Q, meant as a general and wide-ranging arts and culture show, has displaced shows like Freestyle and The Arts Tonight on CBC Radio One schedules. This is part of a general restructuring of CBC Radio to assess the fact that the average listener is over the age of 65. CBC Radio, as an organization, is correctly assessing that some things about its networks have run their course - too much of a classical music focus on CBC Radio Two, for instance.
At the same time, the new shows often come at the expense of shows that didn't need to be sacrificed, Brave New Waves being the most notable of the shows that recently went defunct. The questions are: is Q a good show period, and is it better than the shows it replaced, most notably Freestyle and The Arts Tonight?
The second question, at least for me, is answerable. Q is better than Freestyle, the show it's directly replacing. What annoyed me about Freestyle was the format of two hosts making idle chatter and then playing music being flimsy at best. None of the hosts were able to transcend such a bad format. Q has some structure to it - its promise to cover the whole of culture is already being met. Lame title aside, Q knows why it's on the schedules.
As for the first question, the show's a little too uneven to properly gauge at this point. Q is a mixed bag. Pieces have already ranged from the essentially meaningless (an interview with Harry Connick Jr. where Connick shilled his New Orleans tribute CD) to the truly interesting (a piece about the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Once upon a Time Walt Disney exhibition).
A few pieces came across as spillovers from Definitely Not the Opera - the deconstruction of Beyoncé songs from an "armchair therapist" being one piece best left untouched. Shows like DNTO and Go! are sometimes hard to take due to that sense of humour, and I'd hate to see Q fall into that trap.
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