This Is Hell: A Chicago radio mainstay. (And a contest winner?)

By Mitchell Szczepanczyk -, Photo from Public Radio Quest August 26, 2008

Chuck Mertz - a self-described "bitter, blind, broke, gap-toothed radio show host" -- has taken Chicago north side radio listeners to Hell for more than nine years. His weekly radio show, "This Is Hell", has aired four hours every Saturday morning on the northside and north suburbs at WNUR 89.3 FM - or online at wnur.org.

This Is Hell features long-form interviews (sometimes an hour long) with acutely perceptive questions. The guest list is expansive to say the least, and ranges from mainstream liberal icons (like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and political "framer" George Lakoff) to icons of the American left (on a single episode some weeks ago, Chuck interviewed Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Patrick Cockburn as three of his five guests).

And I think Chuck is funny. He certainly leavens every interview, and most every segment of This Is Hell, with jokes and witticisms.

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I've heard some longtime listeners of the show remark about having a love-hate relationship with This Is Hell - enjoying Chuck's probing and informative interviews, but not caring too much for his jokes.

Still, the fact that Chuck Mertz is this funny while still interviewing serious guests about a host of timely and weighty topics, is - in the words of Erica Jong's famous quote - "rarer than a unicorn". In recent months, Chuck has been participating in a contest called Public Radio Quest, which tries to find the next great American public radio host, a la American Idol.

Chuck has been the host on a non-commercial radio station (WNUR is the radio station of Northwestern University) for almost a decade, and all that work has certainly helped. Chuck Mertz qualified into the final seven - the seven finalists who are ultimately vying for three spots to produce pilot radio shows that will be submitted to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The contest's website, at publicradioquest.com, is where you can find out more, including the rules of the contest and how to vote. In this current round, the leading vote-getter wins an automatic berth into the next stage of the competition