For those who remember the BRUCE & COLIN SHOW….
BruceANDColin.NET
What was the Bruce and Colin Show?
Colin McEnroe is well-known for his Connecticut Public Radio program originating at WNPR in Hartford. What some listeners might not know is that his broadcasting career began many years before that:
In 1992, WTIC, a 50,000 watt heritage radio station in Hartford at 1080 on the AM dial decided to revamp their programming schedule. As part of that effort, they hired McEnroe – a Hartford Courant columnist – to host a daily 10AM to 12noon radio show. McEnroe, an author and Yale-educated journalist was to serve as the in-house liberal voice to counterbalance the station’s conservative programming. The morning show ended in September 1996, however, when McEnroe’s time spot was taken by the syndicated Dr Laura Show. WTIC remained committed to keeping McEnroe on air and gave him a Sunday evening show, along with daily 5-minute commentaries on their drive-time programming. The Sunday show lasted until October 1997 when ‘TIC management decided to pair McEnroe with afternoon host Bruce Stevens to create a new weekday afternoon drive-time show – The Bruce & Colin Show. It was then that McEnroe’s talents could be fully demonstrated.
Bruce Stevens, a steady-voiced mainstream broadcaster who grew up in Maine, and had done afternoon drive at ‘TIC since 1993 served as the straight-man foil for McEnroe’s wit and chaos. Daily from 3:05PM to 6:00PM, listeners to WTIC NewsTalk 1080 heard humorous rapid-fire discussions of local and national politics, popular culture, and daily life in Hartford. In 5 and 10-minute chunks interspersed between regular news, sports, weather, and traffic updates, listeners heard McEnroe regularly walk right up to the line of station policies in an effort to break up Stevens on the air. It was an entertaining, informative way to hear the issues of the day and became appointment listening for many people. Commuters tuning in also heard a diverse and sometimes cranky cast of regular callers including Brian from Easton (Locutus), Mary from New Hartford, and JP the Doomsday Economist, among others. There was truly nothing like it on the radio.
Sadly, as part of a corporate-mandated downsizing – WTIC let Stevens go in October 2006, and McEnroe was forced to continue without an on-air partner. The show was still interesting and funny but a certain chemistry just wasn’t there. Stevens was the special ingredient that moderated the chaos, and his absence was keenly felt.
In December 2008, the corporate downsizing continued and WTIC pulled the plug on The Colin McEnroe Show. The following year he made his way to Connecticut Public Radio, and the rest is history.
Where did the tapes come from?
Contrary to popular belief, most radio stations do not maintain complete audio archives of their programming going back decades. Old tapes were recycled and then discarded. Even today, unless a special effort is made to preserve them, program streams are deleted to free up server space for new data.
I rarely could hear more than the last 20 minutes of the Bruce & Colin Show because it ran while I was at work. Finally, I figured out through a series of timers, patch cords, and a voice-activated logger recorder that I could record the Bruce & Colin Show on audio cassette. Later when WTIC began live-streaming the show, a friend of mine set me up with software to do the recording. There were many glitches along the way including difficulty picking up the AM signal in Naugatuck, and failures of software timers. As a result, the audio quality sometimes varies, but if you’re a Bruce & Colin Show fan, you can put up with it – or at least I could. By the time the show ended, I had a big box of cassettes (mostly un-dated) and a stack of CDs of captured audio streams. In most cases, I edited the tapes soon after recording them to remove portions I wasn’t interested in saving. I’m sure I have some tapes that have the entire 3-hour show, and maybe I’ll include a few of those in the future so someone can hear how much of the show’s conversation was interrupted by news updates, traffic and weather reports, sports, and ads.
Slowly, as time permits, I’ve been digitizing the tapes. The result is this website which I’d like to share with all Bruce & Colin fans. Each tape has a short description. If a date is available or can be figured out based on the content, I’ve included it. I’ll continue adding more tapes over time. Happy listening!
Brandon