Filed under: Etc., Celebrities, Humor
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NPR announced today that Car Talk, its beloved radio call-in show, will cease recording new episodes in the fall. Brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi are retiring from the show, and while NPR will continue broadcasting “new” Car Talk episodes, they will be created from archived material. NPR says Tom, 74, and Ray, 63, will continue to write a weekly column and post to their website and Facebook.
Eric Nuzum, Vice President for NPR Programming, said in a statement, “We’re certainly disappointed that they’re not going to do this forever.”
As we all are. It’s hard to believe that there was a time before Car Talk. The show has been on the air for 35 years, 25 of them nationally distributed on NPR affiliates. For this 39-year-old writer, its appearance on my local public radio station perfectly coincided with that point in adolescence when cars became an obsession. In that pre-Internet era, Car Talk was about the only place outside of an actual mechanic’s garage that a newly minted auto enthusiast could hear people talking about wrenching and gearhead stuff.
I have not listened to every show since that time, but I have never tired of the guessing game I play when each caller dials in with car trouble. Of course, as the years went on, the brothers spent less time talking about auto mechanics and more on humor and the relationships of their callers, but at its core, Car Talk was always focused on cars and the love/hate relationships they inspire.
The brothers’ differential diagnosis was especially intriguing to me early in the show’s run, as I probably learned half of what I know about auto repair by listening. That aspect of the show also provided my wife with one of her best opportunities to pull one over on me. Unbeknownst to me, she had listened to an earlier broadcast of the show on a different NPR affiliate than the one that I normally tune in to. So when I began debating with myself out loud about what might be wrong with the first caller’s vehicle, she hinted at a solution that hadn’t occurred to me, one that the brothers arrived at a few minutes later. Then she did it again, and again, and I became flabbergasted at how my wife - who had never so much as changed her own oil - could have gleaned so much automotive knowledge. When I pressed her, she explained, laughing at my gullibility.
Click and Clack, enjoy your retirement - you will both be dearly missed.Continue reading NPR’s Click and Clack calling it quits on Car Talk this fall
NPR’s Click and Clack calling it quits on Car Talk this fall originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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