How radio reinvigorated the former TV host known as Ed the Sock

Normally, it would be a stretch to compare someone’s career trajectory to that singular sock. You know, the one that goes missing but somehow always turns up. At the back of a dresser drawer. Behind the dryer. Inside a gym bag. Or, in Ed’s case, a radio station in Oshawa.

It’s a fitting metaphor, really. Because Ed, after all, is a sock. And like the nonsentient version, this sock always manages to reappear.

Ed the Sock, the gravelly voiced, caustic puppet that launched his career on community TV some 25 years ago, with stops — and restarts — at almost as many stations and platforms as that rumoured Crosstown LRT, is back. Again. His latest gig is overnights at 94.9 The Rock, taking calls and texts, bantering with listeners, dishing on people, politics and pop culture — in between back-selling songs of Billy Idol, Nickelback, Nirvana and the like.

Nirvana is also how the man inside Ed describes his new gig — while subtly deriding the medium for which he is best remembered.

“I had determined that television was just not the place that I grew up in,” said Steven Kerzner, diplomatically, via Zoom.

His surly puppet counterpart remains synonymous with MuchMusic, which he left in 2008. Ed was definitely that station’s most sarcastic — and, arguably, most entertaining — host. Today’s incarnation of what is now simply called “Much” serves as frequent cannon fodder on the weekly talk show Kerzner (well, Ed) hosts at Sauga 960 AM with his wife and long-time creative partner, Liana.

“The people who live (in TV) now … it’s not the place where I could feel comfortable doing what I do best.”

Live radio, he suggested, instead delivers “a feeling of authenticity and community and immediacy that used to exist in the television I produced … a sense of connectivity that I had been missing. Doing radio really woke me up. It reinvigorated the Ed in me.”

But hang on. How does a former acid-tongued TV personality, whose appeal was largely built upon his appearance, transition to an audio-only platform? “Ed is more about his opinions,” Kerzner asserted. “People go to him because they want to know what he has to say. Not because they want to be amused by a puppet with green hair and a cigar.”

But back to what Kerzner says he does best — or, at least, what first earned his boundary-pushing sock a loyal following in the late ’90s — and how that would play to audiences in 2023. Because it’s likely even the executives at Citytv who greenlit “Ed & Red’s Night Party,” which ran for more than 10 years, would today cringe during the puppet’s innuendo-filled kibitzing with scantily-clad female porn actors (and sometimes little people) wading in a hot tub.

Kerzner, 52, does recognize what society now deems anathema. The hot tub bits, he said, were “a product of the times. Burlesque … a rejection of TV conventions.” And while he acknowledges, “What show can you do today that was exactly the way it was 20 years ago?” he emphatically insists that Ed has always been a feminist.

“Those women were never objects,” he said, stressing that they were paid for their appearances. “They had names, they were spoken to. They had agency. It was fun. Nobody was hurt.”

Doug Elliott, the program director at Rock 94.9, was aware of Ed’s polarizing personality when he put the puppet on his station. (It’s unclear who initially approached who. Elliott said Kerzner came to him; Kerzner said it’s the other way around.) But he’d also observed Ed’s evolution.

“Over the years, Ed has, um …” Here Elliott paused, searching for the right words: “the character, through self-education and everything has really developed. Ed’s enlightened, very well-rounded.” Elliott said he had no misgiving about his new hire for an overnight shift. “He’s a great communicator. And this is an opportunity to stimulate an audience that’s genuinely been ignored.”

And to be fair, Ed (and, by default, Steven) has long embodied progressive opinions. “We were pro gay marriage, pro gay rights, pro trans people,” Kerzner pointed out. “I also have a hard and fast rule to never mock anyone’s faith. And we used comedy (to express this position).”

He’s also a big booster of pandemic safety protocols and vaccination, posting a video of Ed gently confronting anti-mandate protesters at Queen’s Park, which would make both camps on that contentious topic laugh heartily.

And while Ed now uses radio to wax heatedly on many of the tropes exploited by private radio — (so. much. Trump. ugh) — there are also a lot of gentle, and still funny, more personable moments, which an overnight live show affords. Like the listener expounding on why he enjoys his graveyard shift and bosses at the steel factory. Or the Amazon worker who assured Ed that, yes, he’s permitted breaks so doesn’t have to pee in a bottle while doing the job. Those kinds of real conversations — especially the silly ones — are a refreshing tonic against a social media landscape fraught with vitriolic shouting.

“I call it my nighttime neighbourhood,” said Kerzner with a smile, adding that his new bosses are the most supportive he’s ever had — indicating, perhaps, that he, too, has mellowed since his confrontational days in TV. The overnight shift, he said, “is such a feeling of another universe. People out there are their own community.”

Liana, who works as a peer counsellor and hosts a show on mental health at Sauga 960, agrees that Ed has evolved.

“I now need less runway to convince him,” she said about nudging him toward more modern thinking, especially when it comes to women and gender. “The stuff that was considered funny (early in their careers) just isn’t funny anymore.” She’s not, however, convinced that he’s softened, necessarily. “But has he matured? Well, I’d certainly hope so in 20 years.”

All this personal growth begs the question: could Ed not be retired to that sock drawer, leaving Steven — as Steven — to then assume the studio mantle?

“There’s lots of Stevens out there,” said Kerzner. And Ed allows him licence that a human voice can’t. “Ed is someone who is understood, recognized.

“Why would I put aside years of work and earned attention and affection to put the focus on me? That would be a foolish ego move.”

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