“What the hell?” It’s the first question George Stroumboulopoulos asks Belinda Stronach, his first guest on The Hour’s third-season launch. It’s the only prime-time interview Stronach has agreed to do since the Tie Domi scandal. When Stroumboulopoulos poses the question, he leans forward, wiggling a pen in his fingers, casting his affectionate, sad-dog eyes on her. Stronach responds stiffly with some platitude about working hard in Parliament. Producers in headsets stand by, clenching their jaws, looking tense. Stroumboulopoulos pushes Stronach, but gently, tapping her on the knee with his pen: “I’m not gonna give you a free pass on this.” His charm works. She relaxes, if only briefly, treating him to a somewhat more worthwhile sound bite: “As you know, George, nobody—nobody—can break up a happy marriage.”

During the commercial break, Stroumboulopoulos bounds toward the studio audience—which today includes his mom, his friends, and his long-time girlfriend, CBC producer Jasmin Tuffaha. “Does anybody need anything? Want anything?” he asks, but is pulled away by the makeup person for a touch-up before he gets an answer. While his nose is dabbed, he stands obediently still, but with the distracted restlessness of a schoolkid getting suited up by a parent for the playground. When he’s done, he leaps back onstage to introduce some newsy bits, then transitions to a memorable piece about a guy who cleans up bloody crime scenes for a living (the smell so fetid he had to shave his beard to remove the lingering stench), then on to an interview with a movie-promoting Terry Gilliam.

Stroumboulopoulos has the intensity characteristic of the sleepless. He typically goes to bed sometime between two and five, after spending hours watching hockey, returning e-mails and listening to his iPod, and he’s in the office by nine. He also forgoes coffee (he favours Guru, an herbal energy beverage), never drinks alcohol (hasn’t had a sip for 12 years), won’t take drugs and often doesn’t get around to eating until four o’clock in the afternoon. And he’s exhausted. As proof, he points to the dark circles around his eyes, little pillows of triumph over the Monday to Friday bourgeoisie.

Like the Delta blues and punk he loves, Stroumboulopoulos is defined by extremes. He’s only tired because he’s driven by boundless energy; though his life unfolds largely in public, he claims he’s an introvert, which is like the Queen claiming she is a bohemian.

The Hour is meant to bring sex appeal to a network not known for its smoulder. The program is constructed around the magnetism of its host, and like Stroumboulopoulos, it’s dynamic, engaging, spontaneous, yet also sometimes tiring in its impatient velocity. Unlike The National’s warm-milk bedtime pacing, the show pulses with a Ritalin-generation rhythm, edited with split-second cuts, moving anxiously from serious interviews about torture in Zimbabwe to banter about TomKat. Stroumboulopoulos has been cast as the poster boy for a new and aggressively with-it CBC: billboards of the black-clad ex-VJ panel every corner of town. But his talent for television lies precisely in his anti-Corp personality. What he won’t do (he won’t change his wardrobe; he won’t play the starchy anchor; he won’t take out his earrings) is winning him a meteoric career and a healthy fan base. The Hour now occupies the plum, post-Mansbridge time slot, aiming to compete with the biggies: Letterman, Leno, Jon Stewart and CSI.

Stroumboulopoulos is the quintessential To­rontonian: he is what he does, and he strives, fanatically, for that conflation. And though thoroughly at ease in front of the camera, he seems to long less for the spotlight than what the spotlight affords: the romance of a ragged, vivid existence. “I don’t have a balanced life, and I don’t want one,” he says. “I need to be erratic. I need to be driven by high highs and low lows. I want emotional range in my life. I don’t want my life to be easy. You know people say, I just want a good life. I don’t fuckin’ want a good life. What is that? I want to feel things.” And he wants the whole spectrum served up as fast as possible—before the channel changes. “The most important lyric for me is Bob Dylan’s ‘He not busy being born, is busy dying.’ So which guy do I want to be?”