"You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You'd come in, do a read-through, there'd be a few rehearsals, then you'd come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home"
About this Quote
Shearer’s offhand nostalgia for radio isn’t really about microphone technique; it’s a sideways critique of how entertainment labor has been reorganized. The line sells radio as “easy,” but listen to what he’s actually praising: a clean pipeline, finite steps, and a clear endpoint. Read-through, rehearsals, performance, home. Work that begins and ends. In an industry now bloated with development hell, endless notes, reshoots, promotional obligations, and algorithm-chasing “content,” that simplicity sounds almost radical.
The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “You’d come in” and “there’d be” flatten hierarchy and conflict, making the process feel communal and frictionless, like a craft shared among pros rather than a corporate machine. The repetition of “then” mimics assembly-line efficiency, but with a performer’s pleasure: the live audience is the final arbiter, not an executive screening or a data dashboard. “Go home” lands like a punchline and a boundary. It’s the part modern creative workers fantasize about, because so much contemporary media demands you be always on: rewriting, networking, branding, posting.
Shearer, a career-long student of showbiz mechanics (and a satirist of its absurdities), is also slipping in a defense of performance as an event. Radio, in his telling, wasn’t just cheaper or faster; it preserved the electricity of doing the thing once, together, in real time. The “easy” is the provocation: it’s not that the work was trivial, it’s that the system respected it.
The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “You’d come in” and “there’d be” flatten hierarchy and conflict, making the process feel communal and frictionless, like a craft shared among pros rather than a corporate machine. The repetition of “then” mimics assembly-line efficiency, but with a performer’s pleasure: the live audience is the final arbiter, not an executive screening or a data dashboard. “Go home” lands like a punchline and a boundary. It’s the part modern creative workers fantasize about, because so much contemporary media demands you be always on: rewriting, networking, branding, posting.
Shearer, a career-long student of showbiz mechanics (and a satirist of its absurdities), is also slipping in a defense of performance as an event. Radio, in his telling, wasn’t just cheaper or faster; it preserved the electricity of doing the thing once, together, in real time. The “easy” is the provocation: it’s not that the work was trivial, it’s that the system respected it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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