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LIVE FROM RADIOLAND
By Judith Yaross Lee
Watching A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION on television -- with its obvious script readings, uncostumed performers, and headphoned staff -- emphasizes the old saw that TV is merely radio with pictures. Fans may divide over whether the music, skits, or monologues define the show, but they share a love of the radio parodies that drive its humor. Mock commercials and public service announcements (PSAs) crown Garrison Keillor's weekly live broadcast, which revives the old-time radio serial, variety show, and studio audience. Commercials named and punctuated each segment of American radio programming during its heyday, and Keillor sees their absence from public radio as a void to be filled. Mock ads and PSAs invite listeners into an imaginary world -- call it Radioland -- where products have magical powers, English majors are admired above everyone else, and goods not worth having yield to feelings that money cannot buy. ("Some people may think it's odd that I stand up and advertise a product that you can't buy in the stores," he conceded in the Powdermilk Biscuit spot from September 18, 1982. "It makes sense to me. It just means you have to try harder, that's all it means.") Mock ads also let Keillor experiment with characters, dramatic situations, sound effects, and themes in sync with the times and his moods. So it's not surprising that Lake Wobegon and many other elements of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION grew from ads for various imaginary products and services, especially those touted by an entrepreneur named Jack.
In 1971, this indefatigable (imaginary) businessman -- a caricature of the midwestern go-getter -- began sponsoring Garrison Keillor's MORNING PROGRAM for KSJN-St. Paul, the flagship station of what is now Minnesota Public Radio. Jack's ambitions were exceeded only by his chutzpah, and Keillor's deadpan made the irony delicious. Jack's Real Estate Office marketed wooded lots next to Jack's Service Station and Men's Clothing Store, located on a puddle aptly called Lake Woebegone, as enjoying the ultimate in lakeshore safety: "at no place is the water more than three feet deep. Don't risk possible family tragedy at other locations." Keillor and his audience collaborated on this comic fantasy for nearly three years before he began live broadcasts on July 6, 1974. By 1982, when the show went national, Lake Wobegon emerged from inside jokes in ads for Jack's Warm Coat ("lined with over a hundred pounds of Jack's Hot Rocks"), Jack's School of Announcing, Jack's Toast House (predecessor of the Chatterbox Cafe), and other enterprises as an uncharming example of small-town America (upper midwestern variety). Local audiences considered the Jack's spots so central to APHC's comic formula that their disappearance led to complaints that Keillor "canceled Jack because his products have no appeal to the fancy-schmantzy easterners who now listen to the show." In fact, easterners and casual listeners often missed the Minnesota lore in the Jack's spots, which combined a fondness and scorn that fudged the question of whether "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve" was backwards or classic.
Radio rhetoric most obviously inspires serial melodramas such as "Guy Noir, Private Eye." Keillor has raised these parodies to a state of high camp since "The Powdermilk Biscuit Radio Theater" of the first live broadcast, mainly by joking around with radio's reliance on sound. Thirty-two years later, this comic vein still yields gold. The clichéd jazz piano and hard-boiled voice of Guy Noir satirize the era of speakeasies and Dashiell Hammett stories, while seasonal sound effects, from whistling winds to rumbling motorboats, link listeners' lives with life in Radioland. Yet most sounds are redundant, their excess comically undercutting the melodrama. In the episode from December 7, 2002, for instance, sounds track Noir's progress after he's hired by a rich New York fan of a radio show called HOME ON THE PRAIRIE to prevent its being made into a film. First come the honking traffic and a pseudo-sentimental recording by Flem and Bart (the Brooten Boys from HOME ON THE PRAIRIE), a lament about a dead dog to the tune of that preschool favorite, "Go Tell Aunt Rhody."
Top banner photos: Meryl Streep, cast of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (photo by Dana Nye), and Garrison Keillor (photo by Joe Sinnott-Thirteen/WNET). |
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Tanglewood is the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home (photo by Michael Lutch). |
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Members of the Hopeful Gospel Quartet. |
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The program is not available on VHS or DVD. |
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