IN THE FALL of 2007, as The Hour was showing signs of becoming a watchable TV show, George Stroumboulopoulos crashed his motorcycle.

The collision,in Strombo’s parlance,was a “high-quality”one.He had hit a patch of gravel at high speed, and his body went careening into oncoming traffic. The result was a broken collarbone, bruises like ink stains and months of recovery.

He was lucky to be alive, and he knew it. But instead of retiring his motorbike to the shed, Strombo went the opposite route.He took up motorcycle racing.

“The accident didn’t put things into perspective, it didn’t make me think life is fleeting,because I already knew all that stuff.We all do.I just got hurt so badly, I thought,‘Jesus Christ, I need to be better at this,’”Strombo says.

The experience was a microcosm of what had been happening on a larger scale. In the early going, The Hour, Strombo’s nightly evening talk show on CBC,had been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. Snappy montages of the day’s news, condensed and simplified for teens, came across as glib and condescending, suggesting that young people couldn’t understand complex news stories.

As a host and interviewer, Strombo had difficulty finding his rhythm, and the segments that surrounded his interviews consisted of misplaced cheekiness while more serious journalistic pieces tended to miss the mark entirely.

“Most people,” Strombo says frankly, “didn’t think we’d last the month.” Voices within the CBC began calling for Strombo’s head. “A boy doing a man’s job,”wrote the Globe and Mail’s John Doyle. But instead of calling it quits, Strombo decided to get better.

This is, after all, a man who nearly died in a motorcycle wreck and decided to ride his motorcycle even faster afterwards. “There was a point, when I was sitting at the starting grid,and it’s my first race ever,and I wasn’t nervous,” he says. “I was in all business mode.”

That same cool efficiency led to the resurrection of The Hour. Strombo focused on what had been his meal ticket since he got his first start on CFRB radio: his ability to connect with the stars.

The best known of Strombo’s interviews, a limo ride with Bono, came in 2003,when he was a VJ at MuchMusic.

Back then,he was known for being the VJ who knew as much about the various waves of blues music as he did about human rights abuses in China and he wasn’t afraid to make his views known.

Strombo interviewed Bono in his limo en route to the Toronto airport. At the end, Bono uttered five resounding words: “George, I am a fan.”

Today, The Hour survives on Strombo’s ability to make the most vaunted celebrities seem like real people.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart works because the host is hilarious and the segments are funny. But you’d never hear Jon Stewart ask Howie Mandel about Pakistan. Strombo now has the ability to be both funny and wise.

“There’s a reason the prime minister doesn’t want to come on my show. It’s not because he thinks it’s going to be a softball interview,” says Strombo, with his typical confidence. “He doesn’t want to come on because he knows that, if I get going, I get going.”

The Hour has become the top media draw in Canada for celebrities, evidenced by the roster of A-list guests who have sat in the famous red chair: Sarah Palin, LeBron James,Tom Cruise, Hillary Clinton, Morgan Freeman, Michael Moore and hundreds more.

“The best way to do an interview is to do lots of them so that you have experience, you can see nuances in people’s personality,” says Strombo, who adds that the show has built good faith not only in Canada,but with the big decision makers in Hollywood and parts even further far flung.

“The people who sit in that other red chair know what they’re going to get and what’s expected of them,” he says. “Which is this is not a light and fluffy talk show. This is a chance to sit down and be a human being and have a human conversation, and people know that now.…They ask to come on our show as much as we ask them,” he says.

But despite the lengths the show has come — six Gemini Awards, including three for best host — Strombo can’t bear to watch that painful first season.

“To get to a point where we’ve done nearly 800 episodes and we’re on a network, no one thought that was possible,” he says. “So we hold that first season close to our heart. But I know, if I go back and watch that first season, I’ll be like, ‘That was so bad!’”

Learning from one’s mistakes is, of course, a sign of maturity, and that maturity shows in Strombo’s recent narration work for the CBC.

As narrator of the six-part Second World War documentary Love, Hate & Propaganda, he showed a deft knowledge of the material.

In conversation, he demonstrates something just as unusual for a Gen-X icon in black jeans: the ability to deal with criticism.

“Like I said, a lot of people have written nice stuff about me,and people have written critical stuff about me,” he says, “but now I’ve come to realize that it comes down to taste.”

Taste is something Strombo seems to be exhibiting more and more of these days.

Besides his duties as host of the influential radio program The Strombo Show, which recently moved to CBC Radio 2 after a long life on 102.1 the Edge, the omnipresent media personality will also pop up this month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Alongside Olivia Newton-John, Hawksley Workman and Nelly Furtado, Strombo has a small role in Score: A Hockey Musical. The movie is the Toronto International Film Festival’s opening night film.

Even though Strombo is known as a music guy, he says the film’s song,skate and smooch concept was a little hard to grasp.

“I love hockey, but I can’t stand musicals. So I thought, ‘Well, that’s going to be interesting,’” he says. “But it was about the filmmaker, Michael McGowan.When I heard he was directing it, I thought, ‘OK, that’ll be good.’”

During the course of our interviews, Strombo spent a lot of time talking about motorbikes. He knows he nearly lost everything in the fall of 2007, when his accident left him lying in traffic on the wrong side of the road. Strombo survived his crash that day, just like he survived the rocky start of The Hour. Today, he sounds like a man who is enjoying the ride.

“The biggest change from then to now is that I still have lots of questions,but I recognize now that not everything has answers,” he says. “I understand the journey better than I did before.”