100: Radio
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From W.B. E. Z. Chicago in Public Radio International. It's his American life. I'm out of a glass. And let me do something that I've never done before. Let me just reach out and retune your radio for you. You're on the air at WPLP. Good evening, Bob. I'm going to write more than one letter. I'm going to write this thing. I'm going to write the chamber of commerce. Basketball team. I always wanted to go to Miami High. You ever flip through the dial? Pass the stations that you listen to all the time. Just steam up the dial slowly from station to station. Waiting for something. You don't even know what. Something. Anything. Something like this. A radio signal whose source is impossible to figure out. And the intimacy of one voice. What could be more personal? Even in another language. Thanks a moment. I'm happy to talk to you, Bani. Bani, too. Hello, I'm hello. I'm hello to you, Bani, and Rose. I'm happy to you. Okay, I'm singing to you. I call a command. I call a command. I call a command. It's recording off the radio is one of those things that I recorded and then was passed from person to person to person. Finally it ended up on a compilation tape of radio moments put together by radio station WFMU in New Jersey. And that's how we got it. By anybody's best guess it's a radio station in Northern Canada. The speakers in a way. And here's a little hazier. Because they're talking about a strike over and over on this tape. It's possible that this is a situation where the regular radio staff is on strike and these are the replacement workers or it's possible that these are the regular workers who are about to go on strike, head up at the end of the road. Or maybe that's not the story at all. It's actually one of the things that I like about this. Like a lot of good radio. Part of what is so appealing about it is what it leaves you wondering and thinking about when it's over. So, we're going to be talking about the music. And we're going to be talking about the music. And we're going to be talking about the music. And we're going to be talking about the music. Can you imagine tuning your radio, you know, along, and stumbling upon this, you know, just stumbling on this? It's so ephemeral. This moment just happening and passing and about to evaporating to nothing forever. And that's part of what makes radio different from other media, I think. That quality where it can seem so small and so fleeting. He and Brown used to host the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show Sunday Morning and he was very great to listen to. He was smart and pretentious and this great interviewer and writer. And when the show was revamped and he was taken off the earth's host, he read this little radio essay on his last day about the intimacy, you know, the intimacy of radio, the false intimacy of radio. That feeling that we get together every week, you know, you and me. I mean, literally, that's what it feels like. It feels like you and me, you and me, even though we don't know each other at all. Anyway, months passed after he ended that job and we wanted to get him on our show on This American Life. And I caught him up and he was not brusque, but business-like, very proper formal. And it sounds ridiculous to say. I feel sort of silly saying it, but it was hard not to feel a little strange about it. It was hard not to feel a little bit like here's this friend who went suddenly cold. And I would not feel that way about Ted Koppel or Peter Jennings or anybody else who have ever seen on television. I can tell you that. There is just something about radio. It's more personal. Well, this is a hundredth episode of This American Life, which we're going to program, which is a theme. And for our hundredth show, we bring you an hour of stories about the medium in which we work, program on radio. What makes it great when it's great, what makes it terrible when it's terrible, which it often is. At one of our programs today, Brigadoon, searching for an illegal radio station in Miami that keeps
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