Garrison Keillor: No more musings from Lake Wobegon as author retires from iconic A Prairie Home Companion radio show after 40 years

Mr Keillor's last show will air in July 2016 and he will be replaced as host by regular contributor and musician Chris Thile

Garrison Keillor is not retiring altogether (Getty Images)

Garrison Keillor, whose familiar baritone has been a fixture of the US airwaves for more than 40 years, has announced his retirement as the host of the beloved public radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.

The weekly variety programme, broadcast by National Public Radio (NPR), is a mixture of music, musings and conversation anchored by Mr Keillor’s gently comic report on the latest news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota – a fictional town at the heart of the American Midwest.

On air since 1974, A Prairie Home Companion now has four million regular listeners across almost 700 local public radio stations. Many of them have also seen the show live, on one of Mr Keillor’s cross-country summer bus tours, the last of which will kick off next week and travel to 30 cities in all. “I’m stepping down because it’s the sensible thing to do when you are 72, almost 73,” Mr Keillor told the Associated Press.

The programme’s cultural weight is such that the late, great film-maker Robert Altman’s final movie, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Tommy Lee Jones and Mr Keillor himself, was a fictionalised depiction of goings-on behind the scenes at the show.

If NPR is America’s Radio 4, then Keillor is its Alistair Cooke, and Lake Wobegon is its Ambridge. Yet Mr Keillor’s low, lugubrious timbre is probably most familiar to UK audiences as the voiceover on an award-winning series of Honda television advertisements in the early 2000s.

His radio career aside, Mr Keillor is also the author of more than a dozen books, many of which are novels and story collections set in Lake Wobegon, which is partially based on his hometown of Anoka, Minnesota. Speaking to AP, he explained that he was not retiring altogether; he intends to write, make another film and remain as executive producer of A Prairie Home Companion.

“Radio was an accident,” he said, “and I have succeeded at becoming fairly good at something for which I had no talent and no affinity, really. My idea always was to be a writer, and when you get to be 72, it’s time you should get back to doing what you set out to do.”

The celebrated raconteur has hinted at retirement many times before, including in a 2010 interview with The Independent, when he suggested that comic writing tended to be the preserve of the young. “I am working in humour and comedy and this is a field in which clearly people don’t last very well into old age,” he said. “It really is a young person’s sport; I can’t think of many people who sustained it into late life.”

In the same interview, Mr Keillor recounted a recent health scare with customary understatement. During an appointment with his massage therapist, he said, “She asked me something and I spoke to her and my speech was all slurred and my mouth felt funny, numb, and I had a very odd sensation in my head.” He drove himself to the hospital. “To call 911 for an ambulance would be, well... it seemed not quite justifiable to me,” he said.

Mr Keillor’s last show will air in July 2016 and he will be replaced as host in September that year by musician Chris Thile, a regular contributor to A Prairie Home Companion. Mr Thile, 34, first appeared on the programme when he was 15.