Stuart McLean is a genius. Never in my life have I encountered a personality I love to hate and hate to love as much as his "golly-gee-willikers" host persona on CBC Radio's Vinyl Cafe.
Hard as I try, I cannot avoid the man. And now that he has sold a slice of his homespun humour book series in Britain and is in the process of developing an animated series with CBS in the United States, I'm abandoning all hope of escape. Stuart McLean is taking over the world.
Every Sunday afternoon, no matter where I happen to be -- in the car, in the country, in the city -- I always find myself within earshot of a radio tuned to his show. "Howya doin?" McLean says in that voice of his -- a reprehensibly practised mélange of every small-town accent from Come By Chance to Coquitlam -- and before I manage to put down my book or dishcloth and stop whatever it is I happen to be doing and run over and switch the dial, before I can stop myself from eavesdropping on his newest feel-good anecdote (about an eight-year-old girl who returned a cash-filled wallet or an old man struggling with his dentures), before I can put an end to McLean's signature extended run-on sentence -- the kind of sentence that builds and builds and builds with so many irritating little asides you want to rip the radio out of the wall and plunge it into a water-filled sink with your bare hands -- before I can do any of these things, he comes to the punch line. And I find myself laughing. Or crying. Depending on which outcome that folksy banana-faced devil had in mind.
This has been going on for years. For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to get away from Stuart McLean. As a teenager growing up in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, I used to see him around all the time. Later, my relationship with McLean took a turn for the personal and acrimonious. Shortly after I started writing a column for this newspaper, my then-editor informed me that McLean had called and complained about the subject matter of one of my pieces (the article in question was in support of Ty Conn, a bank robber on the lam, who later shot himself in a police standoff). I was horrified, but my editor thought it was a riot. "Hey kid, you've made it," she said, slapping me on the shoulder. "Stuart McLean hates your guts."
After that I did what any objective, sober-minded journalist would do. I howled with resentment whenever his name came up and took public potshots whenever the opportunity presented itself. At the sight of his face on book jackets, newspaper ads or CBC promotions, I rolled my eyes and gritted my teeth. I constructed complex arguments as to why McLean represented everything that was bland and unadventurous about Canada's literary culture.
His twee vision of people and their cute, heart-warming problems bugged me. His hokey penchant for interviewing "regular people" at small-town fall fairs bugged me. His shameless sentimentalizing and pandering to the lowest common denominator bugged me. The fact that he was obviously far more clever than he pretended to be bugged me. The endless comparisons to Garrison Keillor bugged me. The fact that, in spite all of this, I found him kind of sexy bugged me.
But the thing that bugged me most of all was the realization that, try as I might, I could not stop listening to his show. Not only that, it was my favourite show on the radio. Not that anyone knew, of course. I kept my McLean addiction a secret. Like Rush Limbaugh privately popping his pills and publicly decrying potheads, I was a big fat hypocrite. I was like Stuart McLean, only worse. While McLean (I suspected) was far more cynical than he pretended to be, I had made a career of pretending to be a sharp-tongued cynic when really I was just a sappy Vinyl Cafe listener at heart.
So why, you might ask, am I choosing to come clean now? Well, if you've been listening to Vinyl Cafe, you'll know that McLean is handing out awards to people for just being nice. Past winners include that little girl who returned the wallet, Roméo Dallaire for trying to stop a genocide, and a mom who won for "just being a mom."
As a dedicated listener, I'd like to take this opportunity to nominate myself, for just being honest. It's a whole lot different than just being nice, but, if you ask me, just as important.
That's all for this week, folks. Now, go home to your families.