'AMERICAN LIFE' PREMIERS ON RADIO SUNDAY

The radio show "This American Life" is a rare gift from the electronic media: an entertaining show with both brains and heart.

The first show three and one-half years ago, "New Beginnings," told the story of a man whose life is transformed by his belief that he has only six months to live. Another show, "Sissies," included a segment about a gay man who cared for his frail mother after his parents' find out he is gay, and divorce.

Like most of the stories, the one about the gay divorce has a subtext, in this case a tragic one. The father is Palestinian and divorced his wife solely because he wanted an heir to the family name. "He didn't want to divorce Margie," said Nancy Updike, who produced the segment. "He still loved her."

These are "stories that have some quality that makes you remember them," Updike says. "The stories are driven by narrative rather than the news."

"This American Life" begins airing at 9 a.m. Sunday on KRCU-FM 90.9.

The show and creator-narrator Ira Glass won an unheard-of Peabody Award in its first year and is homing in on "A Prairie Home Companion" from the title of most popular program on public radio.

Now there are negotiations with HBO to produce a version for television. But that will require a change in thinking, Updike said in a phone interview from the show's Chicago office.

Unlike TV, "Radio allows for intimacy to unfold without making the listener squeamish."

Most of the shows are structured in three or four acts held together by a central theme, what Updike calls "an arresting idea."

In "New Beginnings," the man who believed he had six months to live woke up the morning he was supposed to be dead "and feels he has his whole life back," Updike said. "Everything is so ordinary but everything seems incredibly precious."

"... He learned that human beings have to live with the idea of a future, that that's part of being human," she said.

"This American Life" started out on WBEZ in Chicago in 1995 and went national after winning the Peabody Award. It is now heard on more than 300 public radio stations.

Greg Petrovich, general manager of KRCU, said individual parts may take some listeners by surprise.

"Some people are probably going to listen to it and say, What's going on here?" he said.

"But if you listen to the whole it really makes you think."

For the people who have created this show, what appears to be a dazzling success from the outside occurred very incrementally, Updike says.

"Now it is finally reaching a point where we are able to marvel at where we are."