Coyle & Sharpe Street Interviews

Radio had never heard anything quite like Coyle & Sharpe On the Loose when it hit the airwaves on San Francisco's KGO in the early 1960s. Of course, there had been many practitioners of what was known then as the "man on the street interview"--but none had stretched the limits the way Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe did.

Every interview seemed perfectly normal: Coyle and Sharpe were well-dressed, well-behaved, and polite. But the questions veered far from the straight-and-narrow, and the results were priceless.

Coyle & Sharpe On the Loose mixed pop music with this street theater, an absurdist and subversive artform that required many hours of work every day to gather and edit enough material to fill a five-nights-a-week radio show.

“Mal Sharpe not only impacted radio, but television and comedy,” said radio historian Ben Fong-Torres in eulogizing Sharpe when he passed away in 2020. “He was the father of Punk’d, of Don Bleu’s Bleupers, and of what Jimmy Kimmel does with people on the streets, asking trick questions or prodding them into participating in stunts.”

This segment came from the collection of Peter Scott, who worked with Coyle and Sharpe at KGO and would later be inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame (as would Sharpe). It was digitized by Joe Paulino, who graciously offered it to our collection.