American Archive of Public Broadcasting Preserves 2,000 ‘Le Show’ Radio Programs

American Archive of Public Broadcasting Preserves 2,000 ‘Le Show’ Radio Programs

New ‘Le Show’ Collection and Online Exhibit Feature Harry Shearer’s Legacy in Public Media and Satire

This December, to mark the 40th anniversary of celebrated actor, author, director, musician, political satirist and broadcaster Harry Shearer’s weekly hour-long public radio series “Le Show,” the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public media producer GBH, is launching the “Le Show” Collection, a publicly accessible digital archive of more than 2,000 hours of broadcasts, stretching back over the past four decades.

Since December 1983, the star of “The Simpsons” and “Spinal Tap” has unfailingly produced and presented this weekly, hour-long romp through the worlds of media, politics, sports and show business with a heady mix of biting satire, probing interviews, comedy sketches and a wide-ranging musical selection from wherever he is in the world.

Vogue magazine hailed Shearer’s broadcasts as a “wildly clever, iconoclastic stew of talk, music, political commentary, readings of inadvertently funny public documents or trade magazines and scripted skits.”

Shearer’s first foray into public radio was “The Voice of America” from KCRW in Santa Monica, California, which premiered on Dec. 4, 1983. The show was later named “The Hour of Power” and then “Le Show” in 1985. Shearer’s comic sketches and song parodies include uncanny impersonations of all the United States presidents over the years. From Presidents Reagan to Bush, Clinton to Obama, Trump to Biden, they all feature in the ongoing series modelled adroitly on pertinent popular culture formats. The news reports detail often-buried perspectives on official policies (“News from Outside the Bubble”) and organizational cultures (“News of Inspectors General”); perception management (“Apologies of the Week”); trends in business, media, and advertising (“Reading the Trades”); threats to the planet (“News of the Warm,” “News of the Atom,” and “News of Microplastics”); and cyber-security breaches (“Smart World”). In-depth interviews with world-leading experts in their fields — authors, journalists, politicians, scientists, artists and performers — give searching insights into the most vital issues of our times.

“Nothing is more evanescent than doing a radio show. So, it’s deliciously ironic to have them collected like this, for leisurely review. I have always loved radio, and ‘Le Show’ has always been a way of being in contact with an audience without having to cater to heavily inebriated people,” said Shearer. “Thanks to all the folks up and down the line who have made ‘Le Show’s’ improbable endurance possible.”

Up to now, this rich collection of programming has only existed on cassettes, CDs and digital audiotapes as a private collection of Shearer’s company, Century of Progress Productions.  However, in 2021 the Library of Congress and Century of Progress Productions began working together to ensure the collection of more than 2,000 “Le Show” episodes, at risk of degradation, would be preserved for present and future generations. Starting Dec. 7, they will be available to researchers, educators, journalists and the public on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.

“‘Le Show’s’ comedy has roots in traditions that came to the fore in the 1950s, when a young generation of satirists commented regularly on current events in nightclubs, college campuses, and political cartoons, often revealing hidden logics, absurdities, and hypocrisies through artistic imitations,” said Alan Gevinson, the Library of Congress project director for the Archive. “At the dawn of the 21st century, satirical news-oriented television shows provided critical alternatives to more traditional presentations of the news. Bridging both eras, ‘Le Show,’ now fully digitized, will be a treasure trove for cultural historians, media scholars, and the public to explore our recent collective past through satirical creations. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is honored to archive such a vital collection.”

Complementing the “Le Show” Collection, the Archive’s online exhibit “Harry Shearer’s Le Show: Sonic Portal to News, Satire, Memory, History,” curated by Rosa A. Eberly, associate professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University, provides historical context to “Le Show” and shines a spotlight on a representative fraction of the collection. The exhibit includes nine sections that offer an overview of the series and showcases what Eberly calls Shearer’s “sonic satire and information-sharing” on “Le Show” over the past four decades. ​​Shearer contributed four short pieces about the evolution of “Le Show” over the decades, charting its development from the 1980s to the present.

“Harry Shearer’s ‘Le Show’ is a cornucopia of vital information, sonic satire, and rhetorical richness well worth listening to again and again,” said Eberly. “If journalism is the first rough draft of history, ‘Le Show’ is a second, revised through a lens of satire, each week managing not only to teach but somehow to delight — though the delight is sometimes excruciating.”

About the American Archive of Public Broadcasting

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation to coordinate a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provide a central web portal for access to the unique programming that public stations have aired over the past 70 years. To date, over 160,000 digital files of television and radio programming contributed by more than 430 public media organizations, producers and archives across the United States have been preserved and made accessible for long-term preservation and access. The entire collection is available on location at the Library of Congress and GBH, and more than 100,000 files are available online at americanarchive.org.

About Harry Shearer

Harry Shearer is best known for his work on both “The Simpsons” and “This Is Spinal Tap.” As the man behind the voices of a multitude of characters,most notably Mr. Burns, Smithers and insufferable neighbor Ned Flanders, he has been a key cast member on “The Simpsons” since it started nearly 27 years ago.He created the character of Derek Smalls, who performed alongside Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel and Michael McKean’s David St. Hubbins to form Spinal Tap for the 1984 movie and has since made numerous stage appearances with the legendary rock band. Smalls has also developed a solo career. In addition to his collaborations with Christopher Guest, his TV and movie career has spanned several decades and has included roles in “Real Life” “The Right Stuff,” “Portrait of a White Marriage,” “The Fisher King,” “Godzilla,” “The Truman Show,” and “Small Soldiers.”

He has been a regular in “Saturday Night Live” twice and created a ground-breaking TV comedy-drama series based on real-life recordings from President Nixon’s Oval Office. Written by and starring Shearer as Richard Nixon, “Nixon’s The One” was broadcast to great acclaim on Sky Arts in 2013.

A prolific radio broadcaster with his long-running weekly “Le Show,” he also is known as a satirical songwriter with four albums to his name. As a stage actor, Shearer has appeared in starring roles both on Broadway and in London’s West End.Shearer is the co-creator of “J. Edgar!: The Musical” which is currently being developed as a feature film.

A child of Hollywood, Shearer made guest appearances on a variety of A-list television series while still in his teens. Credits include “The Jack Benny Program,” “General Electric Theatre” and “Alfred Hitchcock presents.”

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Media Contact: María Peña, Library of Congress, mpena@loc.gov

                         Emily Balk, GBH, emily_balk@wgbh.org

PR 23-099

12/7/23

ISSN 0731-3527