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One night, back in
the late eighties, Richard was bored and restless. He casually flipped on the
TV and had one of those rare life-defining moments. The late-movie playing was
Network, an over-the-top black comedy about a deranged ex-TV-anchor
whose ravings about geo-politics and media lies are exploited for profit by a TV
Network. Peter Finch's portrayal of the brilliantly unhinged Howard Beale and
his immortal rant, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!
shattered Richard’s somnolence. “I want to be Howard Beale,” he thought to
himself. So
captivated was he by Beale’s character that he quit his job at an engineering
consulting firm and enrolled in the Radio and Television Program at Centennial
College. For the first time in his life, Richard was on a mission. A few months after graduation he landed a job at CFRB where he would spend the next decade working with and learning from some of Canada’s broadcasting heavyweights: Ed Needham, Brian Linehan, Michael Coren and John Oakley. After years of booking guests, generating topics and spinning stories for other hosts, Richard had forgotten his own voice, his own opinions and he found himself longing for a creative outlet. Then in the late nineties, after several years as John’s occasional on-air side-kick, the Program Director relented and gave Richard his own show Sunday nights at eleven. The show had an inauspicious beginning as Richard floundered attempting to develop his own style. On-air, he shared intimate and embarrassing moments from his life and engaged in plenty of self-loathing. He surrounded himself with a strange cast of regulars which included a schizophrenic psychiatric patient and an Elvis impersonator who believed he was the reincarnation of the King’s stillborn twin brother. The ratings were horrible. The show seemed destined for cancellation.
Richard began to believe that human history was nothing more than a series of stage-managed events callously orchestrated by unelected oligarchs who operated in almost complete secrecy. Democracy was an illusion and a complicitous media was manufacturing reality which was then spoon fed to a distracted and drug-addled sheeple. We were living in a nightmare; pawns in some kind of spiritual warfare, and our souls the ultimate prize. Was this all a psychotic episode or a cleansing moment of clarity? Richard felt powerless and was overcome with cynicism and a deep mistrust of corporations, large news gathering organizations and government. One night he sought solace and escape at a local video store. He rented a movie he hadn’t seen or thought about in years. He sat back, flipped it on and suddenly, there he was staring into the abyss like some mad prophet; unshaven, his hair and trench coat dripping with rain. “All I know is, you've got to get mad.” Beale thundered. “You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddamn it. My life has value."
Immediately after 9/11, Richard started asking uncomfortable questions on-air. How did the passports of Mohammed Atta and Satam al-Sugam, both on Flight 11, manage to survive an inferno capable of melting steel only to be found conveniently on the street near the World Trade Center? Why wasn’t NORAD, which monitors 7000 flights a day, able to track the four aberrant flights? Suddenly the show quickly developed a dedicated following.
In 2003, Richard left CFRB to produce a morning show at another Toronto radio station. He continued to host his own popular Conspiracy talk show there on Friday nights. Then in the Fall of 2006, Richard's wife, The Mighty Aphrodite, gave birth to twin boys. Suddenly the cosmic tumblers where in play and Richard's return to CFRB seemed imminent. And here's why: Zachary and North were born, October 10th, at ten minutes past ten in the morning. That's right...The tenth month, the tenth day, the tenth hour and the tenth minute. 1010 1010
In late December 2006, Richard was asked to return to CFRB to host "The Richard Syrett Show" four nights a week. |
About this time
he was introduced to another strange man who would have a profound influence on
Richard’s career path and world view. Nelson Thall was a frenetic egg-head who
spoke in inscrutable riddles. He was a media scientist, a one-time associate of
Marshall McLuhan and a long-time JFK assassination researcher. One night over
drinks, Thall reached into his briefcase and pulled out a well-thumbed hefty
tome: “Tragedy and Hope; A History of the World in Our Time” by Carroll Quigley.
“Here, read this,” he said. Richard devoured it in a week and following that
read Quigley’s Anglo-American Establishment and The Evolution of
Civilizations, How the World Really Works, by Alan B. Jones,
and Anthony C. Sutton’s two essential works Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
and Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler.
The Sunday night
broadcast was quickly revamped. Elvis and the psych patient were gone. He began
interviewing rogue investigative journalists, former intelligence officers
anxious to spill their guts, ex-bagmen for the shadow government, scientists
and inventors who claimed they were sitting on free energy technology, alleged
victims of Mind Control experiments, exorcists, remote viewers and healers.
Shakespeare, he realized, had nailed it. “There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
At its zenith,
The Nightside with Richard Syrett on CFRB earned a 13 share in the BBM
ratings. And in 2002 a feature on Richard appeared on the front page of the
Arts section in the Globe and Mail. 