One of my favourite radio hosting moments happened quite spontaneously, when I was hosting an evening shift on 102.1 The Edge back in the early 00s. I had a friend (Rachelle) visiting the studio who happened to be fluent in French, so I thought for fun, between one of the first couple of songs, I’d have her speak a little. The phones buzzed right away, and I ran with it the rest of the evening. The conceit was that the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission had ruled that our spoken word content must be 25% French Language. The lines were jammed with calls all night. The next day, I took some heavy heat from my Program Director for not giving him the heads up – hard to do when it wasn’t planned. At the time, the station had “Input 102”, a phone line where people could leave messages about programming. We had over 300 messages about the French Language edict. About a month later, a student from Humber radio was visiting the station and asked what was the situation with the CRTC ruling, as it had been a big discussion in her class.
I was just going through some old CDs, and found the original show. Audio quality isn’t great, but I thought I’d share. Musically, it’s a fun snapshot of that era, plus a cameo from Strombo. My voice has changed since. Late puberty.