“My voice? What’s it like to have my voice?” Barbara Budd asks, repeating my question.
The co-host of CBC Radio One’s As it Happens, who announced her departure last Monday after 17 years on the air, leans forward in her bright red jacket, her face breaking into a wide smile.
“I understand why you ask,” the 58-year-old confides in a low murmur, pushing her glasses up onto her nose. “It’s sort of like why I’ve always wondered what it must be like to have grown up beautiful.” She pauses momentarily. “Or to have great breasts,” she booms with a loud laugh. “Or to be able to do great hand demos!” she says, fanning her hands out on the table between us.
Irreverent, funny, serious – whatever the situation calls for – that’s the nature of Ms. Budd. By her own admission, she has always been “unleashed” on air, free to ad-lib and add colour and texture to the show in her trademark arch voice.
But today, two days after the announcement, her mood is mostly one of sadness.
“It feels like when someone comes home and says, ‘I used to love you but I don’t any more,’ ” she says of the corporation’s unexpected decision not to renew her contract, which she was informed of a little while ago. She shakes her head. “Not that it has happened to me in any relationship with a man,” she puts in quickly. “[But] you feel hurt and kind of shocked,” she says.
“And then you think, ‘Where were the signs?’ That’s what every man and woman does when somebody says to you, ‘I’m outta here.’ You think, “Why didn’t I see it?’”
The breakup has been painful. Last Monday, Ms. Budd told listeners that she will leave at the end of April. She says she is disappointed that – on Wednesday, the day we meet – she still hasn’t heard from co-host Carol Off, who has been away sick for a few days. “I understand that everybody operates differently,” Ms. Budd says diplomatically.
(They have since spoken – “We discussed my departure at length the other night. Ah, life. We laugh. We cry. And we carry on,” she later explained.)
CBC brass also requested that they approve her on-air goodbye speech. “They read it and they said, ‘It’s good and it’s like you.’ But they wanted me to remove two words – ‘with regret.’ They thought it sounded loaded, which it was, and my response to that was, ‘Well, don’t you think that by not putting it in it’s loaded?’ But I could see that it bothered them, so I took it out,” she says. “I wasn’t told I couldn’t go on air without taking it out. But I acquiesced because I don’t like making other people’s lives miserable.”
Since she started on As it Happens the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, Ms. Budd has worked with some of the CBC’s leading journalists, including Alan Maitland, Michael Enright, Mary Lou Finlay and Ms. Off. She works part-time – coming in at 3:30 in the afternoon to record her contributions, delivering a funny, sometimes serious or cheeky counterpoint that helped continue the show’s popularity, 42 years after its inception.
“It’s like a skating pair,” she says of the on-air partnership with her co-host. “From day one, you have to find out what your best numbers are. Is it the tango? Something else? And it was different with Michael and different with Mary Lou and different with Carol as well. But the object has to be that you’re dancing as a pair,” she explains, adding that she and Ms. Off get along well and have respect for one another.
