Mal Sharpe’s creative genius crossed many boundaries. He is recognized by BARHOF for his pioneering radio work with partner Jim Coyle in the early 1960s as well as his later radio performances and work in creative radio advertising campaigns.
Sharpe was born near Boston, MA in 1936 and studied broadcasting as an undergraduate at Boston University before attending graduate school at Michigan State University. Sharpe, an accomplished jazz trombonist, later told the San Francisco Chronicle that he moved to San Francisco after seeing an album cover showing Turk Murphy’s band at a San Francisco nightclub.
Sharpe’s radio career was born when he met Jim Coyle, a fellow tenant in a Pacific Heights rooming house. The two perfected a zany brand of ambush comedy, never breaking their straight-arrow characters. They would lug a “portable” reel-to-reel tape machine to a public location, concoct a ridiculous premise, ask passersby to get involved, and record the results. Sharpe’s approachability and sincere voice made the bits work.
The two were hired by KGO and given a Herculean assignment: produce three hours of fresh material daily, five nights a week. Coyle and Sharpe added to their ambush comedy with a series of made-up scenarios, including a fictitious war between San Francisco and Los Angeles in which each of the two served as a Field Marshal on the side of San Francisco’s forces. In an early review, San Francisco Examiner columnist Dwight Newton wrote, “Listen to Coyle and Sharpe for a night and you are almost sure to be misinformed on current events…Right now they reflect a sort of blending of Bob and Ray, ‘Candid Camera’, and early Don Sherwood.”
Coyle & Sharpe On the Loose came to an end in 1965 when the two left KGO to pursue television opportunities in Hollywood. In true Coyle and Sharpe fashion, Sharpe lost track of Coyle and never worked with him again.
Sharpe would return to Bay Area airwaves, reprising his man on the street routine at KMEL and KQED and starring in a series of ad campaigns for major clients. As Sharpe said in 2011, “I don’t use actors. I never have. People on the street come up with lines you cannot write.”
The jazz musician side of Sharpe kept him busy with a band called Big Money in Jazz. For 26 years, he hosted a radio show titled Back on Basin Street, With Mal Sharpe at KCSM.
Mal Sharpe died in 2020 at the age of 83.