Radio Canada

OK, I'm just going to come right out and say it: The radio in Canada sucks.

Oh my God, does it suck.

Like Australia, radio here comes in layers. In more populous and interesting places the radio landscape will be rich and varied, in the middle of nowhere you find just one or even no stations. In between, you will find the same kinds of combinations of stations depending on the towns and cities nearby. To complicate matters, the mountainous country in BC means that radio stations are only available in small geographic areas, which means you don't need to drive too far out of town before whatever you were listening too breaks up. You could get lucky and find the same station again coming from a different town on a different frequency, but you're more likely to have to settle for something else.

The basic layer is CBC (the public broadcaster), the equivalent of our ABC programming that is available across Australia. No matter where you go, you can always rely on getting CBC. Which is about as cheering as the knowledge that, no matter how far you are from civilisation, you could always stick your thumb into your own eyeball. I have actually listened to a fair bit of ABC country radio back in Aus, and although it's not exactly riveting broadcasting, they play some decent music and they have amazing weather forecasts from real meteorologists. You'd think that a weather forecast couldn't be very interesting, but that's because you're mistaken and you've never listened to ABC country radio.

But the CBC is like a spoken word dirge. My understanding is that they round up locals who mistakenly think they're getting called in for jury duty and force them to recount stories from their childhoods. I recall one riveting program where a gentleman explained amazed he was that some women at his university found his indigenous facial features and skin tone attractive. Sure, he sounded like a nice guy, but DON'T CARE.

Then there was the guy talking about how his local fishing pond was being used by a mining company for tailings and blah blah DON'T CARE.

There was even a guy from Calgary talking about how everyone hated Calgary but people in Calgary quite liked other people in Calgary DON'T CARE.

And the music. Oh, God, the music. I have a degree in philosophy, but never before have I felt such a keen urge to weep tears of lost hope for the fate of human artistic endeavor. In Aus they either play music that they expect people will like, or music that they expect people to find interesting. It's not necessarily great, but it's OK. On CBC they play music that they feel compelled to bear witness to. The kind of music that makes you want to call the artist to explain that maybe they should look for other work, but at the same time know that to do so would shatter something deep and important within them. Plus the weather forecasts are hopeless.

So, ever reliable CBC is a plague upon my ears. The next layer up in availability is country music, and not that peppy, fun, Shania Twain style country music that you probably like but will never admit to it. No, the play the terrible kind of country music that's about owning a truck and drinking beer and tall grass and how much more country you are than other people who are less country than you by virtue of your truck and beer and proclivities for tall grass. Country music is almost as common as CBC, but even less pleasant to listen to. You can be pretty far from anywhere that is worth being in and still hear country music.

Fitting snugly within the country music layer is the crazy Jesus people layer. When you're scanning through the channels, the crazy Jesus people sound quite reasonable for about the same amount of time as it takes to work out what the radio people are talking about. After that the crazy Jesus people do not make for good company. They tend to like talking about things like how Jesus wants you to be a stay-at-home mum, and how the United Nations is trying to force you to abandon your kids and get a job, or how abortions are the number one thing keeping God awake at night. They don't talk very much about that bit in the Bible where Jesus hangs out with the poor, the downtrodden, the outcasts and the uncool and tries to get everyone to be nice to each other. In any case, since I'm neither a stay at home mum, nor likely to require an abortion at any stage, I find the crazy Jesus people a bit irrelevant. Plus they scare me. So religious radio is also out.

The next smallest layer is commercial pop music. This is clustered pretty tightly around towns of a few thousand people in BC. It is also quite terrible. I was a Justin Bieber virgin until I arrived in Penticton. For years I've been wondering what 14-year-old girls and people who are on witness protection programs that require their twitter accounts to be indistinguishable from 14-year-old girls even though they don't appear fit that category in any way have been talking about. Well, I still don't, but I have heard some of the Biebenator's work. Who said international travel doesn't broaden your horizons? If it's any indication of the quality of the commercial radio here the current Justin Bieber song that's doing the rounds on the radio is the third best thing I've heard on Sun FM. The two things ahead of it on the list are Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know and Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back, which came on late last night and made my day. There's a pretty big step between two and three on the rankings, but I'm going to go out there and say that I would prefer Justin Bieber to almost everything that gets played on the radio here.

But it doesn't really matter what songs they play, because the advertisements are overwhelming. I admit that I don't listen to commercial radio back home, but I'm sure that the little that I have heard involves fewer ads than the local channels here. And the advertisements are all for things that are irrelevant to my life. "What's more attractive than luscious, kissable lips?" asks one ad for laser treatments, "This is the sound [kids laughing] of a McDonald's Happy Meal" says another, "Spring is the time to get your garden looking great" claims the local garden store. Where are the ads for people like me? The radio never says "Would you like a free shower?" or "Finally, a free place to plug in your laptop which isn't really awkward to hang around in like a public bathroom" or even "Does your van occasionally spit coolant all over the road?".

Back in the Kootenays (the region containing Rossland) and north up to Revelstoke and Golden there's another layer of radio stations playing commercial rock music. Listening to these stations means you will hear some Nickelback, but you'll also hear other music that isn't that bad. There also seem to be fewer ads, and the ads are vaguely related to people like me - in fact my old work used to advertise on the local commercial rock station. That's almost the same as saying that dirtbags are a viable advertising market in that part of BC, which will blow your mind if you think about it too much.

I'm sure that in highbrow, sophisticated places like Vancouver there are a multitude of radio stations. Not least because they pick some stations up from Seattle over the border. To be honest, I don't really know. Last time I drove through Vancouver it was hammering with rain and my windscreen wipers had decided to stop working, which is every bit as horrible as it sounds. When one is close to death in this way, one does not invite further difficulty by listening to the radio. By the way, that was on the way to see Maud's Hot Sister, so I hope you guys realise how much I suffer to bring you the LOLs.

Of course, my van is a roving palace of luxurious delights, so of course it has a tape deck. But that, my friends, is a story for another day.