Radio Host Plans ‘Wide World’ Comeback

Christopher Lydon is staging a radio comeback.

As he leans across the table, the former public radio star can barely keep the delight out of his voice.

“This is my bid to retake the airwaves,” he says. “I would like nothing more than to be on the radio full-time again.”

Lydon has had an eclectic media career, but it’s radio that always draws him back. In 1993, after decades in the print and television journalism industry and an unsuccessful run for Mayor of Boston, Lydon moved to Boston’s largest National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, WBUR, where he created the syndicated radio show “The Connection.”

Two years ago, in a much-publicized battle with WBUR, host Lydon and his senior producer Mary McGrath walked out on their top-rated radio show, along with nearly their entire staff. In a battle to control ownership and a share of future growth in revenue, Lydon’s and McGrath’s salaries, at that time the highest in public radio, were leaked.

“We built that show from scratch, and it became really, really nasty. When they realized that they couldn’t win, they basically threw money at us to make us look bad,” Lydon says.

But now, Lydon is back, with a seven-part show called “The Whole Wide World,” which Public Radio International aired across the country starting last month.

Born in Boston in 1940, he is the third of six children in a second-generation Irish Catholic family. He attended Roxbury Latin School and then Yale, graduating in 1962. After seven years at the Boston Globe, Lydon moved to New York Times’ Washington bureau, where he covered presidential campaign politics for almost a decade. He then migrated to the Ten o’Clock News on WGBH-TV in Boston, and then to NPR.

When he first left NPR, he kept busy with lectures, theater and a project he calls “parachute radio,” a global “drop-in” radio show. It was inspired when Weld Professor of Law Charles R. Nesson ’60, who was studying the prisons of Kingston, Jamaica, invited Lydon to join him on a visit. Lydon’s trip inspired him to embark on a mission to open talk radio listening posts in the Caribbean, West Africa and Southeast Asia. For two weeks each he hosted nightly call-in radio shows on commercial stations in Kingston, Ghana and Singapore, talking with both radio and internet listeners on the wide range of subjects.

Lydon says he is a big believer in using the Internet for broadcast media.

“The possibilities for the Internet’s use are infinite,” Lydon says. “At the same time that we were broadcasting live overseas, people right here in America were able to get online and listen along. It’s truly an intersection of the local and the global.”

In January, Lydon took part in the production of Children of Herakles at the American Repertory Theater, conducting interviews with guests before the performances and reading the part of the chorus in the play itself.

“It was really a transformative experience,” he says. “Peter Sellars [who directed Children of Herakles] is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. He just gets it. He’s extremely knowledgeable on every topic of conversation and I feel really blessed to have met him.”

Lydon liked Sellars so much that he decided to feature him in Lydon’s new radio program.

This latest venture, a seven-part series called “The Whole Wide World,” is ambitious in scope, striving to “decode the riddles of the new race, the new map, the post-Cold War 21st century.”

The mission of the series is to pull apart the contradictions of globalism and to discover and elevate what people have in common.

“We live in a single, shrinking stewpot of culture, climate, viruses, medicine, money, terror, TV images and instant Internet connections,” Lydon says. “The Whole Wide World is the radio program that asks you to help sort the trends that could kill us from the ones that could make us stronger, maybe wiser.” Recently, Lydon has been enthusiastic about Amin Maalouf, a French-Lebanese novelist, historian, and illuminator of the identity riddle.

“If I had the courage, I would devote an entire show to him,” Lydon says. “He’s that brilliant.”

To Lydon’s mind, “The Whole Wide World” is giving people a voice, and not just the celebrities who populate both his past and present broadcasting ventures, but also the voices of the people. The last episode will be a call-in show, broadcast live on WGBH Boston.

“There are a lot of people wanting to be heard, and this is their chance to do it,” he says.

Lydon encourages participation at every turn, urging individuals to leave him voice mail and to post their opinions in forums on the web site.

In fact, some of his listeners’ communications will be integrated into the program. Amber, an illegal Barbadian immigrant with a high-school education who often called in to comment on the Connection, speaks in the first episode.

“She out-talked the best of them, and what she says is so crucial to who we are as Americans,” Lydon says.

Developed in collaboration with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where Lydon is a fellow, “The Whole Wide World” is being distributed weekly to public radio stations nationwide until mid-April and on the web.

—Staff writer Helen Springut can be reached at springut@fas.harvard.edu