from Sean Fitz-Gerald of the National Post,

During the two months of the NHL playoffs, his days are spent in a windowless studio on the seventh floor of the CBC’s downtown Toronto headquarters. He was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt during one recent editing session. Pages torn from a steno pad covered the desk, an incomprehensible shorthand scrawled on each scrap — a cue, a note, or an inspiration for a future montage.

“I have this weird kind of head,” Thompson said. “I walk around with cinematic films going on in my mind. I’ll see a bird flying over a streetcar as a kid walks across the street, and it will be like, ‘Oh, that song!’ ”

And the songs for his montages vary. Sometimes, they are not even songs. Thompson has worked with opera and hard rock, folk music and spoken word. Canadian actor and filmmaker Jay Baruchel opened one broadcast earlier this season by reading from Two Solitudes, the 1945 novel by Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan. (Baruchel had two pages to read, and he read them fiercely: “I wish we had actually filmed him doing it,” Thompson said with a smile.)

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