Thursday, August 24, 2006

Shoot Me Now...

Just when you thought CBC in Ottawa couldn't get much worse, news that Rita Celli is on her way back to the radio airwaves.

Ontario Today used to be a reasonably intelligent and worthwhile show under former host Dave Stevens - perhaps the last of the smart hosts at CBC radio in Ottawa (correction: not quite the last, there's still Rob Clipperton). Now it's a disjointed, rambling mish-mash of bizarrely unrelated half hour phone-in segments cut with navel-gazing arts pieces and irrelevant and obscure 'news' items.

Celli, a chatty hackette who plays dumb schoolgirl rather too convincingly, hosted the morning show for a while, where her giggly style and sycophantic interview technique grated horrendously on caffeine deprived nerves. I suppose we should at least be grateful she won't be on in the mornings again. Her smiley and inane style combined with the new format might well be the final blow to the feebly struggling corpse of Ontario Today.

This appointment continues the slide of CBC radio from an intelligent (although pathologically biased) talk and news network to a patronising, desperate to be relevant, non-entity.

We lost Ken Rockburn, Michael Enright, Peter Gzowski, Mary-Lou Finlay, Dave Stevens and John Lacharité.

We got Alan Neal, Rita Celli, Lucy vanOldenbarneveld and endless stand-ins. 'Nuff said.