When I got my current job, I was ecstatic that I was finally working somewhere I could get to by public transportation. Avoiding aggravation of driving in the winter, saving money, getting to read more, polluting less. I’m ashamed to say that didn’t last. Where I live, Laurier station, it seems is exactly the spot on the orange line where the metro is the most packed. The doors open onto a wall of people, all looking at me like “you’re not really thinking of coming in, are you?”.

So hanging my head, I started driving again. Lightspeedcar doesn’t have a CD player, and the three tapes I have are getting repetitive. So, for about the third time in the past three years, I’ve given radio another chance.

Surfing the channels, I get crap like “la gang de malades”, “les grandes gueules” or “yé trop d’bonne heure”, where a bunch of hyperactive people talk at the same time. Anytime someone starts a sentence that piques my interest, they’re interrupted by another person and they go off on some tangent of fart-jokes and Serge Ménard parody. Then they laugh for minutes on end, and I’m left staring at the console, going “what the hell are they laughing at? I guess it’s just that I haven’t been smoking”.

Or else you get the English equivalent with Mix 96, CHOM that always plays the same old stuff, and Aaron and Tasso on Q92, whom I’ve seen enough at the movies, thank you very much. CKUT isn’t bad, but people being constantly outraged about one injustice or another, that also gets old.

In the summer of 2000, COOL FM got started. It was amazing. You never knew what you’d hear: Jay Jay Johanson one minute, followed by ska, then Bebel Gilberto, and Moby before he hit the mainstream. You could expect to be introduced to interesting, slightly marginal things. It lasted about six months, before they proudly announced their change of formula – and promptly became another CKMF. T wrote them a letter to express our disappointment, and got no reply.

I want one, only one radio station to provide me with good programming, something funny, interesting or thought-provoking. I know it’s hard for radio to compete with TV. On TV, we have access to big budget American shows written by the best writers. With radio, we have only access to the pool of local talent, and nobody can be funny or interesting for hours on end. But still, this can’t possibly be the best we can do. Some local talk shows tend to be interesting for 30 minutes on end at least.

I can’t be the only one who’s aching for this. What radio are the intelligent, original people of Montreal listening to?