Let’s Put on a Radio Show
No doubt you’re familiar with the mind of Lynda Barry. If you listen to WBEZ at all attentively, you know Glass and Covino, too. “I do these reports where I kind of hang out with people and try to capture what their lives are like on tape,” says Glass. “Like last year I spent a month and a half at Lincoln Park High School.”
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A bittersweet observation is in order. Glass, Covino, and Barry all left their mark on Heat, NPR’s valiant late-night failure that went on the air last March and leaves it October 26. Glass and Covino were loaned to New York early on to help put the woefully underfinanced and understaffed new show on its feet. Barry became a Wednesday-night regular.
The world wasn’t ready for Heat. The public didn’t flock to it, underwriters didn’t support it, and few public radio stations even bothered to carry it. So it’s important to understand that Gary Covino, for one, considers Heat far more staid than the new radio show hatching in his head. “I think what Heat turned into fairly quickly was another interview program,” he said. “A more adventurous interview program, certainly. The most adventurous show on NPR. But still, another interview program.”
If any program director at any public radio station in America has what it takes to roll the dice, it’s Ken Davis. Davis had Heat on the air in Chicago from day one (when it couldn’t be heard in New York, or in Washington either), and he kept it there from 10 PM to midnight even though jazz fans were furious. “We were dug in for the long term,” he says. “Our overnight audience went practically down to zero. We figured this would be a year and a half of audience loss that would gradually come back and eventually be bigger than what we had.”
The price tag. Murray Street Enterprise, the New York City studio that created Heat, had pretended to itself and NPR that the first year of the show would cost $900,000. Then reality set in. Its projected budget for year two was $1.4 to $1.7 million. After testing the philanthropic waters, NPR saw no way of raising more than half that much. Keeping Heat on the air, says Murray Horwitz, NPR’s director of cultural programming, would have meant squandering “all of our resources of cultural programming.”
“Every night we had to do something,” explains John Hockenberry. “We either sounded intelligent or we sounded stupid. As long as we were willing to take the gamble at the beginning of every show to sound intelligent or sound stupid, listeners went along with it.”
