Maintaining a Radio Sensibility and Gentle ‘Morning’ Pace

He’s the television anchor with that quirky--”I’ll see you on the radio”--sign-off at the close of each week’s “CBS News Sunday Morning.” Bow-tied rather than blow-dried, he has some bulk across the middle and heft to his resume, having gotten his third Emmy last year for his interview with painter Andrew Wyeth on Wyeth’s 80th birthday.

And at a time when many contemporaries have retired, or at least are contemplating it, Charles Osgood, 66, who celebrates his fifth anniversary with “Sunday Morning” this month, frankly confesses that he’ll stay “as long as they let me. You never have the feeling in television that you’re going to last a day beyond your contract, but I’ve got a couple of more years to go. . . . “

Earlier this year as “Sunday Morning” was marking its 20th year on air, Osgood--who stepped in after the late Charles Kuralt retired in 1994--celebrated the 90-minute show for having “a liturgical kind of pace” that runs counter to television’s often breathless pace.

And the longtime radio man, who is equally as well-known for his 20-a-week “Osgood File” radio commentaries that often include his own poetry, fits that “Sunday Morning” style. It’s there in film clips as he’s interviewing the leathery faced Wyeth. Or watching him play piano and sing a medley of World War II-era songs, including “The White Cliffs of Dover,” with a bunch of folks in an East London pub. He did that piece in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995.

“I don’t see myself as a television guy who also does a radio show,” Osgood said this week by phone from New York. “I think of myself as a radio guy who also does television.”

Author of five books including the upcoming “See You on the Radio,” Osgood believes that coming out of radio gives him a certain advantage on his television show.

“Occasionally people will write, and say, ‘What are you talking about? You can’t see anybody on the radio.’ But I do think that radio has pictures, and in some ways because those pictures are created in the mind of the listeners they are better.

“Radio is a one-on-one kind of medium and ‘Sunday Morning’ is a one-on-one kind of television broadcast,” he added. “We talk to the audience. We never talk down to them.”

He never thought of himself as a possible successor to Kuralt, he said, because he was a year older. “I thought it was a wonderful show and was devastated one morning when I was putting on my socks to hear on the radio that Charles was retiring. It never dawned on me that they might ask me to do it. . . . [I thought] they’d surely get one of the young people to replace him.”

It gave Osgood a second television career. “I had already sort of retired from television. I was going to focus on radio.” Osgood had been doing the “CBS This Morning” news breaks and was co-anchoring what is now “CBS Morning News,” the half-hour show that precedes it.

“It just seemed to me that my television career wasn’t going anywhere,” he said, adding: “It seemed to me that I looked a lot better--always had looked better--on radio.”

For Osgood, the appeal of “Sunday Morning” was the show itself. “It’s the only show in commercial television that first of all covers the arts, makes it a point to do that. And our pieces are a lot longer. It’s not unusual for us to do a 10-minute piece. So we can take the time to be a little more reflective [and] I think the audience is in a different mode.

“On Sunday, I imagine them to be having a second cup of coffee, maybe with the Sunday paper in hand and maybe still in their bathrobes. They’ve got time for us.”

* “CBS News Sunday Morning” airs Sundays at 7:30 a.m. on CBS.