It started out as a flight of whimsy, a tongue-in-cheek radio variety programme in front of a live audience of 12, at first broadcast only in Minnesota. Since then the programme launched in 1974 by Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion, has snowballed into an American phenomenon with four million listeners a week on 600 radio stations.
After the programme — which includes Keillor’s 20-minute monologue slot about the fictional Lake Wobegon — came the books. More recently there has been A Prairie Home Companion website, where you can buy T-shirts and joke books, or even a themed cruise to Juneau, Alaska, in Keillor’s company.
Now Keillor’s wry celebration of a mythologised Midwest in an indefinite past has been brought to the big screen by veteran director Robert Altman (himself born in Kansas City) with a cast including Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan. But its real star, say reviewers, is the owlish Keillor in the role of the radio compere that he has played for the past 30 years on the eclectic Saturday afternoon show.
At first just a local curiosity in St Paul’s, Minnesota — the ”nice state” — before going national, it finally seems destined to induct the wider world into its ironic deadpan vista of singing cowboys, tomato fights, Norwegian bachelors and endlessly endless yarns.
Already lauded by Rolling Stone as the antidote to the ”hard sell side-show of Hollywood”, the film has been analysed by critics across the US for the meaning of its evocative nostalgia. Keillor has been hailed for his drawling, feelgood voice, not heard since James Stewart.
”When he speaks, blood pressures drop across the country, wild horses accept the saddle, family dogs that have been hanging on at the end of chronic illnesses close their eyes and drift away,” wrote one critic last week. And A Prairie Home Companion — named after the Prairie Home cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota — has always been a self-conscious retreat from the pressures of modernity. For that, Keillor is derided as much as he is loved. When Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, ”That’s true if you’re a pilgrim.” And a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to attack his TV yelling: ”Be more funny!”
The film — which has gone straight into America’s top 10 grossing films of last week — is already inspiring cultural divisions. Altman believes that it will appeal to an American audience largely ignored by the big studios. ”Garrison’s audience is like the Mel Gibson Jesus audience,” Altman told a local newspaper, without suggesting whether he was a fan of the radio shows. ”This movie is going to play for two weeks in places like Chicken Switch, Arizona, because the programme has such strong rural appeal.”
Keillor was inspired after researching an article on America’s most famous country and western show, the Grand Ole Opry and for 30 years A Prairie Home Companion has pursued the same repetitive format which, say its fans, has been the basis of its reassuring quality.
Each show opens with Tishomingo Blues and Keillor’s monologue about his fictitious home town — the locus of his equally famous literary output. Each opens with the words: ”It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown, out on the edge of the prairie.”
The segment always ends with the line: ”That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above-average.”
A joke seemingly not worn out with repetition is the spoof advertising for Powdermilk Biscuits, whose self-consciously verbose slogan is: ”Made from whole wheat raised in the rich bottomlands of the Lake Wobegon river valley by Norwegian bachelor farmers; so you know they’re not only good for you, but pure… mostly. Buy them ready-made in the big blue box with the picture of the biscuit on the cover, or in the brown bag with the dark stains that indicate freshness. Whole wheat that gives shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. Heavens, they’re tasty, and expeditious!”
The Washington Post has described the show as a kind of Norman Rockwell painting for the ears — ”an answer to an American desire to fence off a small portion of the cultural landscape as a refuge from the coarseness, cynicism and irony that are postmodern life”.
Sam Anderson, writing in the online magazine Slate, said of Keillor: ”He has come to represent a crucial schism in the national taste — the Great Continental Divide between sarcasm and earnestness, snark and purity, the corrupt and the wholesome. The mere sound of Keillor’s voice — a breathy baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers — is enough to set off warfare between the generations.”
Keillor is torn over such interpretations. It is not nostalgia he is attracted to, but a sense of belonging. He wrote last year: ”I am a fan of the preachers on little AM stations who sit in a tiny studio in Alabama or Tennessee and patiently explain the imminence of the Second Coming … I love the mavericks and freethinkers and obsessives who inhabit the low-power FM stations — the feminist bluegrass show, the all-Sinatra show, the Yiddish vaudeville show.”
Needless to say there has been one place where A Prairie Home Companion has been most popular in its first week — Minnesota, where it has taken three times the national average for door receipts. – Guardian Unlimited Â