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Good Night Ms. Ratuski Wherever You Are
03/18/07
Friday night was the last night for Northern Lights a CBC radio show hosted by Andrea Ratuski that ran from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. There were many nights when I fell asleep to the dulcet tones of Andrea Ratuski. With a decidedly classical flavour the mix of music provided by Northern Lights was the perfect blend music and talk to unwind too. I missed the announcement of it's demise back in January when CBC announced their decision to migrate music programming off of Radio One and focus on news and current affairs. In the shuffle Northern Lights was killed off to be replaced with repeats of CBC shows heard earlier in the week including Vinyl Cafe and Tapestry.
Perhaps I'm cynical but it seems more like a cost cutting measure to me. The second hour of Northern Lights has been filled by moving the start of CBC Overnight forward by one hour. CBC Overnight is reruns of shows from other public broadcasters from around the world. Two hours of original programming has been replaced with nothing new. I'll give the offering CBC Radio 2 a chance but I'm not hopeful, it's a contemporary music show and I'm not sure it will be music to go to sleep by. I'll probably end up going back to programming my own go to sleep music with iTunes and my USB powered FM transmitter.
I know I've written about this before but I'm going to do it again. I want to buy a TV show from iTunes but I can't because I live in Canada. If you look on ebay.ca you'll see iTunes U.S. gift cards selling above face value to, I can only assume, video hungry foreigners who would rather pay for their digital content than steal it. Come on you idiots rights holders, work out your issues and start making money because if you don't you are only encouraging people to circumvent the screwed up system you have in place now.
2 comments
Hey I am trying to program music for my wedding. In my stupidity I threw away the email I had in response from Andrea Ratuski. I don’t know if you can remember but there were three sections to the show that each had an intro and closure with three separate pieces that if I can remember never really changed the whole time I was tuning in. you don’t happen to remember or have a transcript of any of the shows eh?
Here it is March 13, 2012 and this would be the time of evening that I would listen to Northern Lights. A few minutes ago I was reminded of the program, so I ran the title through the search engine and found this blog site. I was listening the evening Andrea Ratuski announced that would be the last program. I was stunned when she made the announcement. To this day I still miss her nightly program, which I used to hear on CBR - 1010 AM in Calgary and also via the Internet, and I live down hear in northern Calif.
CBC, please bring back Northern Lights with Andrea Ratuski!
