While preparing this post for today's posting, this blogger has NPR's most popular show running — "Car Talk" — on KUT-FM, the local NPR affiliate. On this very morning, the NY Fishwrap announced that the "Car Talk" hosts — Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka "Click & Clack, the Tappet Brothers") were ending their 35-year run on NPR. What a loss to this blogger's Saturday mornings. In nosing around in Wikipedia,this blogger learned that the Magliozzi brothers were the commencement speakers at MIT in 1999. NPR plans to run old "Car Talk" shows after Click & Clack ride off into the sunset in October 2012 to "...stop and smell the cappuccino.” No wonder they have the law firm of "Dewey, Cheatem & Howe" on retainer. If this is (fair & balanced) buffoonery, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Hosts Of "Car Talk" To Retire After 35 Years Of Automotive Banter
By Brian Stelter
Tag Cloud of the following article
For years now, after their broadcasts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of the public-radio hit “Car Talk,” have been ranking the listener calls they receive on a scale from five to one, with five being the most entertaining.
It’s an archival system that will soon be put to use.
After 35 years of weekly broadcasts and some 12,500 calls, the wisecracking brothers announced on Friday that they are retiring. “As of October, we’re not going to be recording any more new shows,” Tom, 74, wrote in a CarTalk.com column written with Ray, 63, who added, “We’ve decided that it’s time to stop and smell the cappuccino.”
NPR, formerly called National Public Radio, will keep the show going by cobbling together the best of the old segments — the “fives,” so to speak. The producers think that most listeners won’t notice or care that the show is dated. Nonetheless, the announcement on Friday saddened fans of the pair, also known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, whose freewheeling chat show — ostensibly about cars — has been a weekend tradition for decades.
Dean Cappello, the chief content officer for WNYC, the country’s largest public radio station, credited the brothers with bringing something new to the public radio sound waves: laughter.
“By laughing out loud on the radio, they gave permission for you at home to laugh too,” he said.
“Car Talk,” he said, “is about the human condition. It’s about the desperation you feel when you’re standing in front of something that doesn’t work, and how you work your way out of it.”
“Car Talk” started on WBUR, a Boston public radio station, in 1977. The brothers — both graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — gained expertise from running an auto repair shop in Cambridge, MA. They kept working there while taping the weekly shows, which NPR has been distributing nationwide for 25 years. NPR has no higher-rated show.
“I think it’s fair to say it’s going out at the top of its game,” said Eric Nuzum, the vice president of programming for NPR, in an interview on Friday afternoon.
The announcement capped several years of informal conversations between NPR executives and the Magliozzis about the future of the show, which hasn’t strayed far (if at all) from its original format.
Peter Sagal, the host of another weekly program on NPR, “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” said in a blog post on Friday that getting to know the Magliozzis over the years “made me realize that in radio, maybe in life, it’s much more important to be kind than it is to be clever. And that instead of being different every week, it’s more of a challenge, and more of a reward to your listeners, to find a way to be yourself.”
NPR does not release the “average quarter-hour” radio ratings that assess how many people are listening on a 15-minute basis. But Mr. Nuzum said that “Car Talk” out-rates “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and other radio staples.
“ ‘Morning Edition’ touches more people because it’s broadcast for many more hours,” Mr. Nuzum said. “But for a single hour of programming, this is the single most powerful program on public radio, and has been for years.” (Cumulatively, “Morning Edition” reaches about 13 million people a week; “Car Talk” reaches about 3.3 million.)
“Car Talk” has been an important fund-raising tool for the public radio organization, which relies in part on donations from listeners. Through “Car Talk,” there is even a vehicle donation program for local public radio and television stations. (The show was briefly and badly made into an animated TV series on PBS in 2008.)
“Lots of people discover public radio through ‘Car Talk,’ ” Mr. Nuzum acknowledged, and make their first contribution to the organization for that reason. But because “Car Talk” will continue to be broadcast, albeit in a remixed form, he and other NPR executives said that they don’t expect fund-raising to suffer.
In the past, repeats of “Car Talk” have rated just as highly as new episodes, they said.
“We’ve talked to listeners in the past, in surveys, and they’ve told us that to them, the only thing that matters is that it’s funny, it’s entertaining,” Mr. Nuzum said. “They don’t care when it was recorded.”
The Magliozzis are the kind of people who wouldn’t care. Famously lackadaisical, they joked on Friday that they were about to get “even lazier.”
But turning briefly serious at the end of the column on Friday, Ray said to fans: “Thank you for giving us far more of your time than we ever deserved. We love you. And know that starting this fall, for the first time, we’ll be able to sit at home, laughing at ‘Car Talk’ along with you guys on Saturday mornings.”
Mr. Nuzum did not venture a guess about how long NPR could keep distributing reproduced episodes of “Car Talk.” But the calls that are “fives” alone, he said, could make up eight years of material. Ω
[Brian Stelter writes about television and digital media for the New York Times and was the former editor of the news-related blog TVNewser.com. Stelter is featured prominently in the 2011 documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times." Stelter received a BA in Mass Communication from Towson (MD) University.]
Copyright © 2012 The New York Times Company
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