We tuned in for the last day of old CBC evening programming last night–we tend to have “Music for a while” on over dinner most evenings and J. is a huge “After Hours” fan. “In Performance” had its last show on Thurs. but we left the Friday version on mainly out of inertia (it’s a world music take on the same idea) . They had the hosts for the new shows in for a few minutes in each slot to promote their spots. It’s hard to get any sense of personality for any of the shows–the Jazz show is supposed to jazzy but not *too* jazzy (we don’t want to get into any musical “boxes”), the live performance show is being taken over by the Toronto CBC Radio afternoon host who still sounds like he’s not sure how the heck he ended up there, and the the late show host seemed to be unenthusiastically parrotting some kind of marketing copy about how the design of her show is modelled along an iPod–a bit of everything, no boundaries, etc., etc.
The whole thing seems focus-grouped to death, no sense of personality, musical integrity, or individual taste to any of it. I hope the hosts are more enthusiastic about their shows than about the marketing spiels they’ve been given to sell them with, or it’s all going to be very depressing.