Who's No. 1? It's Brudnoy

To mark David Brudnoy's 25th anniversary as a talk show host, WBZ Radio put out a glowing press release hailing "the longest continual virtually uninterrupted tenure of a weekday radio talk show in Boston history."

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Virtually uninterrupted? Hiding behind that adverb was the unpleasantness of 1990, when WBZ canceled Brudnoy's top-rated nightly program and replaced it, presumably to save money, with a cheaper syndicated show from out of town. It was an unfathomable decision. Broadcast professionals were amazed. Inside Radio, a trade newsletter, headlined its story, "WBZ-AM, Boston Slits Its Own Throat Late-Night."

That about summed it up. The protests flooded in by the thousands, and not just to WBZ but to its owner, Westinghouse Broadcasting, as well. "Spenser" author Robert Parker, appearing for what it seemed would be the last time on Brudnoy's program, fumed, "Do we have time to bad-mouth 'BZ for letting you go? The people who run this station are stupid." The Boston Globe called Brudnoy's ouster a "genuine shame" and a "debacle" and marveled at the "nonsensicalness" of it all. In a lead editorial, the Boston Herald urged WBZ to reverse course. "David Brudnoy is a Boston institution," it said, "and all of us - really, all of us - miss him."

Full disclosure: I wrote that editorial. Even fuller disclosure: Brudnoy and I have been friends for years, and over those years I've often had the pleasure of being on his show, both as guest and as guest host. But even in 1990 you didn't have to know Brudnoy personally to understand that life in Boston would have been markedly poorer if his nightly conversation - intelligent, informed, articulate, good-natured - had ceased being a part of it.

WBZ soon saw the error of its ways, and restored him to his microphone. The station manager responsible for the blunder is long gone.

And 11 years later, Brudnoy is still No. 1 in the ratings.

They are something of a paradox, those ratings. On the one hand, it is easy to enumerate the virtues of Brudnoy's brand of talk radio. His program is erudite but accessible - "smart talk for everyone," the Globe once called it. He lets his callers have their say and often gives them the last word. He really reads the books of the authors he interviews (and he interviews an awful lot of authors). He is polite, even courtly, to his guests. He absolutely refuses to play to the groundlings: there are no sex jokes, no doubles-entendres, no phony bombast, no psychics, no vulgar sound effects, no webcam.

If you've got half a brain and a dab of curiosity, how could you not like the Brudnoy show?

Yet Brudnoy's formula is just the one most talk shows avoid.   Continued...