Remember Laurie MacDonald and Olga Gazdovic, of CJAD’s Saturday afternoon Laurie & Olga Show? Almost a year after getting canned from CJAD along with a bunch of others, they’re returning to the airwaves, in their old time slot (1-4pm), starting next weekend.
A (grammatically incorrect) Facebook group has already been started, and the few hundred people who joined the “Bring Back Olga and Laurie” Facebook group will probably be happy.
MacDonald and Gazdovic got their first radio job through a contest at a mall in 1995.
When they were suddenly fired in August 2009, Gazdovic told The Gazette: “It’s the nature of the business. If I had the chance, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
And so, like Ted Bird and Paul Graif in the mornings, Laurie and Olga become new voices from outside the Kahnawake community being added to Kahnawake’s community radio station. And the country music that used to dominate CKRK’s schedule is seeing less and less airtime in favour of castoffs and disgruntled former stars of the big Montreal stations.
It’s up to the community to decide how to react to this. But some were already suggesting that K103 was suffering an identity crisis, and the 250-Watt station was trying too hard to compete with the 50,000-Watt powerhouses atop Mount Royal, a battle they couldn’t possibly win, even with some names familiar to Montreal listeners.