Image Credit: Compilation/Jennifer Stahn

A truly dreadful misfortune befell me this week. My radio broke. Expecting the usual insightful commentary from the hallowed halls of the CBC, (or what’s left of them following the ministrations of the odious Mr. Harper,) instead I heard only crackling static. Eventually I was able to tune in to one station. It was a local commercial outfit, “Dumb FM” I believe it was called, and it was so completely awful I felt strangely compelled to listen.

The first five minutes were taken up with advertisements which involved alleged adults spouting gibberish in a range of silly voices from the pathetic to the absurd. God knows what they were selling.

Music (of a sort) came next, a succession of almost identical songs all relying on a headache-inducing rhythmic beat, apparently in bad imitation of Irish folk music. Almost all the words were “Woo – ooo – oooo” or “Oh – woh –wohh.” When real words got a look-in they were without fail trite clichés of the “I’m so high” or “show me your love” or “my broken heart” variety. Honestly, you could train chimpanzees to write this drivel.

I realized at this point that local commercial radio is aimed directly at those with a lower than room-temperature IQ, but I was curious to see if it could get any worse. It did.

The announcers appeared, a brace of them performing a sort of amateur comedian double-act which involved a lot of laughing at their own feeble jokes in between banal, witless blather about so-called celebrities or the weather.

When I was later filling out my research by listening (painfully) to other local stations, I discovered that they are all identical, and the “personalities” are utterly interchangeable. They all have cheery, folksy names or go by their initials, an irritating self-indulgence which should be outlawed everywhere. And they all have the same stilted diction which involves putting emphasis in totally the wrong places, such as on a preposition, so it’s never a nice day in the valley, it’s a nice day IN the valley (as opposed to UNDER it, perhaps.)

The men all speak in deep, manly, ridiculously affected tones while the women desperately attempt cheerfulness and achieve only the irritating perkiness of a coffee-shop waitress. Every couple of months they all get fired and show up the next day on a different local station and nobody even notices.

Just when I thought it had got as bad is it could get, they started inviting stupid people to call in and be on the radio. As bait they asked them to answer some bizarrely boring question like “tell us what YOU like best about sunsets IN the Thompson-Okanagan!”, the answer to which hardly varied from “Well, BJ, I like the fact that they’re.. you know… like, red and stuff.”

After five minutes of this I could feel my intellect shrinking. I turned it off and went to get my brain flushed and buy a new radio. One that only receives the CBC.

— The Grumpy Old Git is annoyed by everything.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014