I’ve been a radio listener since the 60’s, I know a little bit about it. I know most people aren’t ‘crap cutters’, they’re bull-shitters (spellcheck liked that better with a hyphen). They have diarrhea of the mouth. That’s probably enough bowl movement metaphors. But anyway, I just heard another fantastic segment of the early morning show Coast to Coast.  A wonderful, wonderful radio show. Most people will never hear it. Most people aren’t insomniac radio geeks. I grew up watching Leonard Nimoy narrate episodes of In Search Of. Coast and Search are very similar shows. Bigfoot, Loch Ness, UFOs, shadow people, ghosts, demons, the Bermuda Triangle, ‘Greys’, cloud seeding, Knights Templar, I’m talking seriously neat stuff.

But you have to get to it! Commercial broadcasting whether it be radio or television has one annoying requirement: they have to make money. Newsflash eh? A radio “hour” is about 33 minutes long depending on the show (I timed it). At the top of the hour you have at most 1 minute of news. Then about 6 minutes of commercials, weather forecast, traffic report, station promos and maybe a public service announcement. A show like Coast to Coast will then have another 3 1/2 minutes of commercial to replace the 20 minutes after break, so they can have one uninterrupted segament about 16 and 1/2 minutes long to the bottom of the hour. They will then repeat the process for the second half hour. That my friends is 1 radio hour, 33 minutes.

Ya get what ya pay for. On Coast to Coast the host has 2 formats: guest or ‘open line’ time. Both generally involve callers. Callers can be the best of times and the worst of times. This next paragraph is one I put on the Coast to Coast Facebook page. Not that it matters, but it gets something off my chest.

“Great stuff, can’t believe I missed it. As I get more TOP (time on planet) I really came to appreciate Coast. Never though (at least in this lifetime) will I understand callers who can’t get to the POINT. Do callers really think they have 40 minutes for the windup? No, you don’t, make the damn pitch. A radio “half hour” has about 18 minutes in it, and despite what your parents told you, you are not the most important person on earth. A nation is listening, and we really don’t need to know in a story about you seeing a “dark figure cross the road in front of you at 2 am in July of 1978 in Fort Smith, Arkansas that scared the hell out of you”, that your momma Maybell who goes by ‘May’ cause her daddy liked springtime and wanted her to always remind him of spring, had fallen asleep in the passenger seat and didn’t see the creature because she was so tired from working 2 jobs after the plant closed down in Jonesboro and the job at the Quicky Mart didn’t pay enough, what with her having 7 kids…”

I have literally heard the host take a call at :25 minutes past the hour, giving the caller nearly 5 minutes to get to the point before the hard break at the bottom of the hour, and the caller could not/would not do it. They had a great story about a ghost, or Bigfoot, or an alien abduction or whatever! But we’ll never know because they could not be succinct. Just mind numbing.

[Just the picture used for this post has several aspects to it. Is it for a remote station downlink? Is it a dish “listening” for ET? Is it a military dish outside Area 51? Who knows? Art Bell started a radio show in 1978 called West Coast AM. In 1988 it became Coast to Coast. I just read Art died in 2018 of an accidental drug overdose at age 72. Sad and pointless. Currently the big dog is George Noory. There are also weekend and fill in hosts Ian this and Jimmy that and some woman host and who knows all. They generally all have incredible patience. Its like they know that aside from the entertainment value of the show, they are providing on-air group therapy for a lot of disturbed people out there.]