Beginning in September, CBC Radio’s arts show Q will follow The Current, and air from 10 to 11:30 a.m. with a two-hour expanded broadcast on Friday mornings. Q will continue to air at 10 p.m. (10:30 p.m. NT) each weeknight., and Jian Ghomeshi will continue to host.
Taking Q’s former mid-day time slot will be Aamer Haleem, who is new to the CBC and radio. Haleem is currently a VH1 personality and host of the show Bands Reunited. He was host of VH1’s Top Video Countdown, interviewing celebrities like Madonna. Haleem was born in London but raised in Canada, attending the University of Toronto and the the Humber College School of Journalism.
CBC Radio icon Shelagh Rogers will be back this fall with a new program exploring the best in Canadian literature. Rogers will speak with renowned writers and future literary stars, and examine the issues having an impact on books in Canada. It will air Saturdays at 3:00 p.m.
Both new shows will originate from Vancouver.
(Both times +30 min in NT)
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| CBC Radio 1, Personalities, Q, Sounds Like Canada |
Aamer also worked in Vancouver. He co-hosted Vancouver Television’s “Vancouver Breakfast” back the late 90’s.
He’s a class act all the way.
You are kidding, right?
Okay…this could work out for all concerned, I think.
God, Gian in the morning? Ugh. I can barely tolerate his uh, uh, uhs and fawning over 70’s and 80’s television “icons” in the afternoon. To have him stuttering through his hero worship of Bob Barker and Kreskin in the morning will be unbearable.
Gian was great as a fill-in host for other CBC programs, popping up now and again, but a steady diet of his show is really unpleasant. I never thought I’d be pining for Bill Richardson.
utterly baffling.
Gian is a bright guy with a lot of good qualities for a show host. But, I completely agree with Deb. His fake adulation for certain things - which he declares with the stumbling and stammering as he pretends that only the perfect choice of words will do - is really too much to bear.
But what sort of show will Aamer Haleem host? It wasn’t mentioned in this blog post.
What is the charter of the new show with Aamer Haleem?
Another arts interview show should wouldn’t make sense, so what is it?
Jian’s daily intro might be a nice transition from The Current to lighter fare, as he often addresses something topical beyond the arts. I’ll withhold judgment until I hear more of what will fill the afternoon.
Tod:
Thanks for the clarification about how radio programs are designed. I would have thought the program idea would be put in place, then the perfect host is selected. Your description seems backwards to me, but …
Ultimately I will give the new programs a chance to develop, but I would like to see something different at night — Jian’s show seems to work better in the daylight hours.
So why isn’t the CBC streaming all the time the way they’re doing with the Mandela concert?
Can you find us the answer, Tod?
I think it’s a reasonable question, and am curious to know out of the many possible reasons which one it actually is.
I’ve never read the comments section on here before. . . Man, is it always so negative? I don’t love every show on CBC, but that’s why radios come with dials. Nobody’s forcing you to listen to Q if you find Jian annoying.
And my goodness, he expresses interest in the topics the show covers. And he occasionally stutters. If this was grade 6, I think Deb would be taking a long, lonely walk to the principal’s office. Being mean is never cool, kids.
I enjoy Jian and the program Q a whole lot more that SLC. I was only getting one hour of Q in the afternoon so this move will allow me to hear more of the program. Jian is a good interviewer and I like the energy he brings to arts and pop culture in Canada. Good move CBC.
Rogers seemed overwhelmed by the daily grind of hosting a flagship program. A weekly gig is probably more her speed. I hope it works out for her.
Well … I’m mixed. Jian in the morning, as has been said, might be a little much. Having said that, his stint on SLC was what got me hooked on him and SLC, until Shelagh came back that is. I will miss the CanCon SLC gave me … Maybe the afternoon show will cover some of that off, without turning into the “Shelagh Rogers ‘n Friends abuse people of a lower class than them” show.
I like Jian hosting a non arts show, as, as others have also said, his fawning and breathlessness wear a little.
I guess we’ll see how the fall lineup does - and we’ll get to see if The Current unveils a new theme song .. I miss the old one
Something I’d love to have at some point: a collection of the Radio division shows’ theme music, available via retail venues. I don’t know what the legal/financial complications involved might be. I’m still interested, though.
The advent of CBC’s breathy boys–Jian, Tamashiro, Gregory Charles–has at least taught me something about the CBC radio hosts I like: They know and care about what they’re talking about.
Whether it was Bob Kerr ranting on about the quality of vinyl records, or today’s Randy Bachman and Terry O’Reilly, they have stuff to tell us and they understand how to tell us in the medium. That’s why it hurts to lose people like Rick Philips, because you’d learn something if you listened to him. Gzowski was the greatest of them all because he knew and cared about so many things, and he was eager to learn more about them while we eavesdropped.
Now, alas, it’s all gush and flutter. What can you learn from these guys, except that they’re really really excited to be doing shows on CBC? And once you understand that, what else do they have to tell you?
The most subversive program left on CBC Radio is Rewind…because it shows how good the CBC used to be.
The problem with Jian is that he really *doesn’t* know what he’s talking about. Jian is neither young nor hip, nor does he have any kind of national perspective. He doesn’t have either the education or the life experiences that would make him even minimally qualified to host any kind of national show, nor does he seem to make any effort to keep up with national current events, preferring perhaps to read only the Toronto papers. This is surely a big reason why his show is floundering as badly as it is. The average Radio 3 afternoon show with Grant Lawrence gets more blog posts in one show than Jian’s show gets in months, and Jian’s personal site won’t get as many in a year. Jian is irrelevant and ignored as a national pop culture personality, and deservedly so. (Tamashiro very much does know what he’s talking about, however, and Charles I don’t really know.).
With respect to the move, I had largely stopped listening to Sounds like Canada so moving Q to that time slot won’t affect my morning listening habits, (although KG is a very good host and had the show continued with her it probably would have won be back). The move does open up a big timeslot in the afternoon for what could be a very good new show, however. I don’t know Aamer Haleem from Adam but, unlike Jian, he apparently has spent a significant amount of time living in at least two different parts of Canada, and that will give him some national perspective and make him at least minimally qualified to host a national show. I assume that the show will be produced and hosted out of Vancouver and that would be a very good thing as well. Vancouver has been a major cultural hot spot in Canada for a decade or so now and I don’t think that has been anywhere near adequately captured by the CBC. In that time CBC largely collapsed into being a regional Toronto channel broadcast nationally and it missed a tremendous amount of the most important cultural happenings in Canada. Hosting a show like this out of Vancouver is a much, much, needed thing on the CBC and I’m actually cautiously quite optimist about it.
I very much hope that it will be available as a podcast as well because during the time Q has been on in the afternoons I’ve become addicted to Grant Lawrence’s Radio 3 show, and it would be very hard to give that up.