For many Tampa Bay area residents, switching on WUSF 89.7 FM on a Saturday morning and leaving it on for hours is a long-standing routine. Whether it's via the station's app as one logs his or her treadmill time, on an old-school radio radio while cleaning or in one's car between errands, the local media outlet's weekend lineup is just a thing listeners take for granted.
If you're one of those listeners, listen up: a few changes are afoot.
Namely, two longtime shows are going away: Car Talk, which has for years filled the station's 10 a.m. Saturday slot with sage auto maintenance advice and self-deprecating jokes courtesy of the Tappet brothers, otherwise known as "Click and Clack," and the 3 p.m. slot's Q: the Music, a Canada-based spinoff of the popular weeknight show Q.
Something of a legacy show for NPR affiliate stations, Car Talk stopped producing new episodes in 2012. One of the Tappet brothers, Tom Magliozzi, died in 2014. WUSF and NPR affiliates have been playing reruns of the show ever since — until now. (You can find podcasts of the show here.)
Two programs will now occupy the spot: This American Life spinoff Planet Money — which originated a decade ago as a podcast aimed at explaining the 2008 economic collapse to laypeople — and How I Built It, hosted by Guy Raz, which the NPR website describes as "a narrative journey marked by triumphs, failures, serendipity and insight — told by the founders of some of the world's best known companies and brands."
“Car Talk was a one-of-a-kind show that brought new audiences to public radio station[s]," JoAnn Urofsky, general manager at WUSF Public Media said in an emailed statement. "We’ll miss Click and Clack, but we’re looking forward to the stories we’ll hear that explain the economy, and introduce us to entrepreneurs, idealists, and the workings of our own minds.”
As for Q: the Music, no new episodes have been posted to the program's website since July.
The program Hidden Brain, which explores culture and psychology, now runs at 3 p.m.
View the full schedule here.
This article appears in Nov 9-16, 2017.