I guess the best way to respond to the OP is to ask if he or she has listened to late night radio in general -- a good deal of it is extremely boring, at least for me. There are tons of political shows that re-discuss the same things that were discussed on talk radio shows during the day. Then there are sports shows. And the home fix-it shows. And toward morning there are a couple of auto problem shows. Oh, and lets not forget the popular financial self-help shows or the psychology self-help shows. I will absolutely grant you that some local markets have very interesting shows, but not much in my particular area.
So, C2C is pretty much the only game in town if you like radio that focuses on topics that are off-the-beaten path. As poor a host as I believe George is, some of the guests are very good. I listen to the show because I have an interest in some of the topics that are covered. It's kind of like when I used to religiously watch the McGlaughlin Group on public TV -- I loved the show, but I didn't really like John McGlaughlin (for various reasons that I won't go into here.) But I very much enjoyed hearing what the rest of the panel had to say. Would it have been a better show with a different host? IMO, yes, but I still watched despite not liking the host.
To answer your question in another way, let me also say that there is something perverse about listening to George conduct a C2C interview. So, why listen, you ask? Well, because I believe Edgar Allan Poe was entirely correct when he said that humans are drawn to perversity in -- well, in a perverse way. Humans sometimes do bad things that they shouldn't and that they know are wrong because they *have* to, because they are drawn to perversity. It's like when you drive by a bad car accident and you know you shouldn't look and you don't want to look but you do anyway. And later you are sorry you did. This is the best reason I can give for listening to GN on Coast to Coast.
There is something to be said about listening to a GN interview of someone who could, in other circumstances, be a very interesting guest. It is like the radio version of a train wreck (sorry MV) or the auto accident mentioned above. And when you see (listen to) something like that, you naturally want to TALK about it so you can get it off your chest. This is the place to come because you will find someone else who was struck by exactly the same bit of monstrosity courtesy of GN as you were...
I think many of us also harbor a secret hope that someone -- SOMEONE -- ANYONE at C2C or Premiere actually reads some of the material at this forum because, believe it or not, there is more than a grain of constructive criticism here. I'll give you an example: Back when I first joined this group, I wrote a long description about why I disliked GN as a host and why I was unhappy with the direction C2C had taken. In that post, I discussed how upsetting it was that a guest would so often be going in a *very* interesting direction only to be brought up short by the break. OK, so it's radio, I have to expect that. So GN would say, "Guest, guest, we'll have to hold it right there and come back to this after the break." Then we'd have the break and C2C would come back and GN would ask some completely unrelated question, never to return to the topic that was so interesting at the break. This made me want to scream for obvious reasons, and this is obviously one of the marks of a very bad host. It's like watching a really great movie and then you are brought up short because the DVR cut off the last ten minutes! After I made that post, George pretty much stopped doing that. With rare exception, GN now returns to the topic if he promises to do so before the break. Now, did that stop because Tommy or someone at Premiere read my post? I doubt it; I hope the producers were smart enough to already be on this because, after all, it should have come to their notice since it happened so frequently.
Finally, I think some of us come here because we have come to regard C2C in many ways as OUR show. I began listening to Art many years ago when I lived in Vegas -- back when he was doing political talk. I was there as the show transformed into what it was for so many years with Art at the helm. A good many of the folks who comprised the audience for that show have long since given up, but a few of us hang on. For the most part, though, George's audience is different than Art's was, though demographics may not have changed all that much. (I have no idea one way or the other.) This is something you can't get at by analyzing demographics, though -- you can only get a handle on it by listening to callers. Many here know exactly what I mean. For those of us long-timers, I guess there is a part of us that has a hard time letting go, even though we know we should. For my part, I have solved that by only listening to the podcasts. This lets me get rid of the commercials and the bumper music (I know, I know, *everyone* likes the bumper music, except me, I guess. I just don't like hearing the same 25 songs played night after night for ten years!) It also lets me skip sections of the show that don't interest me. And, most importantly, it allows me to fast forward during times that George is particularly bad.
So, there are lots of very good reasons for listening to the show and then coming here to bitch about it. I think most of it is pretty much human nature -- nothing here that people don't do in just about every other aspect of their lives!
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