Critic’s Notebook: An appreciation: Tom Magliozzi, Click of ‘Car Talk’

Tom Magliozzi, who died Monday at age 77, was for 25 years the co-host with his younger brother Ray of the NPR series “Car Talk”; a local Boston version had run on the public radio station WBUR for a decade before that. As the Tappet Brothers, Click and Clack, they dispensed automative advice — they ran a Cambridge repair shop, Good News Garage, though both also had degrees from MIT — but you didn’t need to know or even care about cars to be a fan.

We speak of “voice” as an expression of character, the outward sign of the inner self. As a medium of voices, radio is intimate, confidential, human; a hot medium, in Marshall McLuhan’s formulation, that requires participation. Listening, we make the pictures that suit us, create faces for the people we hear and may continue to favor the ones we imagine after we’ve seen the real thing. We tune in for comfort: Radio fits in our ear, hangs out while we do other things — drive, cook, clean, go to bed.

Research shows that Tom was Click, though it’s not a distinction I ever made; indeed, I never knew one from the other. Each was just “my brother,” the person being referred to by the person talking, and together they formed a single, double-headed, disputatious entity. Loud and raucous and given to laughter, with New England accents several stories deep, they were by the crepe-soled, deep-pile carpet standards of public radio a riot in a parking garage.

Theirs was the sound of grown men who had found a way never to grow up, to make their private party public; it was the talk show as bunk bed. Projecting an attractive blend of joie de vivre and practical competence, they seemed to know their business, and that they did not always agree in their diagnoses made them seem more rather than less reliable.

A 2008 PBS Click and Clack cartoon show, “As the Wrench Turns,” was a natural fit neither for the brothers nor the network; its 10 scripted episodes failed in every respect to capture what was compelling, fun, genuine or interesting about the Magliozzis. But even a video version of “Car Talk” would have sacrificed something, making concrete and specific and limited what was best left open and intangible.

“Car Talk” stopped production in 2012 — perhaps owing to Tom’s Alzheimer’s disease, complications of which are what killed him — though archived episodes continue to air. (Just as the show does not depend on its titular subject, it does not need to be contemporary.) Ray has reportedly expressed an interest in reviving the show as a “tribute” to his brother; he would know better than anyone that it won’t be the same. But that’s no reason not go forward.

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