned content or very dated rerolls. (Evan Solomon concluded his show Monday by asking Ontarians to make sure they got out to vote.)
 
Based on the traffic reports I heard in the afternoon, there were long line-ups on all the usual routes heading back into Toronto, and I suspect each car likely had more than one or two people in them. How were the supposed information stations serving the thousands and thousands of listeners stuck in those frustrating backlogs? By telling them yesterday’s news or even worse, discussions from weeks ago.
 
I’m not against giving the regulars the day off. They’ve certainly earned it. But there are surely a large number of fill-ins who could sit in the chair for the one important drive home shift, giving willing ears live weather, news and topical updates that might be of more interest than shows from last month.
 
As I monitored the afternoon drive programming on the talk show stations Monday, all of them were in rerun mode. Most of the references were horribly dated and of course, there was nothing about the traffic jams (aside from the quarter hour traffic updates,) severe weather warnings, the intense heat, the implementation of the tariffs in the trade war between Canada and the U.S., updates on the latest downtown shootings that left several dead, the Jays latest loss or any other news.
 
There has always been this insane logic in the biz that people don’t want to hear about anything controversial or political on their weekends or time off, as if what was fascinating Monday-Friday suddenly becomes a huge bore on Canada Day and the stat that followed it this year.
 
It might have been nice if someone were live for the great migration back. But there’s no foresight, no willingness and most especially no ownership wanting to fork out the overtime for it. And in the end, a chance to make a great impression on thousands stuck in their cars for hours is lost.
 
I know if I were them, I’d rather turn on music than listen to a dated show that’s four weeks old or more. It’s a captive audience waiting to be grabbed. And after Monday’s mass exodus from cottage country, it still is.