The so-called Free FM talk format from CBS destroyed any chance quality entertainment talk with great personalities had to make it. In attempting to simply clone the Howard Stern sensibility and spread it around the broadcast clock, CBS shot down the possibility a real entertainment talk station with real, unique talent would ever be given a chance in the near future. In other words, the chance that Phil Hendrie’s show might one day share a frequency with talk shows similarly designed to make people laugh went from slim to none.
The reason entertainment talk does not exist to any significant degree is that programmers and general managers and COO’s have destroyed it. Talk radio today is still predominantly programmed by former news directors or news people. The stations are managed by bottom-line surrogate owners. Talk radio is as far from grasping the concept of 24 hours-a-day spoken-word satire and humor as it’s ever been. When a giant like Neil Rogers passes away with hardly any notice or commemoration from talk broadcasters you know the idea of any new, entertainment talk station speading its wings anytime soon is a hallucination. In fact, Neil was openly mocked on the Twitter feed of an affiliate of mine, a station so proud of it’s staid and stale conservative programming it used the word “conservative” in its station ID’s. Imagine a station today believing that it’s super-cutting edge to have people like Mark Levin on it’s schedule but smart, hip, funny and dominant personalities like Neil Rogers who, by the way, buried Rush in the ratings every three months for years, aren’t “conservative” enough. Well the station exists folks. And where there’s one there are more.
So the answer is a formatic split. The need for shows like mine to find radio homes that have in place imaging and promotions designed to support them is acute, extreme, desperate…I’m searching for an adequate word here….critical! There you go! Critical. Like a patient near death in the ICU, shows like mine where there’s an honest effort at making great, funny radio and not political noise will be dead soon. I have had to be content with such descriptions as “the Saturday Night Live of the radio station” or “the funny one.” Meaning, while the rest of the station does what the rest of the station does and the promotion and the marketing and the affiliation are all geared toward that, here’s Phil giving you a little bit of a break from it. But we’ll be back to the regular, fantastic stuff soon. Bullshit. Have the guts to see that I am not an anomaly or freak but a continuation of a tradition started by Steve Dahl and Howard Stern. My show is as different from Sean Hannity or Rick Roberts as Alternative Jazz is to Classic Rock. It’s a different format and should be treated as different from talk radio and in need of different stations to carry it: Real, broadcasting radio stations.