Philosophy Talk

I wanted to like it – I longed to like it. I wish US radio had more (any!) of that kind of thing – of things like Radio 4’s Start the Week or Thinking Allowed or In Our Time, for example. But alas, I was unable to like it. It’s too like ‘Car Talk’ – too full of pointless yuks, too broken up into bits, too interrupted. Probably not their fault; probably NPR doesn’t allow anything else; but it doesn’t make for sustained or interesting discussion…

We can’t please everybody, I guess, Ophelia. It was a pilot though and you really shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

The pilot on lying was, in my opinion, too broken up. Even though the callers were intelligent for the most part, they did interrupt the flow of things. Plus, our two guests, though both intelligent and articulate, didn’t really have anything to say to each other. That gave that episode a more busy feel than we wanted. Most likely, we will mainly have a single guests (except for brief interviews here and there) and will go with two guests only when we think we need to have two opposing points of view or some such forcefully articulated by real live advocates thereof (rather than just having John and/or I playing the devils advocate or some such).

But you do have to understand that there are inherit limits of the medium that will always be with us. Radio (in America) is mostly not “destination” listening. People listen to radio for short bits, while driving from here to there, dip in and out. So partly it’s the fault of the medium You can’t have a discussion that last an hour, has a beginning, middle, and end such that only those who are with you from the beginning know what’s going on or where you’ve been.

That’s part of the reason it’s taken us TWO and HALF years to find airtime and why we’re operating on a mere shoestring of a budget — neither radio folks nor potential funders gives us much of a chance of succeeding in making philosophy radio-worthy even for Public Radio’s relatively high-brow listening audience.

But we’ll see. We continue to try to perfect our art. That’s our real goal for the first season, to give birth to a new form and to generate an audience for that form so that (a) potential funders will be more forthcoming with dollars and (b) potential outlets will be more willing to open up space on their airwaves. The two go together obviously.

But by the way, our show has nothing to do with NPR. It’s independently produced, owned, and distributed. NPR is much too conservative and risk averse in their programming to give this serious consideration.

Eventually, if we are successful in building a relatively large audience, NPR may take notice. But so far, mostly silence and disinterest from them, even though we’ve had some contact.

Anyway, do listen in. Send your comments. Help us perfect this emerging form.

My only problem with the show was that I tried to call in and the line was busy!

Also, for a show that will be webcast, instead of call-in, a good idea is write in e-mail questions, rather than having call-ins. (They do this on MLB.com’s web-only baseball radio broadcasts to good effect.) Then, the host can read (and edit), getting in new and interesting points without

You can edit the questions and save 30 seconds of chit-chat. I tend to change stations when I hear “Let’s go to the phones . . .”

Luck! Really.

Ken (and Ophelia)

I don’t know how the BBC radio commissioning process works exactly, but I do know you can find it on their website. Try to get them to run it, or some appropriately Ophelia -influenced version thereof….