Radio – Page 12 – Harry Heuser

12th Feb 200912th Aug 2024

Inherit the . . . Air: Dialing for Darwin on His 200th Birthday

Before settling down for a small-screening of Inherit the Wind, I twisted the dial in search of the man from whose contemporaries we inherited the debate it depicts: Charles Darwin, born, like Abraham Lincoln, on this day, 12 February 1809. Like Lincoln, Darwin was a liberator among folks who resisted free thinking, a man whose ideas not only broadened minds but roused the ire of the close-minded–stick in the muds who resented being traced to the mud primordial, dreaded having what they conceived of as being set in stone washed away in the flux of evolution, and resolved instead to keep humanity from evolving. On BBC radio, at least, Darwin is the man of the hour. His youthful Beagle Diary is currently being read to us in daily installments; his “Voyages of Descent” with Captain FitzRoy have been newly dramatized; and his theories are the subject of numerous talks and documentaries.

The bicentenary celebrations got underway early at the Natural History Museum in London, where last December I visited an exhibition of artifacts and documents from Darwin’s journeys of discovery, quests that had their origin here in the west of Britain: “In August quietly wandering about Wales, in February in a different hemisphere; nothing ever in this life ought to surprise me,” young Darwin noted.

Nor should resistance to change. Back in 1935 (as Erik Barnouw reminds us in A Tower in Babel), when the hostile response to Darwin’s theories resulted in a media event known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, station WGN, Chicago, took the microphone straight into the courtroom so that listeners might hear defense attorney Clarence Darrow ask prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, “Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?”

Bryan professed to believe just that; and unable to sway the jurors from thinking otherwise, Darrow lost the case—a case that, if some politicians had had their way, would not have been made public. It was not just the espousal but the very mention of Darwin’s ideas that was considered a threat. An amendment to ban all broadcasts of “discourses” about Darwin was proposed in the 69th United States Congress. If that amendment had passed, the evolution could not be televised today.

It comes as no surprise either that the two men who penned Inherit the Wind were former broadcast writers; in fictionalizing the trial, they disowned the medium that had imposed so many restrictions upon them, that kept potentially incendiary ideas from being disseminated; that, in the interest of public calm—as opposed to the public interest—was apt to cast aside what it did not dare to cast broadly.

It was not until long after his death that Darrow, once known as the “boy who would argue against everything,” became the subject of a CBS radio documentary; in it, many outspoken thinkers—including Edith Sampson, the first black US delegate appointed to the United Nations—were heard arguing in his defense.

Perhaps, I am overstating my case when say that Darwin was too hot for radio; yet even when his ideas were presented on the air, they needed to be cooled down so as not to inflame anew. In 1946, a dramatization of his career was attempted for The Human Adventure, an educational program produced by CBS in co-operation with the University of Chicago. As Max Wylie put it in his foreword to a published script from the series, The Human Adventure presented

dramatic interpretations of the progress being made in university research throughout the world, progress in any of the thirty thousand research projects that are now being worked on by scholars and scientists in this country and in the centers of learning throughout the civilized world.

The description does not quite fit the episode in question, which transports listeners to a less civilized, less enlightened past. It opens on a “leisurely day in London” anno 1859. On 24 November, to be precise, the very day on which Darwin’s Origin of the Species went on sale. The scene is a bookstore, the dialogue between a young scholar and his formidable aunt who disapproves of Darwinian notions:

When I was a girl, we knew exactly how old the world was. Bishop Ussher proved it in the scriptures. The world, he proved, was created in the year 4004 BC, on a Friday in October at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Not that the lad is particularly up-to-date; “everyone knows that animals don’t change” and that “species remain exactly as created,” he argues. “Every kind fixed and separate.” Darwin’s new book was flung at that rickety bandwagon, as the play drives home. “Instantly, overnight, the lines of conflict are drawn. The complaisant, orthodox world, which is Victorian England, erupts into a storm of controversy.”

The narrative soon shifts from social agitation to the thrill of exploration and pioneering. It emphasizes the spirit of “Adventure” over the dispiritingly “Human” by introducing us to the younger Darwin aboard the Beagle, the eager scientist in his laboratory, and the ailing researcher supported by a loving spouse. Without diverging from facts, the drama suggests that Darwin’s theory were not quite so earth-shattering after all, a similar treatise having preceded it that threatened to render Darwin’s own publication redundant. Without omitting a reference to monkeys, the broadcast refuses to acknowledge that its subject matter continued to make zealots go ape.

Defusing Darwin’s prehistoric time bomb, The Human Adventure argued the “storm of abuse,” the “bitter intemperate, all too human controversy” to be “behind us now.” The voices of protest give way to a demonstration of how Darwin’s words echo the theories of scientists from around the world, an enlightened world united through science. Science fiction, in short.

11th Feb 200912th Aug 2024

NBC, CBS, and Abe

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, I am once again lending an ear to the Great Emancipator. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been America’s “radio president”; but in the theater of the mind none among the heads of the States was heard talking more often than Honest Abe. On Friday, 12 February 1937, for instance, at least six nationwide broadcasts were dedicated to Lincoln and his legacy. NBC aired the Radio Guild‘s premiere of a biographical play titled “This Was a Man,” featuring four characters and a “negro chorus.” Heard over the same network was “Lincoln Goes to College,” a recreation of an 1858 debate between Lincoln and Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas. Try pitching that piece of prime-time drama to network executives nowadays.

Following the Lincoln-Douglas debate was a speech by 1936 presidential candidate Alf Landon, live from the Annual Lincoln Day dinner of the National Republican Club in New York. Meanwhile, CBS was offering talks by Lincoln biographer Ida Tarbell and Glenn Frank, former president of the University of Wisconsin. From Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, the Gettysburg Address was being recited by a war veteran who was privileged to have heard the original speech back in 1863. Not only live and current, the Whitmanesque wireless also kept listeners alive to the past.

Most closely associated with portrayals of Lincoln on American radio is the voice of Raymond Massey, who thrice took on the role in Cavalcade of America presentations of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years; but more frequently cast was character actor Frank McGlynn.

According to the 14 June 1941 issue of Radio Guide, Lincoln “pop[ped] up” in Lux Radio Theater productions “on the average of seven times each year”; and, in order to “keep the martyred President’s voice sounding the same,” producers always assigned McGlynn the part he had inhabited in numerous motion pictures ever since the silent era. In the CBS serial Honest Abe, it was Ray Middleton who addressed the audience with the words: “My name is Abraham Lincoln, usually shortened to just Abe Lincoln.” The program ran for an entire year (1940-41).

The long and short of it is that, be it in eulogies, musical variety, or drama, Lincoln was given plenty of airtime on national radio, an institution whose personalities paid homage by visiting memorials erected in his honor (like the London one, next to which singer Morton Downey poses above). Nor were the producers of weekly programs whose broadcast dates did not coincide with the anniversary amiss in acknowledging the nation’s debt to the “Captain.” On Sunday, 11 February 1945—celebrated as “Race Relations Sunday”—Canada Lee was heard in a New World A-Coming adaptation of John Washington’s They Knew Lincoln, “They” being the black contemporaries who made an impression on young Abe and influenced his politics. Among them, William de Fleurville.

“Yes,” Lee related,

in Billy’s barbershop, Lincoln learned all about Haiti. And one of the things he did when he got to the White House was to have a bill passed recognizing the independence of Haiti. And he did more than that, too. Lincoln received the first colored ambassador to the United States, the ambassador from the island home of Billy the Barber. And he was accorded all the honors given to any great diplomat in the Capitol of the United States. Yes, the people of Harmony have no doubt that Billy’s friendship with ole Abe had more than a lot to do with it.

Six years later, in 1951, Tallulah Bankhead concluded the frivolities of her weekly Big Show broadcast on NBC with a moving recital of Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby. That same day, The Eternal Light, which aired on NBC under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, presented “The Lincoln Highway.” Drawing on poet-biographer Sandburg’s “complete” works, it created in words and music the “living arterial highway moving across state lines from coast to coast to the murmur ‘Be good to each other, sisters. Don’t fight, brothers.’”

Once, the American networks were an extension of that “Highway,” however scarce the minority voices in what they carried. Four score and seven years ago broadcasting got underway in earnest when one of the oldest stations, WGY, Schenectady, went on the air; but what remains now of the venerable institution of radio is in a serious state of neglect. An expanse of billboards, a field of battles lost, the landscape through which it winds is a vast dust bowl of deregulation uniformity.

10th Feb 200916th Mar 2022

“. . . can’t help being here”: Edison, the Wireless, and I

No matter how small our voices, how slight our utterances, millions of us carry on making a record of ourselves and circulating it online. Long gone are the days in which autobiography was reserved for the supposed great and good; now, anyone can flaunt the first person singular, step into the forum and exclaim, “Here I am!” or “Hear me out.” Sure enough, here I go again. Never mind that my record is spun a little less frequently these days, short on that groove I am so slow to get back into. A case of dyspepsia rather than abject discontent. I sometimes wonder, though, in how far the ready access to self-expression and promotion is enabling us to believe that whatever we do or say is quite worth the sharing, that we need not try harder or trouble ourselves to aspire. Now that we can all have our names in lights, provided we supply our own low-wattage bulbs, are we becoming too apt to settle for the publicly unmemorable?

Back in the earlier decades of the 20th century, when folks were more ready to listen and less likely to be heard—by anyone beyond their circles of associates and relations, that is—exemplars were rather more in demand than they are nowadays. No mere American Idolizing, but a veneration of excellence that inspired attempts at emulation. In the 1930s, a decade that gave rise to superheroes and uber-egos—even a glossy magazine like Radio Guide encouraged its readers to aim higher than that knob with which to twist the dial.

Aside from answering questions like “What’s Happening to Amos ‘n’ Andy?” or telling readers “Why Shirley Temple Can’t Broadcast,” the 4 July 1936 issue went so far as to look, jointly with the Edison Foundation,

for the person who will be the greatest benefactor to the human race between 1936 and 1976. We want the man or woman, boy or girl, who will do for the second half of our Twentieth Century what Thomas A. Edison has done for the first half of it. Somewhere in America as you read this, is the second Edison! Is it you? If it is, we want you.

I cannot imagine who would have the nerve to respond to such an appeal and forget all about Amos ‘n’ Andy, then rumored to be leaving the airwaves; nor shall I speculate what Edison might have said about this search for a worthy successor, a campaign published in a less-than-scientific periodical devoted to a medium about which, as Alfred Balk reminds us in The Rise of Radio (2006), the enterprising inventor of the phonograph was less than enthusiastic.

While alive, he was rarely talked of in connection with the medium in whose development he figured; yet he often featured in radio broadcasts of the 1930s and ‘40s. The Radio Guide in which the above call for genius appeared states that “[f]our programs on the air today are about Edison,” among them a biography heard over WCPO, Cincinnati.

On this day, 10 February, in 1947, on the eve of his 100th birthday (and some fifteen years after his death) Edison himself was propped behind the microphone, addressing the audience of the Cavalcade of America program. Titled “The Voice of the Wizard,” the conjuring act was performed by one of the Cavalcade’s freelance scriptwriters, Erik Barnouw, now best remembered as the foremost chronicler of American broadcasting:

“Hello … hello. This is Thomas Alva Edison.” It sounded as if the deaf scientist had picked up the receiver of a spirit telephone to make an urgent point-to-point call:

When I was still on earth, I invented that talk-harnessing machine to show how I felt about … well, occasions in honor of this and that. But now […] I feel differently. Because in a way a broadcast like this is the climax of things I worked at. In a way I can’t help being here. This microphone, and the tubes in your radio—I had a hand in them. So, when those tubes light up and bring you a voice from far off, in a way it’s me talking. And then many radio programs are recorded, for schools, and for broadcasts overseas—all ideas that I fought for. Because the inventions that I cared most about were those that would bring men’s voices across space and time. So—I’d like to tell you the story behind those inventions. A few words for a new age.

As I put it in Etherized Victorians, my dissertation on American radio dramatics, the play bridges, in only a “few words,” the invention of the telegraph, an instrument that in Edison’s youth was already “beginning to bind the world closer,” to the institution of American broadcasting and its contributions to a “new age” of peace:

You who, in a later age, have sat at crystal sets to pick up Pittsburgh or Kansas City, or who, during dark days of World War II have listened by short-wave to London under air attack, you will understand how a seven-teen-year-old boy felt, sitting at his telegraph instrument in Indianapolis. There was already in that room a hint of the radio age […].

As Edison (equipped with the vocal cords of Dane Clark) expressed it in an exchange with his assistant and spouse-to-be, Mary Stilwell (voiced by Donna Reed),

[t]here are barriers between people—and countries—that we almost never break down. Now these things I’m working on, Mary—they’re for breaking down barriers. Talking machines, loud-speaking telephones, talking photography—we’ll have them all! Machines that talk across space and time [….].

The play suggests radio to be at once “talking machine” and hearing aid, a democratic communications apparatus by means of which “truth” is enunciated and disseminated. The institution of broadcasting is thus construed as the product and propagator of “the American Idea,” for which “the whole world is better off.”

We do not have to resort to thaumaturgy or otherworldly telephony to be “talking across space and time” these days; but I sometimes wish we were more receptive to the marvel of this means and expressed ourselves more grateful at the potentialities we so often squander by billboarding the trivial. While I can neither “help” being prolix nor “being here,” I am making some amends today by refraining from relating just why Shirley Temple could not broadcast …

30th Jan 200923rd Aug 2022

That “tie of sympathy”; or, Five for the Dardos

“Today, the real humorist is fast disappearing.” The “Today” here is 30 January 1949. The voice is that of satirist Fred Allen, who made the claim when called upon to expound on “The State of American Humor” for the benefit of folks tuning in to NBC’s Living 1949. “Yessir,” Allen declared, “the average comedian is a mouth that speaks the thoughts of others’ brains. Machine age humor, like the automobile, is turned out on the assembly line.” As a wordsmith who preferred to live by his own wit, Allen was the free spirit in a machine that increasingly generated shoddily assembled audience participation programs, the temporary demand for which ran him out of business that year—a dead giveaway that executives were not in it for laughs.

What Allen in his dread of the mechanical and the mercenary could not foresee is that, sixty years on, the “[m]achine age” would give those determined to publish the thoughts of their own brains an instrument with which to bypass the assembly lines and make a beeline for the byline that would otherwise be hard to come by; a forum in which freely to exchange ideas instead of turning out commercial copy in exchange for a few pay-per-click pennies; and a means of reaching out to the “real” among the virtual whose minds are not of the assembly line persuasion.

One way of acknowledging such commercial-free souls and inspiriting kindred is to bestow the Dardos. It might sound like some post-apocalyptic cult; but in truth it is a token

given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.

I am certainly grateful to the two journalists who saw it fit to stamp me thus. After all, Ivan (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear) and Jeff (The Easy Ace) are among the few who share my enthusiasm for broadcast history and historic broadcasts—the kind of kilorecycling that has been going on here for nearly nigh on four years. In felicitous low-fidelity, they are committed, as I am, to re-popularizing the post-popular, to tracing the mainstream that has dried up or run its course into a sea of indifference. Their work “adds value to the Web” all right; but that is rather too prosaic a way of putting it—and, as far as my web experience is concerned, an understatement besides.

Thrilling is what Inner Sanctum’s Lipton Tea lady might have termed “brisk” entertainment. It is entirely without additives or artificial sweeteners, which makes taking refreshment there a guiltless pleasure. Ace, meanwhile, tells it “The Way It Was”; in his matchless on-this-day approach to chronicling “yesteryear,” he easily aces out a less organized mind like mine, which promptly lapsed into a more idiosyncratic mode of relating the past. To relate to them both has been at once “Easy” and “Thrilling.”

The same can be said for the task at hand. In keeping with the “rules,” I

1) accept the Dardos by displaying it here, along with the names of those who bestowed it and a link to their respective journals; and

2) pass it on to another five blogs I deem worthy of this acknowledgement, contacting each of them to let them know they have been selected.

The five journals I single out here have kept this niche in cyberspace from feeling like a padded cell or isolation ward to me. They are all eligible for the “Helen Trent” award, far from mute testament that because a blogger is “thirty-five or more,” an active life online “need not be over,” that blogging “can begin at 35.” The Dardos I bestow upon them because I appreciate their wit, their ebullience and their tenacity; because they do as they please and, by doing so, make me say, “please, keep doing it.”

As Emerson put it, the ‘perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves.”

A fine intellect not in danger of gloomy insanities is Doug, who keeps Waking Ambrose. Ambrose Bierce, that is, whose Devil’s Dictionary he translates and updates for the 21st century. What’s more, Doug invites all of us to do the same, and, having acknowledged our contributions, regales us with stories and verse, then finds time to make the rounds and drop us a taut line. In all this interactivity, he is a paragon among bloggers.

There are journalist on the web with whom I keep having imaginary conversations. With Elizabeth of Relative Esoterica, whom I picture as a Myrna Loy unencumbered by a William Powell, I discourse on film noir and biography as we listen to the jazz about which she is not only knowledgeable but passionate. We agree that, while it is unwise to be fanatic about anything, it would be wretched not to feel enthusiastic about something or other.

With Clifton of Canary Feathers I converse about the radio programs that enriched his childhood—be it One Man’s Family or Kaltenmeyer’s Kindergarten—and years in broadcasting as he plays an old but beautifully restored church organ surrounded by cats who flit in and out of a scene brightly lit by . . . a leg lamp. In my daydreams, I can readily dismiss the fact that felines make me sneeze.

With fellow expatriate Fred, he of The Synchronicity of Indeterminacy, I go on about Quiet, Please and the Columbia Workshop as he persuades me to open my mind and ear to contemporary sound artists and aural storytellers. His own stories are a popular and critical success. He might be fascinated by automatons—but is living proof of that the imaginative thinker need not fear extinction. His journal(s) would have put his aforementioned namesake at ease.

With John, the “urbane pagan” of Enchanté, I have had many a conversation; I see him whenever I am back in New York City. A few years ago, he expressed to me his intention of starting a web journal. He finally got underway, and what a way he’s got, casting imaginary musicals—On the Fritz! (“A sparkling new musical about Prussia’s gayest prince [and greatest king]”—or musing about the state of his follicles.

With all of them I feel a certain “tie of sympathy.” That those ties are machine-knit does not make them synthetic. Otherwise, I would hardly be one-hundred percent woolgathering about them . . .

29th Jan 20098th Nov 2023

Together . . . to Gaza? The Media and the Worthy Cause

The British Broadcasting Corporation has had its share of problems lately, what with its use of licensee fees to indulge celebrity clowns in their juvenile follies. Now, the BBC, which is a non-profit public service broadcaster established by Royal Charter, is coming under attack for what the paying multitudes do not get to see and hear, specifically for its refusal to broadcast a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for aid to Gaza. According to the BBC, the decision was made to “avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.” To be sure, if the story were not “ongoing,” the need for financial support could hardly be argued to be quite as pressing.

In its long history, the BBC has often made its facilities available for the making of appeals and thereby assisted in the raising of funds for causes deemed worthy by those who approached the microphone for that purpose. Indeed, BBC radio used to schedule weekly “Good Cause” broadcasts to create or increase public awareness of crises big and small. Listener pledges were duly recorded in the annual BBC Handbook.

From the 1940 edition I glean, for instance, that on this day, 29 January, in 1939, two “scholars” raised the amount of £1,310 for a London orphanage. Later that year, an “unknown cripple” raised £768, while singer-comedienne Gracie Fields’s speech on behalf of the Manchester Royal Infirmary brought in £2,315. The pleas were not all in the name of infants and invalids, either. The Student Movement House generated funds by using BBC microphones, as did the Hedingham Scout Training Scheme.

While money for Gaza remains unraised, the decision not to get involved in the conflict raises questions as to the role of the BBC, its ethics, and its ostensible partiality. Just what constitutes a “worthy” cause? Does the support for the civilian casualties of war signal an endorsement of the government of the nation at war? Is it possible to separate humanitarian aid from politics?

It strikes me that the attempt to staying well out of it is going to influence history as much as it would to make airtime available for an appeal. In other words, the saving of lives need not be hindered by the pledged commitment to report news rather than make it.

Impartiality and service in the public interest were principles to which the US networks were expected to adhere as well, however different their operations were from those of the BBC. In 1941, the FCC prohibited a station or network from speaking “in its own person,” from editorializing, e.g. urging voters to support a particular Presidential candidate; it ruled that “the broadcaster cannot be an advocate”; but this did not mean that airtime, which could be bought to advertise wares and services, could not be purchased as well for the promotion of ideas, ideals, and ideologies.

The broadcasting of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats or his public addresses on behalf of the March of Dimes and the War Loan Drives did not imply the broadcasters’ favoring of the man or the cause.

On this day in 1944, all four major networks allotted time for the special America Salutes the President’s Birthday. Never mind that it was not even FDR’s birthday until a day later. The cause was the fight against infantile paralysis; but that did not prevent Bob Hope from making a few jokes at the expense of the Republicans, who, he quipped, had all “mailed their dimes to President Roosevelt in Washington. It’s the only chance they get to see any change in the White House.”

A little change can bring about big changes; but, as a result of the BBC’s position on “impartiality,” much of that change seems to remain in the pockets of the public it presumes to inform rather than influence.

Related writings

Go Tell Auntie: Listener Complaints Create Drama at BBC
Election Day Special: Could This Hollywood Heavy Push You to the Polls?

28th Jan 200925th Jan 2024

“Here is your forfeit”: It’s Hopkins’s Night As Colbert Goes Private

“Our guest stars might well have been tailored for the celebrated parts of Peter and Ellie,” host Orson Welles remarked as he raised the curtain on the Campbell Playhouse production of “It Happened One Night,” heard on this day, 28 January, in 1940. Quite a bold bit of barking, that. After all, the pants once worn by bare-chested Clark Gable were handed down to William Powell, who was debonair rather than brawny. “Mr. William Powell surely needs no alteration at all,” Welles insisted, even though the material required considerable trimming. Meanwhile, the part of Ellie, the “spoiled and spirited heiress” whom Peter cuts down to size until he suits her, was inherited by Miriam Hopkins. It had “certainly never been more faultlessly imagined than tonight,” Welles declared. Indeed, as I was reminded by Andre Soares’s interview with biographer Allan Ellenberger on Alternative Film Guide, Hopkins numbered among the leading ladies who had turned down the role and, no doubt, came to regret it, given the critical and commercial success of It Happened, which earned Claudette Colbert an Academy Award.

Now, Welles was prone to hyperboles; but, in light of Colbert’s memorable performance, his claim that the part had “never been more faultlessly imagined”—in a radio adaptation, no less—sounds rather spurious. As it turns out, raspy-voiced Hopkins (whom last I saw in a BFI screening of Becky Sharp) does not give the spirited performance one might expect from the seasoned comedienne. Her timing is off, her emoting out of character, all of which conspires, along with the imposed acceleration of the script, to render disingenuous what is meant to be her character’s transformation from brat to bride; and while Powell, a few fluffed lines notwithstanding, does quite well as the cocky Peter Grant (it was “Warne” when those pants were worn by Gable), the only “spirited” performance is delivered by Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the lively score.

In short, there is little to justify Welles’s introductory boast. Was the Wunderkind getting back at Colbert for standing him up two months earlier, when Madeleine Carroll filled her place in “The Garden of Allah”? What’s more, Colbert appeared to have passed on the chance to reprise her Oscar-winning role for Campbell Playhouse, something she had previously done, opposite Gable in one of his rare radio engagements, for a Lux Radio Theater reworking of the old “Night Bus” story.

That same night, 28 January 1940, Colbert was heard instead on a Screen Guild broadcast in a production of “Private Worlds,” in a role for which she had received her second Academy Award nomination. During the curtain call, Colbert was obliged to “pay a forfeit” after incorrectly replying “The Jazz Singer” to the question “What was the first full-length all-talking picture to come out of Hollywood?” For this, she was ordered to recite a tongue twister; but it wasn’t much of a forfeit, compared to the sense of loss both Colbert and Hopkins must have felt whenever they misjudged the business by rejecting important roles or by risking their careers making questionable choices.

In The Smiling Lieutenant, the two had played rivals who ended their fight over the same man by comparing the state of their undies; now, Hopkins seemed to be rummaging in Colbert’s drawers for the parts she could have had but was not likely to be offered again. Well, however you want to spin it, radio sure was the place for makeshift redressing, for castoffs and knock-offs, for quick alterations and hasty refittings. It catered to the desire of actors and audiences alike to rewrite or at any rate tweak Hollywood history. Go ahead, try it on for size.

27th Jan 200917th Nov 2023

The Sound of Second-Hand Clapping: In Town To-Night

I enjoy spending time by myself. It’s a good thing I do, considering that I am pretty much on my own in my enthusiasm for old and largely obscure radio programs, especially those that I only get to hear about. Listening, like reading, is a solitary experience; to share your thoughts about what went on in your head can be as difficult and frustrating as it is to put into words the visions and voices of a dream. Besides, unless you are talking to somebody who gets paid to listen, your dreams and reveries are rarely as stimulating to others as they are to yourself. This isn’t exactly a dream, much less one come true—but it’s a jolly good facsimile thereof.

A few weeks ago, I walked into a second-hand bookstore in Hampstead, London. Second hands down, a used bookshop is the place to be initiated into worlds you cannot experience firsthand, no matter how deep you dig or vigorously you claw. The volume I had my dusty hands on was a signed copy of In Town To-Night, a truly forgotten book promising, as the subtitle has it, “The Story of the Popular BBC Feature Told from Within.” In other words, a close-up of something quite out of reach.

The compendium was published in 1935, at a time when dramatics had not yet come to the fore on American radio. According to a 1938 study by William Albig, a researcher who compiled data to establish the percentages of airtime devoted to various types of programs on nine American radio stations between 1925 to 1935, dramatic broadcasts (including plays, sketches, and serials) were not a significant aspect of programming, even though they had increased considerably in frequency during that period, namely from 0.13% in February 1922 to 8.85% in July 1934. Radio plays were even less frequently heard on the BBC; nor were there any signs of change. Dramatic programs constituted 2.14% of the BBC’s offerings in February 1925, as compared to 2.04% in July 1934.

So, what kind of program was In Town To-Night? “[A]s every one knows,” the blurb on the dust jacket reads, it is what the BBC called a “feature,” a highly inclusive term for a series of broadcasts produced or written by the same team or featuring the same host. While rather more formulaic, Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight came to mind, as did many of the hour-long variety programs broadcast in the US during the mid- to late 1930s.

In Town To-Night prided itself on being a program of many voices. Whatever the sound produced by such friction may be, it was on this feature that chimney-sweeps were heard

rubb[ing] shoulders with film-stars, and cat’s-meat merchants with peers of the realm. Poets, down and outs, playwrights, pearly kings and queens, and interesting people from all parts of the world have been gathered within its framework.

J. C. Cannell, the author of the book, was a talent scout for the Saturday night feature, which, at the time of publication, was in its third season; his role was to ensure a “queer medley” of personalities,

chosen with haste, though with care. A mixed lot, picked as though from a lucky dip, surprising because listeners did not know beforehand whom they would hear, and nearly always, I think, delightful for some reason or other.

Heard on this rehearsed and scripted variety program were many familiar voices from Broadway, Hollywood, and the West End; among them Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Merle Oberon, Ethel Barrymore, Paul Muni, Johnny Weissmuller, Vivien Leigh, Polly Moran, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Ida Lupino was interviewed by her actor-father Stanley; and Hermione Gingold was heard in conversation with her dresser.

Jimmy Walker, formerly Mayor of New York City, was featured, as were movie director James Whale, author Algernon Blackwood, and Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, who was “anxious to talk about his constant search for interesting screen personalities.”

Cab Calloway performed, as did Leonard Hawke, the first man ever to sing on a BBC program, along with assorted groups of Welsh miners and Swiss yodelers. Wilhelm Grosz, composer of “Isle of Capri,” played a medley of Strauss waltzes he had discovered in a bookshop in Venice.

The greater attractions, though, were the real folks and the curious ones telling their stories, many of which are retold in Cannell’s illustrated account. As the program found its voice, the stars made way for the stories of everyday—or not so everyday—folk, their struggles and successes. There was Pan The Ming, for instance, who stopped by while touring the world on foot (apart from brief intervals on his bicycle); there was a singing laundryman, a woman detective, a one-armed parachutist, as well as “one hundred grandfathers from the Upper Holloway Baptist Grandfathers’ Club”; Molly Moore, a knocker-up from Limehouse; Mrs. Wheelabread, “The Chocolate Lady” from Kensington Gardens, and Jack Morgan, “The Boy with the Large Ears.”

And then there was a visit from Clayton “Peg” Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who inspired listeners with his philosophy when he urged them to “forget” their “self-pity and go right ahead and do as other men do.”

In Town To-Night sounds like a program to stay in for—not just for the stories, which Cannell can recount, but for the voices that he cannot. Say, what is the sound of second-hand clapping?

22nd Jan 200910th Aug 2024

Biggest Announcement Ever

No, I am not referring to today’s publication of the Academy’s chosen nominees for this year’s Oscars; nor am I going to circulate information about some future event of alleged significance. The kind of announcement of which I speak was made seventy years ago, to the day, back when announcing was both a business and an art. Whether they served as barkers or featured as sidekicks, whether they peddled toilet soap or introduced those nine out of ten stars who condescended to claim they used it, announcers heard on network radio were respected and highly-paid professionals. Celebrities in their own right, they had come to prominence in the 1920s, well before they had many big names to drop.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, NBC’s Chicago headquarters even ran an announcer school. According to the 16 April 1938 issue of Radio Guide, the school offered classes in “pronunciation, writing and reading script, speaking extemporaneously, reading three-minute announcements in town and four minutes, and other tests designed to simulate an announcer’s actual experience.”

About those actual experiences: as I perused the radio listings for Sunday, 22 January 1939 (which, along with hundreds of such published broadcast schedules, have been made available at this invaluable site), I became rather wistful about the printed announcements of so many fine or worthwhile programs I may never get to hear. Claudette Colbert’s visit with Charlie McCarthy, for instance, or Jane Cowl’s performance in an adaptation of Schiller’s Maria Stuart. And how about Mayor La Guardia in a “Two-Way Transoceanic Talk” with the Lord Mayor of London—from a police car no less!

Rather than getting carried away in an ode to faded echoes, I studied the listings to verify the broadcast dates for some of the recordings that are in my library. Of Carole Lombard’s Presidential prediction and Cary Grant’s singing in The Circle presided over by Ronald Colman I have found occasion to write previously; but the really big announcement was made on a March of Dimes spectacular (shared here), an announcement even greater than the cast assembled in the fight against infantile paralysis.

And what a cast! It isn’t often that you get to hear Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Rudy Vallee, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Frances Langford, Bob Burns, and Fanny Brice in a single broadcast, and find them joined to boot by film stars Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power, recording artist Maxine Sullivan and tenor Frank Parker, as well as teenaged Mickey Rooney performing one of his own compositions, “Have a Heart.”

Not that what they had to say or sing was all drivel, either. Eddie Cantor, who was an outspoken anti-fascist when it was not yet de rigueur or prudent to be one, had the best line of the evening when, commenting on the popularity of swing music, he remarked:

A lot of people say that maybe these children shouldn’t be worshipping at the shrine of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as a father and as a citizen, I’d much prefer to have these children hailing band leaders than heil-ing bund leaders.

Still, what, above all, distinguishes this March of Dimes broadcast from any such extravaganzas is its opening announcement:

The thirty-seven voices to which you are now listening represent the combined personnel of announcers employed by Mutual, Columbia, and National Broadcasting Networks in Hollywood. Tonight, we speak as one voice, a voice which reflects the sentiment of an entire nation when it says: infantile paralysis must go.

On the air, nothing could bespeak radio’s commitment to a cause more forcefully. I wonder whether the NBC announcer school prepared its students for choric recitals.

Related recording
The Circle (22 January 1939)

21st Jan 20093rd Sep 2024

Filling in the Blanks

I’ve had quite a few “silent nights” here at broadcastellan lately (to use an old broadcasting term); and yet, I have been preparing all along for the weeks and months to come, those dark and cheerless days of mid-winter when keeping up with the out-of-date can be a real comfort. Not that the conditions here in our cottage have been altogether favorable to such pursuits, given that we had to deal with a number of blackouts and five days without heating oil, during which the “room temperature” (a phrase stricken from my active vocabulary henceforth) dropped below 40F. Not even a swig of brandy to warm me. I have given up swigging for whatever duration I deem fit after imbibing rather too copiously during the New Year’s Eve celebrations down in Bristol.

Those are not the blanks (let alone the ones in my short-term memory) that I intend to fill here. The gaps in question are in my iTunes library, which currently contains some 17500 files ranging from the recent BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm to World War I recordings. The vast majority of these files are American radio programs. They are readily gathered these days; but the work involved in cataloguing them for ready retrieval can be problematic and time consuming. For now, I am not lacking time; at least not until our long planned and much delayed move into town, real estate crisis be damned. Anyway . . .

For the past few weeks, I have been filling in each of the fields as shown above, verifying dates, checking the names of performers, comparing the sound quality of duplicate files, and researching the source materials for adaptations. It took a while to arrive at a convenient system. When I started the project anew (after the crash of an earlier Mac), I made the mistake of entering the date after the title of the broadcast (entries in lower case denoting descriptive ones).

As a result, I could not readily listen to a serial in the order in which its chapters were presented. I would have been at a loss to follow and follow up today’s installment of Chandu the Magician (1949), as if having missing out on the chance of getting my hands on Chandu’s “Assyrian money-changer” by sending in a White King toilet soap box top sixty years ago were not difficult enough to bear.

The effort should pay off, though, as it allows me to select more carefully the programs worth my time. On this day, 21 January, the highlights, to me, are the second part of “Freedom Road” (1945), a dramatization of Howard Fast’s historical novel about the post-Civil War era (currently in my online library); Norman Corwin’s examination of life in post-World War II Britain on the previously discussed One World Flight (1947), a documentary featuring an introduction by Fiorello La Guardia and a brief commentary by author-playwright-broadcaster J. B. Priestley pop-psychologizing the causes of human conflict; and the aforementioned debut of The Fat Man (1946). Not that I’d turn a deaf ear to Ingrid Bergman in Anna Christie as produced by the Ford Theater (1949) or to the Campbell Playhouse presentation of A. J. Cronin’s Citadel (1940).

And then there is another address by Father Coughlin (1940), about whose Shrine a fellow web-journalist sporting Canary Feathers in his cap had much to say recently in his personal reminiscence.

Listing, though, is to me almost always less satisfying than listening; it is also far less difficult and engaging. Listening often results in research, in comparing adaptation to source, in reading up on the performers, or in finding contemporary reviews. About the 21 January 1946 premiere of I Deal in Crime, for instance, broadcast critic Jack Gould complained that it “creeps along at a snail’s pace” and that Ted Hediger’s monologue-crowded narrative style was “not helped” by William Gargan’s “rather lackadaisical” delivery.

While he did not have instant access to thousands of such programs, Gould nevertheless noted the sameness of such nominal thrillers and their “stock situations.” To him, Paul Whiteman’s Forever Tops was the “real lift” of the evening’s new offerings on ABC, a reference that compels me to find a recording of that broadcast . . . .

In this way I spend many an hour before once again sending another missive into the niche of space I, as keeper of past broadcasts, have grandiloquently styled broadcastellan.

20th Jan 200912th Aug 2024

(In)au(gu)ral History: Presidential Addresses, Past and Present

“We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning—signifying renewal, as well as change.” With these words, John F. Kennedy opened his inaugural address on this day, 20 January, in 1961. Twenty years earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt embarked upon his third term as US President by insisting that democracy was “not dying,” whatever the apparent threats upon it or the wavering trust in its vigor. He urged his fellow citizens to “pause” and “take stock,” to “recall what [their] place in history has been, and to rediscover what [they] are and what [they] may be.” Not to do so, he cautioned, would mean to “risk the real peril of inaction.”

Granted, as Harry S. Truman remarked in 1949, “[e]ach period of [US] history has had its special challenges.” Yet somehow, as I listened to these past auguries and reappraisals, they began to echo and respond to each other as well as to the fears, doubts and hopes of our present day. I do not mean to imply that such reverberations betray a certain hollowness in their ready replication or applicability; rather, they begin to sound familiar in unexpected ways.

Outside the context of its time—though not within the vacuum of ahistoricity in which no political speech can ring true or otherwise—passages from FDR’s 1941 address, for instance, brought to mind those terrifying—and terrifyingly uncertain—early days of the 21st century, particularly the repercussions the so-called war on terror has had for US politics and the way the Republic and all it stands for came to be perceived beyond its borders:

The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide.

But we Americans know that this is not true.

Eight years ago, when the life of this Republic seemed frozen by a fatalistic terror, we proved that this is not true. We were in the midst of shock—but we acted. We acted quickly, boldly, decisively.

These later years have been living years—fruitful years for the people of this democracy. For they have brought to us greater security and, I hope, a better understanding that life’s ideals are to be measured in other than material things.

No doubt, Roosevelt was being somewhat self-congratulatory. Could a Republican successor to George W. Bush have made such a claim and been believed when suggesting that acting “quickly, boldly, decisively” back in 2001 has brought “greater security” or that the years have been “fruitful” ones for a democracy in which freedoms are being curtailed and surrendered in the dubious act of preserving them?

That “ideals are to be measured in other than material things” is an echo of the sentiments Roosevelt shared in his first inaugural address (4 March 1933), in which he told a Depression-stricken audience that the

[r]ecognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and [that]there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

The lesson, which each generation must learn anew, is, for the most part, not absorbed voluntarily; but this time around the “ideals” have been threatened along with those “material things” many find themselves divested of, partially as a result of failed policy and unchecked opportunism. It is this confidence in “ideals” as “truths” that the present administration is called upon to strengthen, so that the words of FDR, anno 1941, may once again ring true, namely that

[m[ost vital to our present and our future is this experience of a democracy which successfully survived crisis at home; put away many evil things; built new structures on enduring lines; and, through it all, maintained the fact of its democracy.