George Stroumboulopoulos...... the coolest guy on TV

Published: Inside Entertainment magazine - December 2007 Written by: Emer Schlosser Excerpt from Entertainers of the Year George Stroumboulopoulos Page 1 of 2 What you see is what you get with Stroumbo. Emer Schlosser pays a visit to CBC’s hunky politi-punk. His office is a cozy corner of calm. I’m here to meet one of the most engaging Canadians to hit the airwaves. The tranquil atmosphere of George Stroumboulopoulos’s office is in direct contrast to the fact that the ubiquitous Hour host appears to be one of the busiest bodies on the box. The man’s a machine, who won’t even let something like a motorbike accident slow him down. (He was left with a broken collarbone and a banged-up noggin.) Stroumboulopoulos seems utterly dedicated to his talk show, a topic he talks about with the passion of a proud parent. Stroumbo’s journey through journalism began in ’93 at a radio station in Kelowna, where he supposedly dressed up as a lizard and drove around promoting the station. He moved back to Toronto to work at sports radio’s The Fan 590, after which he moved back to music and down the dial to 102.1 The Edge. Then MuchMusic came calling. “I didn’t really want to go at first, but then thought about it and went, Sure, what the hell?” It was because “it was The NewMusic. I wouldn’t have gone to be a VJ; it wasn’t my thing. I couldn’t be the guy to play the new *NSync video. I’d rather die.” In addition to The NewMusic, he also hosted MuchNews and The Punk Show. So, how did the pierced punk from MuchMusic fall in line with Peter Mansbridge and the fifth estate? It wasn’t love at first sight. “When they called me I said ‘no’ the first few times... because guys like me aren’t on CBC... I had a very similar misconception of the CBC as many people do. Old, stodgy, blah blah blah. So when they called me I was like, F*ck no. No! What the hell am I going to do there? I know I even said to them, ‘Do you even watch what I do? Do you know what kind of person I am on TV?’”