On Oct 15 Prarie Home Companion is going to start with a new host, Chris Thile.  Garrison Keillor had been doing it for 43 years.  He deserves a rest. Garrison wrote and performed for two hours every Saturday.  The show also toured across America and did cruises.

I discovered PHC around 1978.   I tuned in at the end of the show during the News from Lake Woebegone.  This guy was talking about Pastor Inqvist and the Chatterbox Cafe.  The story ended with Lake Woebegone where the women are strong, the men are goodloooking and the children are above average.

This was before the Internet so all I had to go on was Saturday night, KUHF, and it ended at 7 PM.  I tuned in the next week at 6 PM and he was reading hello cards from the audience to people that were listening that couldn’t make it to the show because of distance, jobs, or children.

During that hour I heard musicians that were unknown to me like Jeanne Redpath and Leo Kottke.  I learned more about artists like Chet Atkins and Doc Watson.  An 18-year old boyon the North side of Houston doesn’t have any friends that listen to public radio so I didn’t have anybody to talk to about the show.

I could talk to the guys in the after work bar near me about the musicians.  The Namedropper was a small (1500 square feet) bar within walking distance of my condo.  The patrons were mostly in their 50’s and owned machine shops or car repair places in the neighborhood.

I learned to appreciate storytellers and the craft of radio comedy.  I silently cheered at Julie Walters’ line in Educating Rita about Peer Gynt.  She was given an exam question about how she would solve the staging problems of the play.   All she answered was ‘Do it on the radio’.  When Michael Caine wants more she takes the paper and writes Ibsen’s quote about it being a play of voices.

I’m afraid that the new version will cut out most of the skits and be a music show,  I’ll admit there’s not a lot of mainstream radio venues for bluegrass but there are even less for spoken word.

Podcasts are the coming thing but they don’t have the water cooler cache.  They are like the cool foreign movie you found on the bottom shelf at the video store.  Cars are starting to get the web but the radios are still there.

I wish Chris well but I’m not going to go to a lot of trouble to tune in to the new show.  The format will probably change.   Garrison  tweaked the format for PHC for probably 20 years.  I don’t think the new format will be perfect out of the box.