"Before Car Talk, NPR was formal, polite, cautious...even stiff."
Doug Berman
Car Talk is the most important program in the history of public radio.
There, I said it.
Now, I didn't say it was the best show. The car guys themselves would laugh that off. And I didn't say it was the most influential. It didn't spawn legions of glasses-wearing hipster storytellers like Ira Glass's This American Life, or define the radio newsmagazine like All Things Considered.
But it was the most important because it completely flipped upside-down the idea of what public radio was supposed to sound like. In doing so, it gave us our one true, top-of-the-charts hit. That's why losing Tom Magliozzi to Alzheimer's Disease this week is such a blow to us.
For young public radio listeners, the millennials who grew up strapped into car seats in the back of the Volvo, conscripted into riding along with Susan Stamberg instead of Howard Stern, Click and Clack were just a part of what you expect out of public radio. Older guys with funny accents, laughing a bit too hard at things that weren't all that funny, until Mom and Dad started laughing, then you too.
Those kids don't realize that public radio before Car Talk didn't sound like this at all.
"Before Car Talk, NPR was formal, polite, cautious….even stiff," said Doug Berman, Car Talk's long-time producer in a loving obit on the show's page. "By being entirely themselves, without pretense, Tom and Ray single-handedly changed that, and showed that real people are far more interesting than canned radio announcers."
Newer listeners also don't realize that in the 1990s, public radio's finances were defined by Car Talk. Our Saturday morning fundraisers were events. Stations like ours literally couldn't get enough volunteers to answer all the phone calls of support that would come in during that one hour. It was the most listened-to, the most pledged-for program. The thing we counted on to make our fundraising goals.
The money that we -- and hundreds of other stations -- raised during Car Talk in its heyday helped to bankroll an expansion of public radio's mission to cover news. It helped us grow and react to a changing world after 9/11. It helped provide the financial underpinnings of Ira Glass's experimentation, and that of RadioLab and Planet Money. It helped me start a daily talk show eight years ago.
Even years after it had ceded its spot atop the public radio hit list to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, a show engineered to be a Saturday companion to its success, and even after it had gone into a state of perpetual reruns, with callers asking questions about cars that had long since gone to the junkyard, Car Talk remained one of the most enduringly popular shows on public radio. Now, I largely agreed with Ira Glass that public radio would be better served by investing in new hit shows instead of "best of" classics. But the numbers don't lie. People still love Car Talk, and they will even after one of its voices leaves the air forever.
But why? Why did a show that was completely different from anything we've put on the air before or since, have such an impact? In part, it was the Everyman appeal. A show for many listeners who never spent even one other hour of their week with our programming, but just had to listen in to laugh.
And yes, it was the laughter. Tom's cackles and snorts were a kind of virtuoso performance in infectious inflection.
But really, I think Car Talk worked for public radio because it wasn't about cars or comedy. It was about something we don't associate much with public radio programming: family. It was about listening to two siblings who reveled in each other's company so much, that you couldn't help but want to call your own brother, or sister, or favorite uncle, and laugh with them.
When a show is about family, over time it lets you in to that family as well. We all feel like we lost a brother in Tom Magliozzi. As someone whose livelihood depends on what he helped to build, he's kind of a giant. A really big brother.
On this week's Car Talk, Ray Magliozzi will honor his older brother with his own memories, and his favorite Tom moments from the show. You can listen at 10:00 am on Saturday and Sunday on WNPR, and on their weekly podcast.