Coveted

One more WKRP article, but a good one: An interview with Richard Sanders (Les Nessman). Sanders was a writer as well as an actor; his writing partner was Michael Fairman (a fellow character actor who appeared on the show a couple of times), and together they wrote one or two episodes every season, including the famous "Ferryman's Funeral Home" episode.

Q: Do you think people will notice the missing music?

A: I think in certain shows it's going to be sorely missed because that was the thing that made it different than any other show about radio that had ever been on. We used actual music at the time, the music that everybody was listening to at the time — and sometimes before they were listening to it. It became almost like a radio station. Record companies would send us copies of their new releases and people would listen and decide.

A lot of times, Tim and Howard would choose the music they wanted to use and the writers would try to work around that. Sometimes songs would come out that people hadn't heard and they would become popular as a result of that. And because it was playing up-to-date music, then the disc jockeys all around the country the next day would talk about the show because they would talk about the music, too. So it really helped, hugely.