Tired of TV - try RADIO!

[OpenMike]

Published: Friday, October 5, 2007
Radio often has more entertaining shows than TV
I like radio. Most of the time, I prefer it to television.

I know that sounds somewhat goofy, maybe even slightly moronic, but I truly do. When Bill and I used to rent a vacation cottage Down East in Cutler, Maine, one of the biggest attractions for me was that there was no television, but it had great radio reception. And since it was so far north in Maine, it got great programs from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that I had never heard before, including a little program called "This American Life" that has since become a huge success and garnered all sorts of broadcasting awards.

I don't like all radio. I like music, I like some interview shows and I like quiz shows. I enjoy "A Prairie Home Companion," and I love "Selected Shorts," which is a radio program from Public Radio International that has fabulous actors and actresses reading great short stories. I cannot forget the thrill I had when driving back from northern New Hampshire one evening, feeling totally sick of driving, only to tune in to the local radio station and hear a mellifluous voice read Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil." (It's a great story about potatoes, and one of my favorites.) It was my shortest long drive home ever, my brain focused on taters instead of the highway bedlam surrounding me.

I like to listen to shows such as "Splendid Table" and "Lost and Found Sound."

I'm often intrigued by "This I Believe." What I like is to hear voices telling me stories. And usually, if I hear one good story, I tune in often.

That's what happened to me with "This American Life." I heard it, fell in love with the concept – each week there's a theme, usually explored by three or four writers – and then I ventured into the online archives and listened to all the earlier shows I had missed. What a gift this was to me. It took me months to hear the entire archive. I finally printed out a list and checked them off. Some I listened to twice, they were so good.

And now I have a new obsession. It's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me," the NPR news quiz. I listen to it every week.

The structure of "Wait, Wait" in my opinion, is genius. There is a host, Peter Sagal, an official judge and scorekeeper, Carl Kasell (his voice on your answering machine is the prize if you win one of the games), and three panelists from the stable of celebrities, who vary every week. The panelists currently include Roy Blount Jr., Tom Bodett, Amy Dickinson, Adam Felber, Kyrie O'Connor, PJ O'Rourke, Charlie Pierce, Paula Poundstone, Roxanne Roberts and Mo Rocca. All of them are quite witty, quick on the uptake and have distinctive voices.

The program starts with a guest having to play "Who's Carl This Time?" Kasell imitates people in the news, and the guest gets to play "Guess who?" Then there's a round of current event-type news questions, where the panelists compete to win points and out-funny each other, in reverse order.

All of that's good, but my favorite segments of the show are "Bluff the Listener" and "Not My Job." For "Bluff the Listener," the guest listens to three stories delivered by the panel and tries to determine which one is true. The panelists write their own bluffs, and most of them are too good to be true. Or so you are led to believe. "Not My Job" invites a noted expert in a field on the program to ask him or her to answer questions wildly outside it. One of my all-time favorite "Not My Job" contestants was Dr. Ruth Westheimer, whose topic for "Not My Job" was "Always Pick the Answer You're Afraid Might Be True," which was about the tricks of various trades.

But once I discovered "Wait, Wait," I started going through its archive.

This may be the last bit of evidence that convinces my husband that I have finally lost it. What is the point of listening to a show about old news, of all things? I mean, news is only news when it's, well, new, so why even listen to the old stuff?

Because it's funny.

It's quite funny, actually, and, in an odd way, very comforting. There's real relief in listening to funny talk about old news and knowing that we've survived.

And that we can still laugh about it. Well, some of it.

June Lemen is a freelance writer from Nashua.
Write to her c/o The Telegraph