By KRISTA ASHFORD
Staff Writer   

The arena is cold. The unmistakable sounds of hockey are all around. The skates slice up the ice, the puck crashes into the boards, cheers reverberate off the walls when a goal is made. It’s a sunny afternoon in Toronto and it is the weekend of the Good Times Hockey League of the Arts (GTHLA) annual summit. Host of CBC’s television show The Hour, George Stroumboulopoulus is playing for his team Chart Attack Hack. Though they lost the game and their fans are disappointed, nothing about Stroumboulopoulus is disappointing.

George Stroumboulopoulus

“Work dominates my life, all I do is work. The only thing that will trump work is this weekend. I make sure that I don’t work during the summit. I make sure that I can come out and play because I look forward to it all year,” says Stroumboulopoulus, 38, who is new to the sport of hockey. He did not start skating until his 30s, he says he’s only become active in the last part of his life. “I’m not a physical guy”.

This hockey tournament has become an important part of his social life since he spends most of his time working between The Hour, The Strombo Show (radio) and the various charities he’s involved with.

Stroumboulopoulus is originally from Malton, Ont. and started his career at a radio station in British Coloumbia. After moving to Toronto, he was hired by MuchMusic and quickly became one of their most popular VJs. With his confidence and directness, Stroumboulopoulus was immediately liked by MuchMusic’s target audience - teenagers. Although he left MuchMusic in 2004, music remains an important part of his life.

“I play piano, I’ve been playing for about 25 years but I don’t want to be in a band where piano exists. If I was going to be in a band it would be much nastier. I like to listen, I’m a receptive person. I like to take things in and let them kind of float around in my mind or my heart for a while and hopefully after some sort of gestation period they become something else. I never know what it will become,” he says about experiencing a song for the first time.

He uses a musical analogy to speak of the collective experience, a concept which is important to him as a journalist.

“I can listen to a song in Toronto; you could listen to it in St. Catharines. Somebody who wrote a song in a town that doesn’t exist anymore, in a country that nobody remembers. He wrote it about a girl that no one remembers, 200 years before our parents were born and yet somehow, that song perfectly describes how you’re feeling tonight and that’s magic,”  he says, “There’s no other art that does that and that’s the genius of a song to me, it can be individual and collective at the same time.” 

Stroumboulopoulus says he is not so concerned with the experiences of the individual, he cares more about the collective experience, his “whole life has been about the collective experience.”  For Stroumboulopoulus, hockey is another example of this.

“That’s why I love hockey so much because when there’s a big goal the whole country loses their mind, that’s the collective experience.”

On The Hour, Stroumboulopoulus interviews an extensive variety of people, from Hollywood starlets, to authors and politicians. He says that objectivity is obviously an important attribute to a journalist but it is important only in the right interview.

“In some interviews, the real strength of [it] is your ability to be passionate about the subject and try to use your passion to bring something out of the person.”

He speaks of this difference between interviewing a Hollywood star and a politician. “Actors don’t owe you anything, politicians owe you everything.

When people grill Hollywood stars I sometimes laugh at them and I think why does that person have to answer your f---ing questions, because they don’t. The onus is on you to make it engaging, they don’t owe you shit. But the leader of the federal party, owes you everything.”

Stroumboulopoulous mentions trying not to “layer an interview” with his emotional values because it is not about what he believes but about what the story is about, he says. Stroumboulopoulus is certainly a confident presenter and this comes across in his interviews but, he says, it is important to leave ego out of the picture.

He says a little bit of swagger is OK when speaking to the camera but “If you didn’t write the record then don’t act like it. A lot of times in interviews people carry themselves with a cockiness that you just don’t need. You didn’t make Pulp Fiction so don’t act like it, you didn’t write OK Computer so don’t act like it. They did. Respect the art.”

When Stroumboulopoulus was approached to host the CBC special Love, Hate and Propaganda, profiling the methods of propaganda used in order to incite the events of the Second World War, he did not think he would be able to fit it into his busy schedule. However, after some creative shuffling it worked out that he could do the series.

“I just like things, I like knowing things. What people do isn’t as interesting to me as why they do it and Love, Hate and Propaganda shows why people did what they did.”

He says that understanding Canada’s history is important to understanding what goes on in modern politics. His passion for the political structure in Canada started at a very young age.

His mother is Greek and Stroumboulopoulus was the first member of his family born in Canada and, he says, being a child of an immigrant, your family often comes from a place where politics are important. “So politics wasn’t a separate thing, it just was. My uncle was really into it and we used to talk about politics all the time,” contributing to his development being a politically informed Canadian.

Of course, punk rock had something to do with it as well.

“I got into punk rock really early, I liked heavy metal and all that but my favourite stuff was the angry stuff. My favourite part of the angry stuff was that they were angry for a reason. Not because so-and-so broke your heart, which f---ing bores me. When Joe Strummer joined the Clash, Mick Jones had written a song called I’m So Bored With You and Joe Strummer said ‘No, let’s change the song to I’m So Bored With The USA.’ That’s the difference.” He says songs about the individual are fine but it all goes back to the “collective experience” and that is “way f---ing better to me”.

On his own involvement in the Canadian political system, Stroumboulopoulus had this to say: “I couldn’t join a party. I’m not represented by one party. I like to think that I’m too complex to represented by one party. Also the political system in this country is so bullshit right now. It’s so f---ing uninteresting to me. I mean I’m interested in the bigger story and that’s why I cover it; I do believe this country can be better. So I do my part, I go on the air regularly and say, ‘we deserve better’ hopefully there will be a whole generation of people that react.”

When asked if he would ever run politically in Canada, Stroumboulopoulus answered with an immediate no, saying he prefers to report on the situation than to be involved in it.

“And I swear too much.”

With The Hour heading into its sixth season, Stroumboulopoulus heads back to Toronto to jump headfirst into more interviews and more inspiring controversy.

“The North American apathy is kind of funny, but it’s not surprising. This is a country where there’s very little to complain about, certainly if you’re middle class and you’re white.”

The Hour airs on CBC weeknights at 11 pm, for more information visit www.cbc.ca/thehour/.