Without pictures, Playboy still draws

Playboy Radio: To the uninitiated, it’s a concept that may seem as pointless as a driver’s manual in Braille. But listeners to the company’s “Night Calls” program know how uninhibited, frank and funny a talk show about sex and relationships can be and don’t seem to miss the visual titillation.

The show, which airs live weeknights from 4 to 7 PST on XM Satellite Radio, celebrated its first anniversary Wednesday. The laid-back discussions of love and sex are definitely adult but give the show an openness that is prurient without being puerile. The audience includes men and women, gays and straights.

Co-host Juli Ashton said they might be preaching to the converted: “You’re paying for this channel; you’re probably already pro-sex.”

The program is an offshoot of the “Night Calls” television show on cable’s Playboy Channel, a twice-monthly program on which Ashton and Tiffany Granath also host guests and take calls. The key difference, Ashton said, is that the radio show is more discussion while the TV show promotes more activity among its home viewers.

“We’re trying to get them there through the visuals,” she said. “On the radio, it’s the stories, the fantasies. A lot of our callers are on the road, so we don’t want accidents -- two hands on the wheel, people.”

Callers talk about sexual experiences they’ve had, discuss relationships and ask advice. Ashton and Granath open up as well, discussing their personal lives and joining regular callers in this interactive soap opera.

Shared lives

“Over the year, we’ve been through relationships with people,” Ashton said, as callers have talked about meetings and breakups as they’ve occurred. “We’re living life with these people.”

One woman considered going into adult films but then found out she was pregnant, and she had her baby on Tuesday this week. Dylan, a regular caller, was a gay, long-haul trucker afraid to come out of the closet because the trucking community is so small, until fellow drivers phoned in and advised him “to just be yourself.”

At any given moment, Ashton, a gregarious blond, may be checking an in-studio guest’s Web site on the computer while Granath, a wry redhead, leans back in her chair and purrs to the callers, referring to them as “sweetie” or “honey bun.”

“They tell us their deepest secrets,” Granath said, and in return sometimes, “we tell them things they don’t want to hear.” Such as the man who was considering an affair with a stripper, because his wife had cooled to sex after 13 years. The duo lambasted him for jeopardizing his relationship and not communicating with his spouse.

Ashton said they’ve asked others, “Why are you telling us this? Go back and tell your wife.”

The show goes into reruns after today’s program until Sept. 22, when Ashton and Granath start their second season. In the first year, they logged 1,000 guests, drawing stars from both the world of pornography and mainstream entertainment, from adult-film actor Ron Jeremy to female rock quintet the Go-Go’s. The pair has also hosted members of the L.A. Kings hockey team and the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, actors John Leguizamo and Steve Guttenberg, members of the bands Aerosmith, 98 Degrees and Wu Tang Clan, and “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Unusual debates

“Night Calls” producer Farrell Hirsch said he wanted guests to feel like they were “sitting in a living room with Juli and Tiffany at their house.”

It’s a living room with upholstered, rust-colored walls, indigo shag carpeting and a small beaded chandelier above the desk where Ashton and Granath monitor a pair of computers, one listing information about the callers on hold. An off-white chaise sits in one corner of the studio, which is shared by a cable show that airs video clips on the weekends.

With no broadcasting experience before “Night Calls,” Ashton and Granath said they learned their interviewing style on the job, relying on natural curiosity and a quest for frankness. They’ve learned to draw out reticent guests, and they enjoy showing their listeners that any given preference or peccadillo is not unique.

“They hear something and go, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not the only one,’ ” Ashton said.

The show can dissect serious subjects, such as obscenity or same-sex marriage, or less weighty topics, such as the etiquette of lap-dance recipients, or “are there good-looking swingers?” Hirsch said.

“There are millions of people who can’t hear that debate anywhere else,” he said. “There really is no other show in the world like it.”

Such targeted programming is the goal of XM, which, like rival company Sirius, offers more than 100 channels of music, news, talk and sports via satellite to consumers with specially configured radios. For a monthly fee, customers can choose from myriad niche programs and music genres -- and hear them anywhere, coast to coast. Playboy, XM’s only premium channel, costs an extra $2.95 per month.

Chance Patterson, XM’s vice president of corporate affairs, said the company set the goal for Playboy subscribers at 2% of all XM users Though he wouldn’t divulge exact numbers, he said the figure had exceeded that mark.

At the end of summer, XM announced it had 700,000 subscribers overall and said it expected to hit 1 million in the fall, he said.

Ashton said the first day they were on the air, they had seven subscribers, “and I think four of them called.” Now they might choose about 10 calls hourly from the 200 or so that come in on a given night.

“It’s so much bigger than I thought it was going to be,” Granath added.

And one of their largest contingents of listeners is long-haul truckers.

XM was already popular with truck drivers, because of its nationwide availability, and because it offered a channel specifically for them, Open Road, which features travel information, weather forecasts, news and trucking-related talk and music. When they’re not listening to that, though, many are tuned to the Playboy channel.

Prevents drowsiness

“There’s a whole group of us out there,” said trucker Axel Johansson, of Spokane, Wash., who stopped his electric-blue semi-tractor by Playboy’s Glassell Park studios this week to visit his favorite radio hostesses at “Night Calls.”

The show’s informal fan club, called “Club 205” after the Playboy channel’s position on the XM dial, has grown up organically, making up its own name and bumper stickers.

“It’s created a whole huge group of friends out there,” said Johansson, who goes by the name Rusty Knight when he calls the show.

On the road, at truck stops and elsewhere, fans of the show spot the stickers and chat up their fellow travelers. Some even get excited when they meet regular callers, whose lives they’ve heard played out on the air.

“They’ve become stars too,” Ashton said. “They get to have their piece of fame.”

Johansson said he’s been driving for 13 years and listening to Playboy Radio on XM for about nine months. He said “Night Calls” is especially useful after the sun goes down, and darkness, solitude and monotony can conspire to make a driver drowsy, no matter how much rest he’s already had.

“If you’ve got some girl talking to you all night long,” he said, “when was the last time you fell asleep in that situation?”

Reassuring connection

Mike Schermoly, marketing director of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Assn., which represents about 350,000 truck drivers around the country, said he did not know how many truckers subscribed to the Playboy channel, or XM as a whole, but he said the service had gained popularity because of its nationwide reach.

“The advantage of XM Satellite, you could listen to the same channel from coast to coast. You aren’t losing channels -- you could always tune in, whether you’re in Albuquerque or Baltimore,” he said.

That enables drivers to follow their favorite programs wherever they are and gives the stars of even niche programs a nationwide following.

“I could drive across country right now and my car could break down,” Granath said, and as soon as she identified herself as “Tiffany from the 205,” “there’d be a posse there to save me.”