In recent months a lot of AM stations around the country have marked 100 years of service, but in Bridgeport, CT the rise of an FM station is enough to make a movie about. To mark 60 years since variety WPKN (89.5) signed-on, film producer and editor Cob Carlson has created a documentary about the public radio station called “The Greatest Radio Station in the World.”
The documentary tells the history of WPKN, which launched in 1962. The movie features in-depth interviews with station volunteers and listeners going back to the founding, with what the station says is a “unique ‘found’ footage.”
“The great writer Joan Didion once said, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ Working on this documentary story injected a bolt of life force into me—so thank you, WPKN,” said Carlson in a statement. “The station gives its programmers a tremendous amount of creative freedom to produce great radio in whatever way they choose. That was one of the things that enticed me to do the film.” In addition to his work on movies, television shows, commercials and music videos, Carlson is currently an adjunct professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.
The name of the WPKN documentary comes from an August 2021 “Talk of the Town” article in the New Yorker which declared WPKN as “the greatest station of the world.” As writer David Owen pointed out in the article, “Depending on when you tune in, you might hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet, or a dozen different covers of the same Bob Marley song, or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing, or a totally addictive cut by the group that the founder of Morphine founded before he founded Morphine…Because the shifts are staggered and the playlists are not generated by a corporate algorithm, you can be reasonably certain that, if you hear a song you don’t like, you’ll never have to hear it again. The station also has talk shows that no one would mistake for ‘Fox & Friends.’”
WPKN is using the documentary as a fundraiser for the station. It has created a gala featuring a screening of the movie along with tours of the WPKN studios to be held on Saturday, June 25. Tickets will be sold for $150 apiece. Carlson will host a Q&A session with the audience after the screening.
Founded in 1963 as a 100-watt campus outlet at the University of Bridgeport, WPKN is today a 10,000-watt listener-supported community radio station largely run by volunteers. The station says its terrestrial signal now reaches 1.5 million people in Connecticut, Long Island, parts of New York and Massachusetts.
Watch a trailer for “The Greatest Radio Station in the World” HERE.